Youthink

Wow, this is Sunday, a free day after so many hectic days of designing and publishing. And, there goes my second review at Youthink, about a famed Indian blogger Amit Agrawal, who went on resign from his job to become a professional blogger.

So, coming directly to the review of his technology blog Labnol.org aka Digital Inspiration.

Design: Elegant, The very first look at the blog makes an impression on you, although it is as clustered as other technology blog in town but still the mix of White, grey and light dirt color gives it a clean look. The flash based snippets on the top just below the blog header are a nice watch but they seem to be quiet old, without any periodical updates. The RSS and email newsletter subscription on the top of sidebar, saves the users their time. But I don’t like the two line summaries for blog posts to fit in more posts on the home page. At least, four or five summaries are desired unless you are forcing your readers to go on to other page, so that you can increase the number of page impressions. A cheap trick, which is very popular amongst new age bloggers. I also find the Google friend connect widget wrongly placed in the middle of blog posts. It should have been put on the sidebar. The logo of Digital Inspiration is very so-so.

Marks: 5/10

Online Presence: With an Alexa India rank of 863, Technorati rank of 190 and authority of 2,143, Labnol or Digital Inspiration is surely present in the virtual world. With feed subscriptions of over 38,000, Digital Inspiration reaches out of thousands in virtual world. It seems Digital Inspiration is not a part of Google News network which seems to generate huge traffic for such technology blogs and news websites.

Marks: 7.5/10

Content: Content is always the king, even in the case of Digital Inspiration, it is content that is making it work. It is more of Indian Techcrunch. The latest and practical information from the World Wide Web and technological fronts make it a worthy read for geeks as well as technology enthusiast. The language translation tab on the top is a major disappointment as it uses a Google translation service which just ruins the worthy content, may be the inclusion of some originally or human translated content for the blog will do wonders. In India where over 300 million people read or write one or the other vernacular language, having technology blogs in vernacular languages it is must for next gen internet revolution in India. The blog seems to be more focused in providing hacks based info in posts with less attention towards new technological changes.

Marks: 6.5/10

The first Indian blog, which I am going to review on Youthink is Mutiny.in. Well, this is the first time, I am looking at Mutiny.in as a reviewer, although I have been using it for my information gathering for a quiet long time.

Anyways, I would be marking all the aspects of Mutiny.in on the scale of ten, which would be aptly described In the following paras.

The part in the review of Mutiny.in is the design.

Design: The very first thing you notice about Mutiny.in is the neat design which has been done by fellow Mutineers and Vunite media, as it looks like from its honepage. The grey menu links at the very top makes it for the reader to traverse through the blog. What I really like is the Mutiny’s slideshow of images clicked by Mutineers which are immediately below the blog masthead. The masthead or the blog header is neatly designed and come out with the red color.

What I dislike about the design is dateline and social bookmarking link above the post headers. They just don’t click to me, although the placing is fine, but the fonts and design is just so-so. The sidebar is good but some fonts are just too small to read.

The 336X280 advertisement above the footer is just wrongly placed. The Flickr pool and from editors’ desk in footer look fine with dark grey in background.

Overall Munity.in has kept basics in mind while designing itself. But there is scope for improvement.

Marks: 7/10

Online Presence: With a traffic rank of 9,491 as per Alexa in India and Technorati rank of 27,029, Mutiny shows its online presence clearly. But, when compared to other international blog, It lags behind in terms of search engine ranking. A good search engine optimization expert would surely be boost to Mutiny’s prospects.

Marks: 4/10

Content: From Book reviews to anecdotes to current issues, Mutineers talk in length about everything. The quality of content is surely good and lives up to expectations. Grabbing the feed ot the latest Mutiny in print will always be a good idea. The embedded links in posts giving the background of the story help the reader in getting the feel of the topic. But, what haunts me most is the absence of several posts and less usage of videos and audios. Web 2.0 gives you plethora of tools to be interactive but Mutiny is far from the present reality.

Marks: 6.5/10