Mumbai Mirror has a section called Bloggers Park. It was a nice surprise to see them link to a recent post on Hingis in the latest edition of the newspaper. Check out the online version here. Check out the pdf file (how it appears in print) here.

I was unaware regarding the feature but it does seem a very good section to encourage bloggers.

Kudos to you guys!

Quality Indian Sportswear company Black Panther will be sponsoring prizes for quizes twice a month at Sportolysis. The prizes can only be sent across India but that should not stop you from getting agitated over some awesome quiz questions and finally blowing up your brains with a pistol.

I kid you not. The questions are going to be that good. ;)

The write up of Black Panther reads:

A prime player in the field of Sports, Fitness & Leisure apparel, BLACK PANTHER has a formidable track record in striving to offer the best value–for–money products. In terms of look and feel, each garment is specifically designed in line with our brand theme of “Seriously Sporty”. Living upto which involves the customizing of the finest fabrics globally used for active wear with styling that is both inventive and functional.

BLACK PANTHER stands committed to providing ‘Total Sportswear Solutions’. As such, in addition to an extensive range of apparels, we also manufacture a wide range sports accessories, covering the entire spectrum, from sports socks, football stockings, athletic supporters, wristbands, headbands, knee-caps, anklets, etc. Each article is designed, keeping in mind the need to fuse a form & feel that reflects an active lifestyle with the kind of pure performance one would expect from a leading sportswear brand.

I told you it is a high quality brand! I thank Saakshi for taking the effort for striking the deal. Now get ready for some questions in a few days time!

Satya Prakash asks this question in his latest post. He tries to reason out the answer as well:

A blog is about one’s affiliation, association, subscription, belief, disbelief, disenchantment and disappointment with some idea(s). The view presented in a blog can’t always be compared with Op-Ed pages of a newspaper. There can be several sources or websites which have better substances, but a blog is author’s personal substantiation.

Will Luke finds himself in the same boat. He, like many of us, has seen the progress blogs have made in the recent past:

I just find it really interesting. Blogs are evolving so quickly (they’ve certainly changed and matured beyond measure in my short time fiddling around with them). Channels, sets or groups of blog-types are forming. Initially, most people simply used the format to write about their mundane lives. “I went shopping. Shopping sux lol” is about as interesting as they got.

Blogs are the strong new medium by which ideas of any one and every one can be published instantly. In another era, you would have to write to a newspaper and hope that the newspaper would publish it in the letters to the editor if not the OP-ED column. A blog has it’s own audience - doesn’t matter if it is large or small. Amit Varma talked about blogs being The New Journalism:

Blogs may have began, in the late 1990s, in that manner, but they have evolved into a powerful new form of journalism, that offers journalists the scope to do things that they cannot do in other media, and that draws discerning readers for just this reason. I experienced this when I blogged on my journey through Tamil Nadu on my blog, India Uncut… My normal quota of 800 pageviews a day – pretty good for a month-old blog – shot up to over 13,000 a day when I began reporting from the coast, and my 10 days of reporting from there got me over 100,000 pageviews, thus demonstrating the power of word-of-mouth on the internet. And the efficacy of this new form of journalism.

A blog can be very powerful. It is there for you to exploit. It can mean different things for differnet people; every one can use it in a different way. For example, for me, Sportolysis means my sporting outlet. I am a huge sports fan (duh! as if I needed to state it given I started a blog on sports). I think a lot of sports and like to talk about it. What better way to do it than via a blog and share my thoughts with however large or small audience develops.

Why do you blog?