Pro Blogging Contest : Is it good for Indian Blogging?

Now you can be “The Most Popular Blogger of India” and ” Win iPod” both.

Theproblogger.com presents the Pro Blogging Contest which is an attempt to identify the best bloggers of India. This is a great opportunity for indian bloggers to gain recognition in the blogosphere.

I believe that professional blogging in India is still very low. Though blogging as such has grown by leaps and bounds in India, there are few, indepth professional blogs by people living in India (Please note, I did not say Indians).

But to make this post better i thought of writing the Pros & cons of this Contest….

Pros

1. This can help making blogging popular among Indians specially the students.
2. Provide recognition to good bloggers, who are currently not well known.
3. This can be something that provides the needed initial momentum to get some good people to start blogging.
4. The judging criteria (traffic, backlinks, technorati rakings, getting diggs etc..)focuses on all the things which a blogger should use to make his blog better & more popular. So even if someone is new to blogging, if he participates in this contest he’ll surely learn a lot.
5. The support forum & backend feeds can help the new bloggers get all those resources which will make them a professional blogger.
6. And for the bloggers who are already Pros, they can easily test themselves where they stand in the community, and can help them learn those tricks which they don’t know and others use.

Cons

1. It asks you to open a new account at Blogspex.com (which provides Free Blogs, and its platform is based on Wordpress). So even if you have an existing blog which is quite popular, you cant use it :( (allthough i guess you can import from your earlier blogs using their import feature)
2. The contest for around a month, so I think people can loose interest.
3. It will be very dificult to track the points of each contestent, and to make it public so that everyone can see it(allthough this will make this event more transparent) would be more difficult, and I guess it won’t be a very good idea.
4. It requires everyone to have that ProBlogger Theme ( ex: Tutorial
Blog ), which is allthough required by the organisers to track the performance of participents(but most prob the reason is to easily get the sponsors for the contest)

Final Thoughts

This defenitely a good initiative. But it needs to address certain issues,

* The Judging Criteria needs to be more preceise, as how much weitage will be given to each area.
* Get a few good bloggers also into the panel.
* More number of participants, coz this will become better as more number of bloggers will join this.

Blogspex.com & Blogsphere are part of BforBlogs.com which is a web 2.0 Free
Blog Hosting Community

Tell me what do you think about this event? Would you like to join? Or have any suggestions?