WHO LET THE BLOG OUT?

It was a question asked by a fellow Bangladeshi blogger Ishtiaque when he was surprised to find that his blog was nominated in the Best Bangladeshi/Sri Lankan Blog category of the Asia Weblog Awards 2004. Probably he missed out the fact that it was I who nominated ten of Bangladeshi blogs of my choice. My intention was to highlight as many Bangladeshi bloggers to the international readers which might encourage them to carry on with more interest. Blogs are also a showcase of one persons culture, thoughts and interests as it is public. Bangladesh's national identity portrayed in the world is not always something we can be proud of. I believe that we can show to the world via our blog or any other public media that we Bangladeshis are not at all behind than the other nations.

I am not a fan of the Awards. But a little bit of fame and more acquaintance can widen one' responsibilities and it can really give one the urge to develop the level of understandings and standard. And this award had its glitches. First of all we did not like the idea of merging the single Sri-Lankan nomination Extra-Extra by Fred, a foreigner blogging from Jaffna with six other Bangladeshi Blogs. I chose not to bother about it as I thought it would not matter much. Now the result convinced me more that I should have protested. Extra-Extra won the best blog in the category primarily because it was highlighted as one of the on-the-site blog during the Asian tsunami disaster on December. The blog had way much traffic than its average during last couple of week and it could collect the votes required to beat a Bangladeshi blog. I am not taking away any credit of that blog, but think that Sri-Lanka should have had another category. There were concerns about the weakness of the voting tool to prevent against multiple voting by the same persons. Wamy noticed that in a few hours his vote increased from 26 to 40. which was unusual at the initial stage. From the result before and after the closing of vote it seems that the multiple votes were not filtered by Simon as promised. But again I thank Simon for taking the pain to host this awards. In this process some Bangladeshi blogs got promoted.

For your refernce here is a list for more Bangladeshi bloggers who are doing a fine job. I will make some recommendation here according to the latest posts:

* Tanya in Bangladesh
* Imtiaz's Weblog

Specially I would like to mention this blog "A Whisper from the heart" wonderfully written by a Singaporean girl Gwen about her experience of living in Dhaka. If you read her blog regularly you can learn some Bangla also.