BlogAdda Vs IndiBlogger – Read this today!
A new friend of mine commented that she liked this post and overall my comparison type posts appear better than the rest. To make her happy, here is my next one. This time, lets compare two of the popular Indian Blogs Directory – BlogAdda and IndiBlogger. (My recent review about IndiBlogger here).
To make the review fair, I want to tip the readers that BlogAdda seems to have an upper hand as far as CSS, SEO and Usability is concerned, since they are a product from a Web development company called Nettalk.
Also one of my reader was upset that I don’t do enough research before writing a post. To make him happy here are the links that I referred for this post.
Tagline:
The first thing that impressed me is the tagline of BlogAdda – “who are you reading today?“. Definitely seems to convey what they are trying to do. In fact, I was wondering why this tag line appears as an image in their homepage instead of text? Unfortunately, was not able to find a tagline for IndiBlogger.
Homepage:
Next comes the homepage. BlogAdda stands way above IndiBlogger, thanks to their web development experience. Infact, they have received few positive comments when they got listed in cssvault. This is something IndiBlogger has to improve (Included in the word upgrade in this post!). IndiBlogger also seems to have lots of Badges and other graphics in their homepage, which they could try and move to some other page.
Usability:
Having 2 search boxes is not appearing very convincing. Indiblogger has 2 of them right in the homepage. BlogAdda doesn’t have “Search by Tags” feature. But what is the big deal, you have “Google” right. Again, “Search by Tag” and “Google custom Search” in IndiBlogger both have different UI and functionality on the “Search result page”, which makes things even worse.
I spent a little time here and searched “Photography” in both these sites. Results were decent since both of them use “Google”. Now, IndiBlogger unfortunately, displays the direct url of the blog in the search result. Which means I need to manually take a look at each of the page to figure out if I like it or not.
But BlogAdda on the other hand, takes me to a page like this one. You can rate, view recent posts directly and also comment. They also have digg/reddit buttons to make a particular post popular. If they had provided, “Add this blog to your Google Reader/My Yahoo” button, I would have rated this feature very high, because this is certainly how a Blog Recommendation site should be designed and BlogAdda seems to have the basics absolutely right. Hats off!
Blog/Twitter:
Remember this post of mine? Consider twitter as an addition to that list. BlogAdda has prominently put up their Blog and twitter id. I guess IndiBlogger also has one, but me not able to find them quite easily. Someone could post this as a comment.
Offline Meetups:
IndiBlogger is very well known for this. They organize a number of meetups. Yet to hear one from BlogAdda. For a successful Blog directory, meetups like this are very crucial and IndiBlogger knows their Business here!
Registeration Process:
I wanted to mention this here, because I am upset with BlogAdda enforcing bloggers to put up their badge on the site for 2 days (till a human looks at the blog before approving). You can ask them as a courtesy however. Best is to have automated scripts to check for the image and upon approval send a friendly email, so that we could remove the badge if needed. (Technorati may be a good example)
Having said these, this is what each of these sites should try to do.
More Blogs = More fun
How to make more Bloggers get registered apart from spamming? Simple, provide something useful. It could be some statistics like Blog popularity based on rating, profile views etc, or snippets from related blogs and so on. Second option is to allow users to submit blogs which they think appear to be Indian. Instead of having people to review such blogs, you can ask the community itself to confirm if the blog is really indian (A typical Web 2.0 functionality). Third option is to have firefox plugin to directly submit links. (Like Instablogs widget). Fourth option is to scrap and figure them out. (BlogAdda can scrap IndiBlogger and vice versa :))
To sum up, if you are a blogger and looking for more traffic, then go ahead and register in both these sites. (Like me :)). If you want to discover new Indian Blogs, then give both these sites a try and let us know what you feel through the comments section.
-Prabhu
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