Come join the Blog-a-Ton!

After playing hide and seek for about 3 weeks, it seems the monsoons have finally relented. It has been raining abundantly since the night and it definitely looks promising for the North-Western Region of India. I hope it continues like that.

Anyway coming back to my topic, I'll like to introduce you to my new initiative, Blog-a-Ton. As some of you might have noticed, I have created this new blog. So what is Blog-a-Ton?

Blog-a-Ton is a misnomer for the word Blogathon. The idea of holding a Blogathon, simply put a marathon of bloggers, came to my mind when I didn't even know that such a word exists. So, I invited bloggers through IndiBlogger Forum to participate in the first edition of a Blogathon, few weeks back.

The idea was simple as I posted on the forum:

We'll choose a day and a topic to blog on. On that day we all will write a post on our blog on the given topic.
After the write-up, we will include the links to the write-ups of fellow blogathon participants.
This will not only help us in making new friends in blogging world but also give us a lot of backlinks.

It was Arjuna, an interested participant who came up with the idea of renaming the event for the want of uniqueness and starting a blog for the same. I believe these were great suggestions and so was born Blog-a-Ton. This new Blog is going to be an efficient way of reaching out to the prospective bloggers and develop an online community at the same time.

And as the new name suggests, our Mission is to conduct a Blog-a-Ton where 100 bloggers will take part together. This ambitious mission can become a reality only with the help of my Blogging Buddies. So if you think, this effort is worth it, come join the Blog-a-Ton (http://blog-a-ton.blogspot.com/).

Date for Blog-a-Ton 1 : August 1, 2009

Date for finalising the topic : July 25, 2009

As already mentioned, discussion for holding Blog-a-Ton 1 was initiated on Indiblogger forums and later on shifted to the new Blog. Of the various topics suggested by the interested participants, the following three got the maximum votes (ironically, just two each).

• WE BLOG, THEREFORE WE ARE
• The Best and Worst(if any) about blogging
• Blogging Experiences

Of these the first one, was suggested by me and seconded by my fellow team member Arjun, based on the tagline of Indiblogger. You may help in pruning down the list to just one final topic by voting for any one out of these three in the comments section of the related Blog-a-Ton post.

I have also created this Blog widget to popularise and spread the Blog-a-Ton community.

You may add it to your blog by following the instructions given in the following Scribd Window. For choosing the desired text, choose the Text Selection mode (denoted by an I) from the drop down menu (downward pointing arrowhead), second from the right on the toolbar of the Window.


In case, the Scribd Window takes time to load, here is the HTML code for the Blog-a-Ton widget. Just replace the square brackets [ ] with the tag brackets < > within the code.
[div align="center"][a target="_blank" href="http://blog-a-ton.blogspot.com/" title="Visit Blog-a-Ton"][img border="0" width="100%" alt="I Blog-a-Tonic" src="http://lh4.ggpht.com/_jKvsNJTH4Sk/SmHNn6cb4GI/AAAAAAAAA2s/814o8hlkjSA/cooltext428949633.jpg"/][/a][/div]
If the button is too large for your blog, then just reduce the number highlighted in red.

In order to keep yourself updated of all the activities happening in the Blog-a-Ton community, visit and start following the Blog.

Before I leave, here are a couple of snaps from my Birthday celebrations, this friday night with my mom and my friend, Shashaank. (My dad was out of station with some work and all my other friends are spread all over India with their respective works.)

In the Birthday Images:
1. In the absence of a cake, making things work with a tiny but yummy Dimsum at the Noodle Bar.
2. Finally cutting something related to cake family, my favourite Brownie Sizzler.

Images Courtesy:

1. http://www.poznan-life.com (edited)
2. Self-Created on http://cooltext.com/ (original)
3. My Personal Collection (edited)
4. My Personal Collection (edited)