I added a few weblogs to my blogroll a few days back:
Economy
Brad Setser: If you are as obsessed as I am – about the macroeconomic issues revolving around the US twin deficits, the resultant instability in the currency market and the role that the Asian Central banks are playing, Setser’s weblog should be a daily read.
Some people feel that it is Apocalypse Now for the current financial order. Bushies think they are orchestrating a soft landing for the dollar. Setser introduces a strong sense of proportion into the debate.
India
Jabberwock: Via Kitabkhana, I recently discovered Jai Arjun’s weblog. Check it out …
Photography
Durgi’s‘s photoblog: As I keep telling Durgesh, if only he were not spending most of his waking hours in the services of the Evil Empire, he would probably have a couple of exhibitions under his belt by now …
Conscientious: Jim Colberg runs the kind of weblog about photography that I would have liked to run if I were as knowledgeable and as focused. (although I do not share his enthusiasm for Chomsky)

In case you did not notice, William Gibson is back.
Gibson and Neil Stephenson are the only two science fiction writers that I try to keep up with (unless you count Douglas Adams and Asimov. But Douglas Adams doesnt write fiction anymore and Isac Asimov is dead). I should note here that neither Gibson, nor Stephenson are strictly science fiction writers. Gibson in ‘Pattern Recognition’ was skating very close to what can be reality.
In other news,
Mobilives is back too.
Alex Ross, the music critic of the New York has a wonderful weblog called The Rest Is Noise.
Insidegoogle is just that; a weblog for for googleheads.

Interesting article on yesterday’s NYT magazine on blogging and its impact on the American political landscape (I am not finished reading it)
Billmon (who used to run a prominent lefty weblog) has a critical piece on the mainstreamization of blogs in LA Times. I am not very sympathetic to his viewpoint on this subject and this post responds to some of the charges.
I think the idea that the prominest blogs stop being subversive and/or suck the Oxygen out of blogosphere is old, justified and in the nature of things. Way back, before the left oriented blogs like DailyKos or Whiskey bar were as prominest as they now are in North America, before the conservative warbloggers like Instapundit became so popular, bloggers in North America used to handwring over the prominence of what went under the name of “A list bloggers”.
Clay Shirky wrote an interesting article on power law distribution last year. What he wrote and what I said in my commentary then, is still valid.
However, there are some caveats. I think single topic weblogs are still a powerful idea. Internet (thank you google!) makes it much easier to find sites catering to your interests. If you are not trying to tackle something as broad as North American politics, there is still enough space for interesting niche weblogs.
If you do want to tackle a broad enough subject, the only way to do it now in a way that attracts a large readership is to provide a diversity of original voices
In fact, as Billmon’s own experience showed, it should be the preferred option if the motivation is fame or influence.

Vinod hosted this week’s Indian Blog mela. Dina is going to host next week’s. It is an interesting idea. I am getting to know a lot more interesting Indian blogs through these than I did through idle surfing.
Incidentally, ‘Mela’ means festival in Hindi and many other North Indian languages.

This thread on Nielsen Hayden’s has interesting suggestions about RSS readers available on the market. Bloglines sounded interesting.
As I said in an earlier post, I am currently test driving FeedDemon, which is very cool, if a trifle slow (that could be because I am on a beta product). I also heard very good things about Newsgator.
In case you are an India newshound, Indian Express is now available through syndications (via Mahesh). I hope Rediff follows suit.

Mahesh Santaram is hosting the ‘Bharatiya Blog Mela’, a rich showcase of Indian bloggers. I was very pleasantly surprised by both the presentation (the design is a spoof on Indian Express) and the content.
Lately, there has been a bunch of interesting new blogs and zines from the Indian community
Om Malik, a journalist with Business 2.0 and the writer of Broadbandits: Inside the $70 million telecom heist has started an interesting new weblog called ‘Not really Indian’ . It seems to cover Indo American cultural kitsch and what he calls ‘un NRI like things’.
I also noticed another interesting weblog called Prayatna on Typepad (via Emergic).
Former NDTV producer and anchor, Smita Maitra and Amrita Ghosh, English lecturer/PhD candidate in Drew University are starting a new Indian literary webzine called ‘Cerebration’. It is currently hosted on Geocities which is rather fragile. It is moving to this location. They are also looking for interesting submissions.
Dialognow, Satya Circle and Mantram have already on the map for some time now and have acquired quite a bit of traction among those looking for news and views from the Indian community on the net.

Anita Bora has an article on site counters in Rediff on the net. I am quoted in it :-).

Let me take a moment to thank Prashant Kothari for including me on his blogroll.
Prashant writes interesting, pithy commentary largely on current US and Indian affairs. I thought his remarks on my last month’s article on Satyacircle were on the mark.
It was also nice to rediscover two of my favourite Indian commentators (Gurcharan Das and Swaminathan Aiyar) through his links. Both write very well on Indian business and economy; though Das’s Optimism Unbound can sometimes grate on people more cynical than him.

Got arrested a few days back.
There are details in MSNBC. (I am chary about linking to anything on MSNBC. They keep moving this around and break my links. )
( via Buzzmachine)