Instablogs, the only blog network in India, has launched a new blogging community platform that will allow readers to Digg stories, create personal blogs and socialize with other community members. Once you join the Instablogs community, you get a personal blog space [like myname.instablogs.com] that revolves around your activity in the Instablogs zone. For instance, you will see comments posted by readers on your stories, your friends' activity, your popular stories and other things. You can change the look-n-feel of your blog in a single click by choosing any of the professional web themes.
If you already have a blog, you can import the contents to your Instablogs space - that will probably give more exposure to your current blog entries and could mean more readers.The process of submitting stories, commenting and voting is quite similar to Digg but the one unique feature they have is "News Leads". It's like telling the whole community about an interesting story on the web, anyone can pick the news lead from the queue and blog it on their persona; Instablogs space. As soon as they do it, the lead becomes a story.
Overall, Instablogs community looks like a good concept implemented quite nicely and considering that they have just launched, the response has been fairly impressive. Give it a shot.
The Instablogs site is monetized with contextual advertising but the revenue is not currently shared with the community members. If that could change in the future, Instablog could see much higher levels of participation as most users need some sort of incentive to get engaged.
Side Note: Instablogs, as a blog network, has over a 100 blogs under their umbrella and the team is managed by Ankit and Nandini Maheshwari who are based in New Delhi and probably the only "blogging couple" in India.
