The Brilliante Weblog Award (a series)

I’ve been wanting to blog on my fellow bloggers that appear in my blog roll (or, as I title it, “Blogs I Read Habitually”) but was kinda putting it off until I got a wonderful surprise from Siditty in her post “Passing The Love: The Brilliant Weblog Award” in where she gave me one of the most wonderful complements I’ve received in blogo-land (thanks!).

Because of this (and because its a meme which you have to pass on, it’s blog ethics!) I’ve decided to do the same.  But instead of doing one blog post on a bunch of blogs I’m gonna make it into a series of posts where I highlight two blogs per post on my blogroll, hope you enjoy.

3arabawy is a wonderful blog by fellow journalist, union activist, and Marxist Hossam el-Hamalawy.

Hossam is a veteran blogger and activist who has been to prison in Egypt on more than one occasion due to his political work.  I had the pleasure of meeting him last year during a speech he was giving on the worker movement in Egypt and we were able to build or friendship into what it is today.

His blog is mostly filled with many short blog posts that highlight certain news items around the world and as well in Egypt and I suggest everyone gets five to fifteen minutes a day to read it as one will get a better understanding of the world around him.

One of the things Hossam has taught me is to make my blog more interactive, in fact, his blog is one of the reasons why my blog is what it is today and one of the reasons why I was able to turn my blog into a more unwieldy blog that was updated once a week or so into the daily blog it is right now.

He has also set up a blogging community of Marxists whom are associated with (except me) the International Socialist Tendency, a Trotskyite group (I’m more of a ML type with post-structualist tendencies).

I recommend always checking out his BookMarx series.

a reader’s words is one of the first blogs I ever read and the first blogger to ever comment on my blog during its first few months in infancy (when it was still over at Blogger).  Bhupinder hails from India and has had quite an interesting life from what I can garner from his blog posts, especially in his college years when he went from a more “vulgar” (not an insult, a Marxist term folks) interpretation of Marxism on the dalit and caste issue to a much more pragmatic Marxian view which held caste at the center of one of the major problems in India.

As you can garner from his blogs title it is the writings of an avid reader and along with blogging on Indian politics and Marxism and Marxian literature he also reviews various books he reads and also recommends various books he has read over his years.

On top of being a great blogger, which made me want to become a better blogger, he was the first bloggers I have also kept up a relationship with through cyberspace, mostly through e-mail and comments and occasionally through Facebook.   Also through him I was able to meet (one in real life) a mirred of other bloggers from India and Pakistan which made me more engaged in the blogosphere in general by keeping in contact with the bloggers I read and developing (some type of) friendhips with them as well.  Bhupinder and I have vowed to meet each other in person in Ireland as I’m making it a tradition to meet up with fellow bloggers I talk to or have some sort of blogger connection with.

His blog posts on Marxist literature are great and are very informative as are all of his posts in general; he especially shines when giving his own analysis on Indian politics.