Instablogs, an India-based citizen journalism site is negotiating a $3 million round of funding, reports TechCrunch. As per the story, the company gets 2.5+ million page-views per month, has 12,000 registered users, and did $300,000 in revenue last year. So what do they need the funds for? To hire key management staff, buying servers and bandwidth, alliances with news agencies and more. I just checked, and the site has undergone a major revamp - it was once a blog network, but now the information is categorized according to country, content discovery is easier; there’s also a Firefox extension for Instablogs, and also extensive use of AJAX. But AJAX not a community maketh: users can rate content, and there’s a separate page highlighting comments from the community. The community appears to be fairly active - check out the frequency of comments. I’m a little wary of pre-funding announcements, it almost appears as if the company is making an announcement that they’re looking for funding. More at TechCrunch

Instablogs reminds me of NowPublic.com, and a great talk given by Leonard Brody at FICCI Frames. More on that when I have the bandwidth for the audio.