Notes from the Nigerian Bloggers’ Conference (by Olumide Alabi and ‘Gbenga Sesan)
We’re blogging live from the Nigerian Bloggers’ Conference…
The conference, which is holding at the Banquet Hall of Elomaz Hotel in Lagos, Nigeria started with a quick introduction by the host (one of Nigeria’s most popular bloggers), Adeolu Akinyemi. Others, who’re busy introducing themselves include the writers of this blog, a weapons engineer, soon-to-be bloggers, blog readers, blogger of the “Gbeborun of Lagos” fame, husbands and wives who blog together, an uncommissioned “Obama speech-writer”, I-must-now-ressurect-my-blog folks and others. From the introductions, it is quite clear that many bloggers started (and stopped, and then resumed again) after reading other blogs.
‘Gbenga is taking us through the definition of a blog or what I’d like to call Blogging 101 or Blogging for dummies. Hmm… his motivation for blogging was fuelled by what he’d like people to say about him at his funeral…lol. One of the reasons he started blogging was to have an outlet for articles he wrote that Newspapers were too scared to print because it didn’t fit their model of political correctness. He also made a personal choice not to blog about bad news because there’s enough bad news out there already. One of the beauties of blogging is the realness of the authors, the way they share the things they truly believe in. Like it or not, blogging can help you to influence things in society, because you have a circle of influence.
Now Olumide is talking and I’m blogging. He’s taking the audience through domain names — what they are and why you should own one. He’s just thrown in a new word — findability — and it says a lot about how owning a unique personalized domain name can help people identify you more easily. “It sets you apart from the crowd, keeps you in control, makes moving easy and helps you keep rakings with your search engines,” he said. I like the “keeps you in control” bit because it helps avoid having adverts that contradict the content of your blog because you’re using a secondary provider’s service. Owning your own domain also shows your seriousness about your idea or business — if only because you pay some money to get that in place each year.
Gbenga Aijotan, of NaijaBrains.com, is presently speaking about online media advertising. He’s discussing the possibility of attracting corporate adverts on blogs having built loyal traffic.
LEST WE ALL CATCH IT…
Some of us have come together to tackle the spread of AIDS. No, not the sexually transmitted one but the one that has gained some notoriety for being rightly and wrongly inferred as the middle name of every Nigerian, at least as far as the Oprahs of this outside world can conjecture! It is called corruption. AIDS here, therefore, stands for Acquired Integrity Deficiency Syndrome. It is good to have anti-corruption bodies, but that’s only one side of the coin. Just as curative medicine has its place, some of us would rather inject the communities with preventive capsules that will forbid AIDS from coming in. It is, perhaps, cheaper to do all it takes to prevent a house from going up flames at all than to start dousing the fire on one side just as it ignites and spreads elsewhere! So much to say for anti-corruption crusades! But let’s face it, who is the culprit? Adults. Leaders. So, what to do with the younger generation? Oh, yes, they know what is bad but has the system consciously exposed them to what is right? Are we unaware of the absurdities on campuses? Have some of the leaders of tomorrow not taken to armed robbery, drug pedaling, exam malpractice, vandalism, cultism, terrorism, whoredom …? Name it. Alas, the young has already grown old in the way of the old! This taken, Nigeria now aptly qualifies for the label of an endangered species. Like a cancer, a terminal disease, it is harder for chemotherapy to stop its spread than it is to forbid its entry into the cell. The safe sex campaign is now more than the talk of research to discover anti-aids drugs. Unless we begin to tackle this social menace from the bottom-up, the spread may assume such an alarming proportion that might consume all.
As a first step, we are in the process of identifying people with at least a modicum of integrity in different walks of private and public lives. Next, we’ll bring them together, set them up as Brand Ambassadors for the new BrandNigeria and get them to move out and positively infect their communities (especially the youth) with values that will not let them catch the ravenous HIV, let alone blooming to AIDS. We have designed various interactive for this purpose.
I’m contacting you because we need you to unleash the power of blogging and social media on this campaign from the on-set. You may call me on 2348067028070.
Femi – The Duke & Convener
Premium Integrity Network
It’s going to be a spell before we pick up any CMS cloud offering from the likes of Oracle. Acquia have of late launched Drupal Gardens which is a cloud based service which feels very promising. There are a host of grounds why we are not moving onto the cloud more speedily, the crucial reason is organisational change where budgets and contracts are specified and presented years for 3, 4 even 5 years. Come replenishment time some clients are asking CMS in the cloud but then have to consider other subjects such as integrating with CRM & other back office systems. I guess it will come about eventually.