HAPPY (SWAZI) BIRTHDAY TO ME

This Swaziland blogsite is one year old today. (7 July 2008)

Don’t worry I’m not about to launch into a speech about how blogging has changed my life and made me friends all over the world (none in Swaziland, but all over the world).

Instead, I want to take an opportunity to encourage people in Swaziland to start up their own blogs.

When I talk to people in Swaziland about blogging one of their main questions (and concerns if they started one them self) is who would read it?

When I think of Swazi Media Commentary, it is a bit difficult to be precise with the answer on this. Roughly one in three readers of the blogsite log on during the hours of 11pm and 6am, so that means unless they are Swazis with bad sleep problems, the readers are at computers on the other side of the world.

The people in Swaziland who read the blogsite are mostly from the media houses or the ‘development industry’. I know that editors and media executives read Swazi Media Commentary, because they tell me so.

Journalists at the newspapers are keen readers and some keep a tally to see which of the media houses gets most mentions. (You can work out for yourself why they might do that).

Among the other Swazi readers are students, academics and people working for NGOs.

So, I hope I am able to convince people in Swaziland who might want to start a blog themselves that with some effort you can find a readership.

The readership of Swazi Media Commentary is extended because I send most posts to the Swazi Solidarity Network forum (SSN), a Google discussion group with about 550 members (I don’t send all the posts to SSN, so if you only ever read me on that group log into the blogsite itself from time to time to see if you’re missing anything).

The Internet is for sharing, so often my posts get lifted from the blogsite and reproduced elsewhere. The Southern Africa Contact in Denmark publishes a newsletter about Swaziland to more than 1,000 members each fortnight and my posts often appear there.

My posts also pop up on other websites at universities, political parties and other activist sites.

Occasionally, the Swazi newspapers will lift a post and publish it in their pages. I have also had stuff reproduced by a news agency and a trade union.

If the private emails I receive are anything to go by, academic researchers in Swaziland, the United States, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Kenya and South Africa are accessing the blogsite.

Only last month a delegation from The World Bank came to interview me about my views on Swaziland after having found me on the Internet.

So there you are. What a clever fellow I am. And so could you be.

I wrote before about the practicalities of blogging. To find out how you can start your own click here

See also
WE NEED MORE SWAZI BLOGS