Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Ten.

Ten. That’s right Ladies and Gentlemen, Digital Crossings has been on in the Blogosphere for 10 whole weeks! Ok, so another way of saying it is just 10 weeks. Clearly not a significant amount of time when compared to other blogs that have been running for years and have thousands of posts.

Still, we did get through this first 10 and the portents for the future are only guaranteed to get better as the blog matures, the author gets better at this and the readership grows. Speaking of readership, how have we done so far? Since very few people have deigned to leave comments on the blog (so only 3 people have), we can’t use the comments submitted to count the multiplied thousands that have flooded Blogger’s servers in search of my wit and wisdom. Thankfully there are other tools for this. In the old days I would have had to implement a little tool called a hit counter that would show me with a gauge on the page, the number of visitors I have had. Nowadays, there are more sophisticated tools such as Google Analytics that gives me a whole lot more information.

Google Analytics Map view showing distribution of visitors Google Analytics Map View

We are happy to report readership in 7 different nations of the world. From Puchon in South Korea, through Barbados and the American cities of San Francisco, Chicago, Houston and NYC, baby! Of course, the largest number of visitors come from home base Lagos Nigeria. Yes, Digital Crossings is world famous!

Actually turning off the hype and bombast, we have had 77 visitors from the aforementioned seven countries. That is an average of 7.7 visitors a week in our 10 week history. We are not discouraged however. Hey, it has just been 10 weeks. We are just getting started with this thing here.

Table of Cities and visits to Digital Crossingsimage

Over the coming weeks and months, we will begin to add more structured content to the blog. Much of the material thus far has been mainly this writer’s experiences and perspectives. We ill expand beyond this by covering other people’s experiences and efforts as they make their digital crossings. For instance, there is a group of National Youth Corp Members in Surulere that are trying to make some serious impact on their community that I plan to cover in the next couple of weeks. The Crossings will also be keeping an eye out for innovative products and services that we can point people to. We will test them where possible (translation – where it will cost little or nothing to do so), possibly interview the people behind them and give you our take on them. Another thing we will be looking at is how governments are using computing technology in Nigeria to get things done. Since this is meant to be a learning resource as well we will be doing “how-to's” on a variety of topics. Together with all this, I will still emote, philosophise, rant and rave as is appropriate.

All this should give us material to write for the next 10, 20, 30, maybe even 100 weeks.

Lastly, I am far from being the fount of wisdom and I am really hoping that we can make the Digital Crossings a conversation, rather than a monologue. So, please write in with your thoughts, comments and ideas. I’m even open to having guest writers to take over a week’s penmanship. I would love to have you write. It’s been a blast and I am really excited about what is to come.

Dej.