10 posts ago, we celebrated (well announced) our first 10 posts and we discussed some plans. We haven’t kept them. We said:
‘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.’
Now on this our 20th post let’s review how we’ve done. We didn’t add more structured content, we haven’t looked at what the governments are doing yet, we really haven’t reviewed any products per se. Now we did look at the Youth Corps members and we did a drive-by of some Nigerian web-based services, and we have provided some information about the risk of hoaxes and phishing. However, I believe this blog can do much better in engaging Nigerians on information technology and how it is increasingly impacting our lives daily. Our intentions still remain what I had outlined in “Ten” and we will work towards creating a structure that supports that as we go on. To do that we may change our blogging platform to one that gives us more flexibility than Blogger, but we’ll see how much we can stretch Blogger before we take that route. In fact, after this post is up, I’ll be working on exploring more feature rich blogger templates as soon as I can. In addition this journeyman blogger will be hitting the books and websites to learn more ways to make this blog a richer experience for all concerned.
One of the other things we will do, as a result of feedback (no not in the comments section – thanks people) is post more than once a week. The Tuesday post will still be the main post, but there will be shorter posts on other week days that capture things of note that would be worth sharing before the Tuesday post. I would also like to invite other technology writers who would like to guest write on this blog to let me know and it would be a pleasure to have your material here. It would be a lot easier to put better content out there if there were more people writing this stuff.
So what have the numbers been like since we did our tenth post? Using Google Analytics again:
And by geographic spread:
This more than triples the number of visitors (83 from 18 cities) we had during our first 10 weeks. Not bad eh? Not to sound like a broken record, but this would be a greater experience for all of us if there is more visitor participation. Talking about participation, have we done any good since we started this blog? Well, Silverbird Cinemas have updated their site somewhat for the first time in over a year. Now I don’t know whether it is due to the post we did or not, but it is nice to imagine that someone over there read it and did something – even if it is only minimal, very minimal. I also had someone write in about getting involved with the Youth Corps programme. However, we won’t know unless you give us a heads up by writing comments and telling us about it.
And my Wiimbledon challenge still stands!
Dej.
