Around The Blogosphere:Blog Idols

It's interesting the stuff that goes around the blogosphere.Now that the East and Southern Africa Idols music competition is over with Zimbabwean Eric Moyo having won the competition on 28th July, 2008 at the Bomas of Kenya something new needs to come up and capture your attention...blog idols may just be it if if you maintain a blog.

Surprising the blogging idols competition has been ongoing and is in its third week as we speak!How we know little but thanks

The Competition:

The competition aims at getting the best of the best bloggers around the world and all bloggers are eligible provided that they sign up to Feedburner .The competition focuses on getting the most number of new subcribers for ones blog within a particular period.When one enrolls the number of subcribers for the blog is indexed then the challenge of getting new subscribers to one's content begins.The blog with the most subscribers carries away the grand prize of $3000, or an equivalent of Kenya shillings 189,000/=

The Rules for the BlogIdols Competition are:

1. All participants must activate the Feedburner feed count at the beginning of the competition.
2. Participants will need to send a short email weekly (100-200 words), describing their strategies to gain RSS subscribes, and what they are doing on their blogs.
3. The emails will be published on a weekly basis at http://www.dailyblogtips.com so that readers can follow and understand how participants are competing.
4. Blackhat methods will not be allowed, so bloggers can’t fake stats, try to damage the blog of competitors and so on.
5. Paid promotion will not be allowed, else it would become a “who can spend more” contest.
6. If you have a blog with over 1000 RSS subscribers and will create a brand new one for the competition, you can’t use your established blog to promote the new one
7. All other strategies and techniques are allowed (guest articles, contests, give-aways, controversial articles, free eBooks), so you are free to get creative

Well thats quite a competition and requires quite some amount of strategy, i just wish they had a special category for African blogs, alternatively we can borrow a cue and start our own competition! Any willing sponsors for Afria's blogging Idols Competition?????

Africa's First Pro Blogger !!!

Its another Monday and as usual i always dirt around my mail to approve and reject comments.I have been blogging for nine years now, i have built up a reputable blog, but thats not just it! I realize that blogging need not just be a hobby for me- but an avenue for self expression.It could also be an alternative medium for passing across information that is not readily available in mainstream media.Blogging can be used also as a tool for personal branding-creating an image of self out there that can be easily accessed by customers, employers, competitors etc.The benefits of quality blogging are immense but theres something thats on my chest, a conversation that needs to !

Musing on this thoughts and the benefits of blogging, im left to wonder who is going to be the first officially recognized African Pro blogger(we must just have this conversation going,i take the honors to begin it)!Yes who indeed is going to take blogging in Africa to a professional level,change perceptions, influence markets and perhaps in the venture make a living from it?who is going to demonstrate to the world that Africa is not lacking in fresh ideas and innovativeness in this rapidly developing communication world-Africa's first pro blogger!The thought just amuses me and im left wondering...what just is stopping me, or my fellow comrades...i believe nothing.I hope that such exciting themes will feature in the upcoming Technology For Africa Conference set for October 3rd and 4th 2008 in Johannesburg South Africa.Among the Guest speakers to feature in the TechforAfrica conference will include:

• Joe Stump-Lead developer and Architect for Digg(i remember sometime back i submited a blog post to DIGG and one of my friends therein was stunned that an African Actually DIGGS post....thats just so sad! Comrades please join up inDIGG only fellow Africans can vote on posts that they can identify with and realte with.Problogger John Chow had his big kill and recognition by virtue of DIGG)
• Andy Budd: internationally reknowned user experience Designer and webstandards expert
• Stafford Maissie :Google SA country Manager
• Vinny Lingham of Synthasite website,a web2.0 startup site
  
• Andrew Turner :Co-founder of mapufacture
• Nii Simmonds :Founder of NAFRICOM and blogger of Nubian Cheetah Fame
  
• Emeka Okafor:blogger of Africa Unchained
• Soyapi Mumba:afacebook applications specialist
• Josiah Mugambi (Kenyan) of stockskenya/skunkworks fame

So as you can see the gust list feature who and who...i believe perhaps among this should come Africa's first pro blogger!

By the way Guys you can read and join this blog at Facebook(my appeal to Kenyan bloggers is plaese put up a profile on Facebook and join blognetworks..dont miss out ) via this link : http://apps.new.facebook.com/blognetworks/blogpage.php?blogid=12668

Googles Latest Invention;KNOL

From blogger google has come up with a new online platform to share information called Knols, will these attract massive new users as blogs have always been?Thats left to be seen however i came to know of this new program through an interesting and exciting article on the official Google's blog entitled "Encouraging People To Contibute Knowledge "The article in part provides:

The web contains an enormous amount of information, and Google has helped to make that information more easily accessible by providing pretty good search facilities. But not everything is written nor is everything well organized to make it easily discoverable. There are millions of people who possess useful knowledge that they would love to share, and there are billions of people who can benefit from it. We believe that many do not share that knowledge today simply because it is not easy enough to do that. The challenge posed to us by Larry, Sergey and Eric was to find a way to help people share their knowledge. This is our main goal.

Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that we are calling "knol", which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only. But we wanted to share with everyone the basic premises and goals behind this project.

The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors' names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors -- but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content. At the heart, a knol is just a web page; we use the word "knol" as the name of the project and as an instance of an article interchangeably. It is well-organized, nicely presented, and has a distinct look and feel, but it is still just a web page. Google will provide easy-to-use tools for writing, editing, and so on, and it will provide free hosting of the content. Writers only need to write; we'll do the rest.

Now that is some interesting news.But what will make knol different and more useful than blogger? The article above highlights that Google's intent is to highlight authors at the same time that Google seeks to encourage the development of strong ethical standards on online writing especially using the knol project(could this be some form of censorship of content!)

I have just viewed a couple of the knols and they range on interesting topics such as:

• How to Backpack by Ryan Moulton
  
• Solutions to toilet clogging
• Cosmetic Surgery
• Entrepreneurship 101 etc

There are endless topics that one can write on like how to make the most efficient and classic makaa(swahili for charcoal etc) and claim that they are an expert on that field!The official Knol page has a tutorial to guide users on how to maintain objectivity and write a good Knol.The good Blogger: A Nairobian's Perspective ! - Create Postpart is that one can generate revenue with adsense on ones own knol!So here i am off to write Africa's first knol,question is on what am i an authority??? any suggestions dear readers???