I started this blog in conjunction with my personal blog in an effort to earn personal online income that I would share with Life in Africa, my favorite cause. I invited others who support Life in Africa to learn to blog with me here, so that they could also benefit from whatever I was discovering about blogging from Africa, and we could raise a bit more social capital for the cause. I believed (and still believe) that a team approach to promoting our blogs would make it easier to achieve visibility and earn meaningful amounts of sharable income - especially for my African friends I invited to participate - within a shorter time period than would otherwise be possible for most on African bandwidth.
Without ever really feeling like we've had a chance to get started on team promotion, I have re-designed this team experiment beyond recognition a couple of times now to try and please participants and potential participants from outside of Africa who have shared their points of view. I have also been asked to share my larger vision for this blog experiment in the context of Life in Africa's future, to which my purpose (stated above) apparently does not offer an adequate response. I am not sure if it's the global team approach, my desire to rally others to use blogging to raise funds for LiA, or my intent to share practical information about earning income through blogging that seems to disturb other Life in Africa stakeholders about this experiment.
The result is that I am currently in a state of confusion over whether or not to continue trying to help Life in Africa in this (voluntary) way. I think that the content created on some of the ourwwworld blogs I helped friends in Uganda to start is extraordinary, as I knew it would be. However, I do not wish to interfere with whatever other plans the Life in Africa team may have for integrating blogs into their activities.
With the holidays approaching, I think for now the best thing to do is to just keep this blog on hold for a while. I will spend some time reflecting on better ways to achieve my purpose without compromising Life in Africa and get back to y'all sometime in January.
If you have any thoughts at all on this subject, it would be really useful for me to hear them. Please post a comment below.
and Happy Holidays!
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
the future of ourwwworld
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I really enjoy blogging, and I love reading the blogs, so I am not sure what to say. Those who want to participate will, and those who don't, won't. Let me know what I can do.
ReplyDeleteThere are lots of advantages to blogging, not the least of which that it's a great way to make a Web site. I've been an avid reader--opps I just noticed that I hadn't added Shawn's blog to by blogreader--of the blogs, so they're important to me. Generally unless someone spams them blogs stay up, so there's no problem with putting things on hold. The team blog approach seems smart to me, and lots of learning has gone on here. Getting blogs to pay is tricky, but there are many advantages other than the revenue.
ReplyDeleteThough I have not yet grasp it well enough, I feel that this was helping in one way or the other to get my projects promoted, I always feel it's a bit tricky for me to get people to my discussions or posts, but with the group blog, I am able to reach very many people.I know I do not yet understand very well the income generating or even the promotion part of it but with time I may.
ReplyDeleteThe difficult part is participation is not living up to expectation, sometimes for us here in Africa , writing is a dream and many people do not have the skill let alone the Language bit of it.It may take some time to get this going, but we should not get discouraged.