Tuesday 22 April 2008

Analysing SA Blogs, Where are the black readers/bloggers?

Amatomu a round up of South African blogs has just passed their one year anniversary and the stats are quite interesting to note. If you happen to follow the SA blogosphere you can be forgiven for thinking majority of South African are huge rugby fans.

Take a look at the screen shot of the most popular blogs in the last 30 days which are publicly available here.





The top two sites(Rugbydump & Keo) which account for roughly 30% of the traffic focus mostly on rugby. There is nothing entirely wrong with that as sites like amatomu are 'democratic' and the public choose the best with the number of visits but the statistics become more interesting when you delve deeper to what they actually mean.

I do not believe anyone could claim that rugby is the most watched or the most popular sport amongst South Africans yet these blogs are the most popular, this further proves that the blogosphere is not actually an accurate representation of South Africans.

This points out that black bloggers and readers are strangely lacking. This was covered by Khanya when the site launched. A year later and the picture has not changed. Khanya ends his blog with

"Perhaps there is a need for some affirmative action here."

This is just plain silly.

It however does point out that Black South Africans are not blogging nearly enough nor are they surfing as much. I haven't seen any statistics on internet usage or access to PC's of black South Africans but i am willing to bet that the imbalance would be represented there as well.

Instead of calling for affirmative action, we should concentrate on education and getting people access to computers & the internet.

As with my previous post i will end with:
Stay tuned for some practical steps to initiate change.

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2 comments:

Darren said...

"Instead of calling for affirmative action, we should concentrate on education and getting people access to computers & the internet." - very good, and I totally agree. This would solve more problems than we realise, I believe.

Ismail said...

yeah man, We have a growing population, imagine if most of them were technologically literate.

 
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