For those of you that didn’t hear about the furor that some unruly upstart evoked last week – which is unlikely since the SA blogosphere is so small in the first place ;-) – take a look at the comments on stii’s blog.
While I don’t necessarily want to repeat anything I said regarding the SA Blog Awards, the fact remains that there is a serious problem currently brewing in the SA blog and social media scene. While one expects an intelligentsia to naturally develop within a particular industry or professional community, I can only say that in this case it is starting to work counter-productively and possibly to its own detriment.
I truly believe that there are more South African bloggers and netizens than we are given credit for, but if you had to ask me where they all “hang-out” I wouldn’t be able to give you an simple answer! Well maybe I would, but MySpace and YouTube don’t add any value to the local community.
Instead what has developed is an extremely small and – I would argue – very closed community, which continues to butter itself up in the hope that this will lead to fame and fortune. Sure, some will no doubt say that these people are visionaries and trendsetters and without them we would have nothing, but it also runs the danger of creating a Mafioso which! [ed - edited due to space constraints]
In case you thought I was the only one, links to recent posts by similar detractors:
Vincent – SA blogger gangbang turns into a snuff movie
Wozafriday – Controversy around the Blog Awards
Nic – Does the SA Blogging “elite” dominate Muti?
Any others?
1 Vincent Maher Mar 12th, 2007 at 4:55 pmwhurd
2 Eric Edelstein Mar 12th, 2007 at 7:40 pmI wrote the following regarding the blogging awards on my blog:
“The South African Blog Awards (Mike Stopforth mentioned they are around 9 187 in Technorati) have a HUGE commonality between judges and blogs in the final countdown. Yes, blogs can’t be in the finals of a category a judge is judging, but a large number of the finalists blogs are the Judges blogs. Are there so FEW bloggers in SA? Can’t the blog awards find some impartial judges? Common guys, get real? Get some system of voting which is unbiased or get non SA bloggers to judge – here’s an idea: Get International Bloggers to Judge? It seems like an old boys blog club at the moment…”
The original posting is at:
http://ericedelstein.wordpress.....seriously/
I have to say however, that Jon is the only one trying to get the awards going. If others think they can do a better job, set up your own blog awards…
So although there are problems with it, I still put my hat off to Jon for being a leader and attempting to get this going.
3 Colin Daniels Mar 13th, 2007 at 11:05 amEric – thanks for you comment. I agree with you and also take my hat off to Jon for attempting to get this off the ground. My hope is that with a bit of tweaking and more people involved, it could really become something worthwhile…
For the record, my criticisms are not wholly aimed at the Blog Awards, but at the current online landscape in general.