Now that the thunderstorm in a tea-cup (A.K.A Bullardgate) has been downgraded to a light drizzle, I thought it would be useful to reflect on what happened in the South African blogosphere yesterday and highlight some of the more obvious issues.

The first thing that was evident is the sense of unity and the feeling of “belonging” to a community that local bloggers clearly have. Without this prerequisite, I doubt that such a big deal would have been made of Bullard’s column, since it was as recently as 18 months ago that bloggers were a relatively isolated and unorganised bunch in this country. I guess we can thank Stork Margarine and Madiba and er! never mind.

Secondly, bloggers are more like journalists than they like to think. They are vocal, opinionated and bunch together like a brigade of Spartans when they feel threatened or attacked. They both extol the same dogma – Freedom of Speech and the quest for truth — but fail to achieve the Holy Grail that is complete objectivity.

Thirdly, people still read the newspaper and mainstream journalists continue to hold the balance of power in this country. There are other individuals, including “bloggers”, that have said far worse things about other bloggers and the blogosphere, but for some reason it is only really given credibility when a well-known journo, who is clearly being facetious, writes a column in a prominent newspaper. Even “Zuma scathing” Bullard was surprised about the response he got. Go figure!

And finally, to get down to the nuts and bolts of it, the real winners on the day were David Bullard and Vincent Maher. Both managed to significantly extend their own profiles whilst increasing traffic to their respective web sites. Bullard has successfully moved his brand into the online space and now has a promising podcasting and blogging career ahead of him as well as a politcal one too?

Maher, the “Che Guevara of the South African Blogosphere”, enjoyed considerable traffic and jumped a few notches up the blog rankings whilst simultaneously promoting Amatomu.com, which most bloggers used as their aggregator of choice to monitor the conversation. Ironically, no one questioned his motives since he does work for a competing media company, which is something I dare to say a professional journalist would’ve spotted.

Overall, it’s good to see the local blogoshere growing so rapidly and spreading its wings, but it still has a long way to go before it comes close to reaching maturity. In the meantime, can’t we all just get along???