Jason Von Berg from The Times recently interviewed musician and blogger, Steve Hofmeyr, and asked him about his views on blogging and Steve Se Spoeg Blok, his personal blog which is written in Afrikaans and currently one of the most popular blogs in South Africa.

The interview is embedded below:


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There’s nothing wrong with the interview from a technical perspective, but Hofmeyr’s responses on blogging are weak, in my opinion, and give me the impression that he’s skimmed over Naked Conversations and thrown some of what he learnt back at the camera for the audience to gush over. I’m not what’s known as a Steve Hofmeyr hater, but this interview really got under my skin.

Two statements he makes in the interview that reinforces my point:

1. “I’m doing it (blogging) because I’m an opinionated musician” – Yeah right. One look at all the animated gifs in both sidebars imply it’s probably more about brand building and the extra revenue he no doubt makes off advertising than simply about “expressing” one’s self…
2. “(The blog received) 30-40 million hits just for last year (2006)” – This is difficult to disprove, but I seriously doubt it as this would mean he was getting between 3-4 millions hits on average per month, more than top SA news sites. According to Amatomu trends, Hofmeyr’s blog received 40k hits over the past 7 days. Multiply that by 4 and it’s still missing some zeros. Add the fact that SA’s blog traffic increased significantly in 2007 thanks to a more publicised blogosphere and the launch of local blog aggregators, and it becomes a far-fetched over-exaggeration.

Am I missing something here?