12/12/12

Today’s blog post is dedicated to my bro Turbodave who keeps on pushing me back to my blog and shares his Bday with Jamhuri Day.  Die besten Wünsche zum Geburtstag, lieber Dave! And a Happy Jamhuri Day to everyone!

Zur gemütlichen Ecke

Dave keeps on pushing me back to my blog(s) for a good reason, because my blogging mojo is still around and has maybe only been diverted to other microblogging sites like FB, G+, Twitter & Co.. Avid readers may even remember The Nonist’s “What everyone should know about blog depression” publication (PDF). I like to refer to this publication once in a while because blogging is an up and down affair. And with today’s competition from the microblogging side as well as the decreased attention span of many readers (I, for one, often save interesting stuff via Pocket because of tl;dr), it seriously needs to be asked if your readers still want to go through longer texts. Maybe not. Maybe if you are publishing interesting stuff. Maybe only if you are one of those SEO maniacs who construct their (equally boring) content around SEO structures.

So are (traditional) blogs dead? I don’t think so. They are needed more than ever, and will be especially successful when they provide (hyper)local content. Local content imo also is the kind of content that will save all newspapers from a complete downfall. Local content, curated as an app for your preferred mobile device. Would this work? I think so.

I have some German friends who complain to me about me blogging in English instead of German. I will need to find a solution to this one day. Could this blog also work in bilingual mode, as advertised on the sidebar and the way I keep it on Twitter since 2007? I know the language issue alone is a sin and that most readers actually prefer themed blogs. The diversity probably is a tribute to the way I work.

Talking about work: I have been busy lately, focussing on an important project, but of course also killed some time with the moving of my micro-/tumble blog from Posterous to a sub-domain on this site:

jke-kikuyumoja-header

 http://jke.kikuyumoja.com

For the lack of an appropriate title, I just called it “jke’s” and imported all previous content from jke.posterous.com to jke.kikuyumoja.com (as explained here). It’s an attempt to keep control over my own content and because Posterous has been acting up since Twitter’s acquisition of Posterous in early 2012. The mail-to-blog publishing is done via Jetpack, even though Jetpack still has some bugs as it currently resizes all images to maximum width. Autoposts to Twitter are done via the wonderful IFTTT. And since I am also publishing all my Instagrams on my jke.kikuyumoja.com microblogging site, they also end up on Twitter. Eat this, Twitter! :-D

And then there’s the recently relaunched AfriGadget site which received a new and responsive, mobile-first theme (which is based on the same Waipoua theme as this blog, by the fabulous Elmastudio):

AfriGadget   Solving everyday problems with African ingenuity

So even though not much happened on this blog, a lot has been going on in the background. Blogs are still very much 2012 and will also prevail in 2013. They are user-generated content that will be linked to from social networks. I would also like to publish more interesting content in 2013 and maybe also some of that in German, if you don’t mind.

Oh, and for those of you still waiting for something glorious to happen on December 12th, 2012 (12/12/12), here’s a special message from my friend SpongeBob:

121212

Cheers!

Author: jke

Hi, I am an engineer who freelances in water & sanitation-related IT projects at Saniblog.org. You'll also find me on Twitter @jke and Instagram.