Some bloggers meet

Yesterday I went out with the GINKS secretariat to meet Emmanuel K. Bensah, one of the most fanatic bloggers in Ghana. I met Emmanuel through his blog. When we connected on facebook he had stated (ticking a box by mistake) that we met in school, but actually the category 'met through their blogs' is missing...

It was very nice to exchange blog and vlog tips, and discuss the Ghanaian blogosphere which is too quiet according to Emmanuel. He is an author for the globalvoices for Ghana. This means that he reads about 15-20 blogs and when he thinks something is interesting for a global audience that doesn't know much about Ghana he writes a review to the editor, who then edits and puts it up the globalvoices site. See an example of a review here. This is a huge opportunity for bloggers to get known (this is how I found Emmanuel's blog) and to be crossposted to a wider audience. He told us globalvoices now has a feed into the Reuter's Africa site. On each country page there is a feed with blogposts, see the example for Ghana. We discussed ways of leveraging the GINKS vlog with ICT4D stories, a possible blogmentoring project and tried to start a Ghanaian vloggers group (so far with 3 members :). I forgot to ask whether the Ghanaian bloggers ever meet.

We had a good brainstorm about the developing of ICT uses in Ghana. Emmanuel was very enthousiastic about his GPRS phone which allows him to connect to the internet by mobile phone. It is not extremely expensive and you can set it to see what you used. When he's offline, he uses his onetouch (onetouch is a Ghanaian telecom service) pay-as-you-go subscription to check and reply to mails and even to go to facebook. I still have my video-ipod dream (in combination with videoblogs) . Mobile television is coming through ghana telecom/onetouch. So enough work for GINKS...