NigeriansTalk

I think when you get a request to do a guest post on Nige­ri­anstalk you can take it that you ‘have arrived’, no? See­ing how impor­tant it is for us Nige­ri­ans to ‘have arrived’, I would like to take my moment to thank all of you read­ing this post, I’m hon­oured. I’d like to thank Loom­nie for ask­ing me to post, my mother for encour­ag­ing the read­ing that led to my obses­sion with all things knowl­edge, my Eng­lish teacher at school Ms Hamil­ton who was the quin­tes­sen­tially for­mi­da­ble black school teacher and the read­ers of my blog Afro Geek Chic, who make me feel like a minia­ture super­star in my own lit­tle sec­tion of ‘Bloge­ria’ (many thanks to Cul­ture Cynic for the very apt name).

So enough of the pos­tur­ing already, what do I want to dis­cuss on the Blogeria-sphere this week? Let’s talk about Nige­ria as an emer­gent mar­ket for web. To say it is ripe is an under­state­ment and to my immense plea­sure Nige­ri­ans them­selves are respond­ing and gen­er­at­ing their own grass roots prod­ucts and web-services. I read blogs across a lot of top­ics and I’m increas­ingly inspired by the blogs that feed my desire to see the Naija geek brigade devel­op­ing and push­ing for­ward prod­ucts not just for Nige­ria but for the world.

One of my favourite blogs is Star­tup­sNige­ria run by Loy Okozie. This is where I dis­cov­ered, Nai­jaPulse (Nigeria’s ver­sion of Twit­ter), Nai­japals (Nigeria’s ver­sion of Face­book) and Nairal­ist (Nigeria’s ver­sion of Craigslist).

It isn’t just about copy­cat prod­ucts, Star­tup­sNige­ria cov­ers every­thing  from per­son­nel changes at the top of our lead­ing tele­coms providers, new social media sites such as RiRanWo and Sturvs.com, to online radio sta­tions totally ignor­ing the national re-branding ini­tia­tive and using noto­ri­ety to pro­mote their  prod­uct, like 419Radio. Need­less to say it’s the home of the good, the bad, the ugly and quite likely the next big thing.

Another great tech blog is Mobil­i­tyNige­ria, focus­ing on mobile ser­vices. Mobile com­pa­nies are slowly real­is­ing the humon­gous pen­e­tra­tion mobile has in Africa and the enor­mous poten­tial this presents (I won’t dis­cuss the risk of exploita­tion here, I’ll be giv­ing my POV on that on my blog some­time soon). Mobil­ity Nige­ria is all about stay­ing ahead of the curve with ser­vices run­ning on the Niger­ian net­works, what’s new, what’s crap (very impor­tant) and what is sexy (for your mobile ofcourse). Cru­cially, this site is mobile friendly too!

I should note nei­ther of the sites above are with­out bias, but when it comes to get­ting the head­lines or the ‘gist’ should I say, you wouldn’t go wrong by book­mark­ing them or putting them in your blog readers.

Not to be left out Bar­Camp­Nige­ria recently took place on Sat­ur­day 25th April in Lagos. Apart from being quite upset I couldn’t go, I was immensely proud to see Nige­ria hold­ing its own ver­sion of the hugely pop­u­lar Bar­Camp con­fer­ence series where every attendee must par­tic­i­pate and/or present. It says a lot about how seri­ous we are about not being left out of the lead­ing edge. Links to the pic­tures and a redux are all avail­able here.

It’s impos­si­ble to talk about emer­gent web exclu­sively in the con­text of Nige­ria, there are amaz­ing things hap­pen­ing all over Africa that we’re part of and ben­e­fit­ing from, check out Afriga­tor and WhiteAfrican’s list of 30 Great African Tech Blogs for just a peep into what’s out there.

If I feel there is one thing lack­ing, its female rep­re­sen­ta­tion. The now quiet Beau­ti­ful Dis­or­der from Onyeka was a great lifestyle and tech blog, but other than her, I don’t know any other female Niger­ian blog­gers who are into tech­nol­ogy and the web who are blog­ging about it. Raise your heads ladies if you’re out there, Nige­ria is most def­i­nitely rep­re­sent­ing and we’ve got to be part of the ‘arrival party’.

LoloBloggs
www.afrogeekchic.com