TEDGlobal and bloggers

In a CNN interview last year Emeka Okator, the programme director of TedGlobal 2007, was asked, “How do you shed light on the brighter side of Africa?”

He answered, “It’s coming from the bottom or primarily from the citizen media type, the bloggers, who are covering Africa to an extent it has never been covered before. There’s strong belief that the rest of the world will catch up as this process accelerates.”

Emeka understands the vital role that authentic, uncompromising, voices from Africa that are expressed through blogs play. Probably because he is a energetic blogger himself. It is wonderful that there is a healthy mix of bloggers amongst the TED Fellows. I’ll highlight the KBW members who are here apart from myself; Afromusing, Bankelele, Kenyan Pundit and White African. Ndesanjo is here as well running things on his home ground. Outside KBW Jea Brea and Andrew Heavens are here too.

There are couple of other Kenyan bloggers who have promised to send me their URLs and I will share them as soon as I get them. We also have a number of bloggers from other countries and I will do the same with the links.

KBW members let me assure that your blogs have a wider readership then you may imagine. I have met some people here that have never been to Africa before but read the KenyaUnlimited aggregator regularly. Many of the other Africans here talk about the power of the Kenyan blogs on the internet and are inspired to go out and start their own blogs and aggregator. Perhaps we should look out for NigeriaUnlimited, MaliUnlimited, etc soon!

At some point in the next few days we will sit down and brainstorm about the African Bloggers’ Conference. Please feel free to share any thoughts you have on this with us.

TEDGlobal2007 | TEDGlobal