The growing power of blogs

Bloggers and internet pundits are exerting a “disproportionately large influence” on society, according to a report by a technology research company [reported in the Guardian]. Its study suggests that although “active” web users make up only a small proportion of Europe’s online population, they are increasingly dominating public conversations and creating business trends

“We’re seeing this growing,” said Julian Smith, an online advertising analyst with Jupiter Research and author of the report. “The strongest part of their influence is on the media: if something online suddenly becomes a story in the local press, then it matters.”

Although the report focuses on Europe I can see this trend becoming increasingly true in Africa in general and Kenya in particular.

Here is an example from Mentalacrobatics. Typically my daily stats show that 25% of the readers of this blog are in the United States, another 25% are in the UK. Kenya is normally around third or fourth with around 10% or 15%. This is more or less what I would expect simply due to the volume of online activity in each of those countries.

The busiest day for Mentalacrobatics this year was when I published CCTV footage of the Raid on the EA Standard and when I put together a quick round up of the reaction of the Kenyan blogosphere to the raid. This is where the country stats got interesting. Have a look at this image:

I found this amazing. The raid on the EA Standard was a massive local story. Although the international media switched on for a while, they quickly moved on as they do. For the Kenyan public and the Kenyan press however, the raid remained the biggest news story for a couple of weeks. Despite having a wealth of information on the raid available in the local press and through international media outlets Kenyans still went online in search of information.

Up to now I have always assumed that Kenyans in Kenya went online to find out what is going on OUTSIDE Kenya. Now it is increasingly clear that Kenyans in Kenya are going online to get an alternative view on the events that are going on INSIDE Kenya. I had another spike in my readership from Kenya in the 24 hours after the Marsabit plane crash. And if an alternative view on Kenya is what you want then a search engine query will probably guide you to one of the Kenyan blogs.