First up we have the BunduWall which allows us to interact with the community to help those in need. If you know of South Africans who need assistance to get them through trying times we would like to share their troubles with our community and try to reach out to help them.

The second addition we added over the weekend was BunduTown which is a noticeboard for upcoming regional events. If you have events in Gauteng, Cape Town, Durban, PE or Bloemfontein you can post them here and motivate for why people should attend your event. If it sounds really cool, we might even dispatch a Bundublogger to come and check it out and post some pics of the event.

We would love some feedback and interaction on these initiatives. Please feel free to drop us a line on webmaster@rival.co.za.

Regards,

Marc

First up we are offering R1000 for the best new blog on the Bundublog.com platform. We are being pretty open about the category and criteria and would love to try and attract people who develop innovative and feisty content.

The winner of the competition will be announced on 31 March 2010.

The second prize will be for the best new entrepreneur / business blog on the platform. The winner will receive R500 in advertising on the AD:Dynamo platform to promote a website / blog of their choice.

Signing up is easy – you can just click here.

For those who have never tried to configure a blog, you will find it is really easy on Bundublog. The site has a number of pre-configured themes and drag and drop components to make it look good without requiring any technical know-how.

You also have 50mbs of space so plenty of place to upload content, pictures, videos etc.

For those who are a little more entrepreneurial you’ll also be able to try and generate some revenue from your site through AD:Dynamo, Google AdSense, TrafficSynergy and OfferForge programs.

We are looking for some exciting new content from our blogging community.

If you have any queries please drop me a line on 082-561-1585 or e-mail marc@rival.co.za

We have been spending quite a lot of time sorting out some of the tech issues behind Bundublog and our focus is now shifting to making the site a destination for African blog traffic. To do that we need kick ass community driven content.

The blogger numbers are up and we’re shifting our focus to podcasting content. We’re throwing it out to the blogosphere that we are looking for some cool podcasting shows to syndicate and promote. Apart from an established and growing community and audience for the content, we’ve also got some budget to promote the podcasts and help the presenters grow their audience.

If the podcast is really good we’re even prepared to pay for it… we don’t pay well but its a start!

Content wise, tech podcasts are a dime a dozen and don’t have a hell of a lot of appeal for us. Thing we would be interested in include:

• Education
• Science
• Sports
• Book and video game reviews
• Entrepreneurship
• Finance (provided it is not dry and boring)
• Contributions from citizen journalists in other African countries including Zimbabwe, Botswana and Nigeria (English only please)
• African politics
• SA entertainment including comedy skits
• Music from new African bands looking for exposure

We’re also quite happy to entertain some content that might be considered a bit more “risque” so try us out and we’ll see what we can put together.

If you’re interested in putting together a podcast or looking to grow your audience using Bundublog.com then please contact Marc Ashton on 082-561-1585 or e-mail marc@rival.co.za

Sponsor opportunities
Podcasting and internet radio are still in their infancy in Africa (including South Africa), but it is likely to become an increasingly powerful space for sponsors and advertisers.

We believe there might be opportunities for companies operating in the following industries to gain exposure through the Bundublog community:

• Branding and social media
• Music
• Entertainment
• Bandwidth and hosting
• Entertainment

If you would like to discuss some potential opportunities please give me a shout on the contact details above. For context purposes the packages start at R1850 excl. VAT per month so are affordable for many small businesses.

Look forward to some excellent content from the community.

Regards
Marc

The Dating Game blog – is offering a R250 cash prize for the persion who leave a story of the best “Worst Date” experience. This competition expires at the close of business on Friday 5 March 2010 and should be lots of fun. So get posting.

Marc Ashton is offering a bottle of booze for the contributor who can provide the best insight into which South African bank offers the best small banking solution. Give your thoughts here.

We also have two other incentives for new bloggers which will be formally announced tomorrow morning but here is a sneak peak. Bundublog.com is incentivising new bloggers with two competitions including:

• Best new entrepreneur blog for March 2010
• Most risque new blogger – March 2010

Get blogging!

As many of you will know we have been working with local Pay-Per-Click network AD:Dynamo and they have recently supplied our bloggers with a plug-in to enable them to start making some money off their blogs.

If you have an AD:Dynamo account you can log into your Bundublog.com dashboard and scroll down the left-hand side of the page until you find the “plug-ins”  menu item.

Click on this and there is the option to “Activate”.

From here it is pretty self explanatory so feel free to mail any questions you might have to marc@rival.co.za

As a bit of feedback we’re making about R4.95 on our highest value clicks at the moment so the AD:Dynamo network is appearing to gain some traction.

Happy blogging!

Earlier this morning Chile was struck by a massive earthquake. This has been followed up by 50+ aftershocks, tsunami warnings in places like Hawaii and other seismic events in Argentina.

How do I know this? I’ve been following it all day on Twitter and various blog and news platforms.

Not so long ago a global relief effort was launched in Haiti as 200000 plus people lost their lives after a major earthquake hit the region. Again we have been kept up to date with so many aspects of that event simply because technology has allowed us access to images and stories shared over the net.

Powerful stuff!

This is just a quick note as a bit of early warning that Bundublog.com will be moving over to new servers over the course of the week and the site might be a little up and down when they make the move.

Please bear with us over this time – after the last data loss we are being extra careful with this handover and will be managing a series of back-ups.

If you have any queries please feel free to drop me a line on marc@rival.co.za.

Regards,

The Bundublog.com team!

We have always wanted to show off the potential of this country and its fantastic opportunities. Blogging is a brilliant tool to be able to show this brand off to the international community and with the 2010 World Cup around the corner we’ve attached the following map below to show you some of the amazing tourist attractions that our country has to offer.

Follow the links and see all the variety our amazing country has to offer. South Africa – you rock!

Secondly a really big thank you to Justin McCall and the Private Property guys who sponsored the event – sponsors sometimes get taken for granted but the industry needs them to grow – so thank you kindly!

It was a fantastic opportunity to interact with bloggers as well as some of the web-celebs including Justin Hartman from Afrigator / Adgator and Nicholas Haralambous from SA Rocks.

I was impressed by the number of people who stayed to the end  – it was a long day but those who attended hung on through it  had a nice opportunity to exchange ideas. Real South African entrepreneurship in action!

A couple of things stood out for me – one was the brilliant Silverlight advert that AD:Dynamo was involved in serving. This  ad for video game Mass Effect 2 is 600mbs and the average time to watch it was 28 minutes. They’ve served it a couple of million times in the UK since bringing it online. That gave me a lot to think about as a web publisher – while our bandwidth doesn’t support it, the type of ad gives me some food for thought!

Nick spoke quite a lot about migrating websites onto mobile platforms – I’d be curious to find out if any of readers view their blogs off their mobile phones?

Justin spoke about a couple of the new developments at AdGator and I see he has just put up a new web post outlining some of these so go and check it our here.

For those who were involved – thanks very much – it was a great day!

I thought I’d put in my two cents on this topic because it is something I find quite interesting to follow.

First up it is very important that the Reuters article talks about teens and their interest in blogging. You have to take that in context – I know my daughter likes to visit sites where the content is pro-active and developed for her – unlike blogs which are user generated.

Does that mean that blogging is going out of fashion? I don’t think so.

Pew Internet and American Life project who conducted the survey have focused on the developed American market. Internet there is cheap and accessible.

Flip that around and look at high growth places like Africa (SA has about 10% internet penetration), China, Russia, India, Brazil, Iran, Mexico – internet penetration is tiny but growing fast. Specifically in terms of mobile internet.

We also are in the midst of a shifting global economy which is likely to see small business starting to come through again as the traditional workforce battles to add capacity.

That is millions of entrepreneurs across the globe who are going to seek a web presence and many of them will be boot-strapping their businesses meaning that they will be looking for free tools to give them exposure.

Blogging is one of these tools.

Very short conclusion – while the stats are saying one thing , they need to be taken with a pinch of salt in the bigger economic picture.