As a follow-up to my post on South Africa’s Top Bloggers, as ranked by Technorati, I whipped out my calculator, and did some number crunching.

There are approximately 16 million blogs tracked by Technorati.

I’ve been told that there are about 30 000 active blogs in South Africa.

That means we represent about 0.002 % of all blogs.

As I pointed out in my post, we also represent only 0.00045% of the Top 100,000 ranked posts on Technorati.

That means that we should have FIVE times as many Top 100,000 blogs as we do right now.

Of course:

1. I probably have not got a full list of our Top Blogs. (Help me update it by leaving a comment below if you know of a blog that is in the 100 000 rank on Technorati)

2. The audience ie. blog readers is also skewed away from South Africa, and if the theory that there are more people who read blog than people who blog, this would also affect South Africa.

But still.

Any comments?

Eric Edelstein is hosting the next OpenCoffee in Cape Town tomorrow, at 6pm at the Extreme Hotel.
He has changed the format slightly, and there will now be a 10 minute presentation by Henk Kleynhans from Skyrove.

Eric has done a great job getting the ball rolling for OpenCoffee in Cape Town, and the meet up between investors, and web entrepreneurs has already gotten some sweet results. If you are a player in the web world, and if you are hoping to make money of it (even if only one day!), or are looking to meet fellow colleagues in the space, go on over and sign up.

Eric has also set up a Facebook group for OpenCoffee, if you are interested. There are over 250 members, so you are bound to be in good company!

For those of you in Jo’burg who are interested in attending our next OpenCoffee, please sign up here.

Once every two months or so, I look at my inbox, see which emails in my inbox I have not opened, and unsubscribe from these newsletters. And every time I do this, I am amazed at the dance I have to go through to complete the process.

Take Barnesandnoble.com

1. They send me a newsletter, for which I probably signed up at some point.

2. They tell me that to unsubscribe, I must click “here”, log in , and change my prefernces.

3. I am already worried, because I know I do not know my password to enable me to log in. So I have to request it. It comes.

4. I log in, go to my preferences, and have to log in AGAIN with my email address. I do that.

5. IAM TOLD AN EMAIL WILL BE SENT TO ME WITH A LINK TO MANAGE MY PREFERENCES!!!!!

6. I wait.

7. And wait.

8. And wait some more.

9. No email. No unsubscribe completed. I KNOW it wasn’t that difficult to subscribe to the bloody thing.

10. Never buying a book from them again!

By the way, did you know (as I have now been told) that Barnes and Noble offers

FREE product Alerts and Newsletters

Wow. Free? Really? Free info that will allow me to buy books from you? Wow? Free? You’re the BEST!

I think I have finally finalised my blogging platform.

I started out on Typepad, which was a heat of the moment kind of action, since I really wanted to try out this blogging trend.

Then I moved the blog to my domain name, www.evedmochowska.com. But since it is impossiblr to spell, pronounce or remember (unless you are me) I realised that that wasn’t the best move.

So I registered the name of the blog as its own domain (it was available!), www.ofrelevance.com and now I think I have settled.

Of course, I realise that I have probably lost some subscribers due to all this havoc, and certainly because I haven’t really been blogging. But that will now change. Trust me. And I promise, no more change.

(I realise that feedburner allows you to keep subscribers when you change hosts, but I made some fundamental errors when I first signed up, so it didn’t work for me).

• » How To Write A Popular Post
  How to write a digg worthy article
  (tags: digg delicious)

• What Is Google PageRank? A Guide For Searchers & Webmasters
  A good guide to PR
  (tags: PR Google pagerank SEO ranking)

• The SEO Playbook - Welcome to the Rabbit Hole Alice - Stuntdubl - Search Engine Marketing Consultant
  An Advanced beginners guide to SEO, Comprehensive - a good “check list” type article
  (tags: SEO, optimization, search)
• 16 Must Read Articles For Bloggers
  Self explanatory
  (tags: blog writing marketing)

• Blog Juice Calculator - Text Link Ads
  Allows you to rank your blog on a global scale. A bit depressing, really!
• How Web 2.0-aware Are You?
  Test your computer’s browsing history, and find out how web 2.0 savvy you REALLY are ….

• 10 Sure-Fire Headline Formulas That Work | Copyblogger
  A neat guide to blog headlines that attract readership
  (tags: marketing, readership, headlines, copywriting)

I came across this interesting sidebit in an old issue of The New Yorker (Oct16, 2006), written by Nick Paumgarten.

He talks about Yossi Vardi, an Israelite living in the US, who helped found ICQ. During a talk he presented at a Gadgetoff (an annual gathering devoted to “bringing the smart and the useless together”), he promised to show how you can transfer data faster with snails than with broadband.

“He compared various data-transfer systems: ISDN, ADSL, Wi-Fly (that is, pigeons). Then he showed a slide of a snail hitched to a tiny chariot with DVDs for wheels. If each disk contains 4.7 gigabytes of data, and if the snail (chasing a scrap of lettuce) travels at 0.000023 metres per second, the snail-system performance rate is over thirty-seven megabits per second. That blows ADSL out of the water.”

Of course, he acknowledges that the technology is not perfect. Specifically in France,

“culinary habits may pose a denial-of-service problem”