I recently had a conversation with a very talented and influential blogger Spidey who’s now somewhat retired now from blogging. We chatted about blog life and where a lot of our friends who used to blog on Kenya Blog World (KBW), where they are today, and how many of them are still blogging?
The answer was that many of our extremely talented blog buddies grew up, and went on to focus on more important things in life.
It also got me to thinking of people who have hacked blogging for the long term and actually turned it into maybe the most important thing in their lives – namely their careers
So I’d like to salute some people I admire, and follow on twitter, who have done just that – being passionate bloggers who have transformed their blogging from anonymous hobbies into their own mainstream careers
f1fanatic_co_uk This site run by UK ex-public relations man is my favorite site for formula one information. He does it full time now and quit his job great site for race reports and tweets and technical analysis of teams and rule changes in the sport. More here
Bill Simmons a.k.a The Sport Guy was a college kid who blogged about professional sports teams in his hometown of Boston which was going through a very depressing period of bad luck. He’d churn out 3,000 word articles overnight after epic games, analyzing his team’s performance against fate, ghosts, the psyche of the town – all with pop culture references e.g the Tyson effect, the Vengeance Scale and the Ewing theory which anyone should read up on when a star player leaves their favourite spots tea through contract, trade, injury or retirement. He has such a level of writing, that made you feel that you had the best seat in the stadium, even if you never watched the game – and today he works, and blogs at ESPN, one of the world’s largest sports broadcasters, where he nurtures a similar team of writers.
Linda Ikeji in Nigeria on news, entertainment, and celebrity news. She runs a site that brand people turn to, to showcase events in Nigeria. More here
Mr Skin who was a Chicago mercantile exchange worker who decided to compile and catalog every (female*) nude scene in mainstream movies on his site (NSFW) , ranking them for greatness, notes the minute & second that they are in the movie. Todays, he’s an authority and a historian of nude scenes. He sounds like someone who should be in jail as radio show host Howard Stern often jokes when MrSkin visits for an annual interview during the academy awards, but instead, over 15 years he’s built a very profitable site that generates 10 million unique visits a month, and has 40 employees, including his (MrSkin’s) mother.
Finally
The guys at BAKE,the officials. They have taken the time to cultivate the local community through meet ups and events, talked to corporations to sell them on the concept of marketing through bloggers, developed other partnerships that have played out into paying gigs for bloggers and even have a local annual blog award show now in its third year.(Full disclosure: I’m nominated this year and have won once)
This post was written by Bankele. He runs a blog on observations on banking, finance, investment, communications, travel, and life in Kenya. Check out his blog here