After I have written the post The South African Blogosphere I got a lot of positive feedback from German readers, who were quite interested in the SA blogosphere and who would like to learn more about it.

Therefore I started to send out questions to a few SA bloggers via email, but Simone came up with the excellent idea to do this public and to ask this way every SA blogger, who would like to contribute.

About the questions

The list of questions is pretty long. Therefore feel free to only answer the question, you would like to answer and from which you think, that you can contribute something to them.

Also feel free to ‘modify’ the question if you want to share your something differnt but related with us. It’s not a strict interview!

If you link back to this post with your answers I will eidt a list of answers at the end of this post, so that everybody gets an overview of the answers and can find those!

Thank you very much for participating in advance!

And here are the questions:

1. Please introduce yourself! When have you started blogging? What was your motivation? How have you heard of blogging?
2. What do you think - at which point stands the SA blogosphere? Hype, disenchantment, normalization etc.? Do non-bloggers read blogs in SA? Does the SA blogosphere has any problems to solve?
3. How would you characterize the SA blogosphere. How is it like to be part of it?
4. Do you think that SA bloggers are different to others? Other topics? Different usage of linking or commenting? Different attitude or communication behavior? Whatever!
5. Is blogging in SA something for “geeks only”? How professionalized is blogging in SA? Do you have bloggers who can live from it?
6. Which role does the “Mail&Guardian online” play in the SA blogosphere? For me it seems to be a big driver and maybe even influence factor. How would you judge its role? Are there any other mainstream media companies actively involved in the blogosphere? What do you think about their involvement?
7. Does blogging in SA already play are big role in politics? Do you read blogs from politicians? Or are they maybe using any other social media platforms like social networks?
8. Who is blogging in SA? Are there significant race differences for example? If yes - what do you think, why?
9. How does the social network market look like it in SA? How big is it compared to blogging?
10. How important is blogging in SA already for corporations? What’s about corporate blogging and how serious do corporations what SA blogger write about them? Are there popular corporate blogs? Would you like to see more corporations blogging?
11. Is “Social Commerce” a topic in SA? Do bloggers or other onliners already actively recommend products via specialized platforms? Do you use social commerce tools, like recommendation widgets by yourself?
12. How much of the SA blogosphere traffic is really from inside SA - how much comes from other countries? Is it a ‘closed’ environment or pretty open and strongly connected with international blogs from other countries?
13. Can you say how much SA blogs you read and how much international ones? Maybe just a ratio?
14. What are the hot topics bloggers talk about right now in SA? Do you have topics where you say: “that’s typical South African, that we discuss this in our blogs”.
15. Which role does micro-blogging play already in SA? How about Twitter? How about FriendFeed? Do you use one of those services? What do you think about them?
16. Is advertising on blogs common in SA? Are there any special blog marketing companies in SA already? How accepted is it? How well does it work? (in Germany advertising on blogs is not ‘yet’ very common and often controversial discussed)
17. How about podcasting in SA? (video and audio) Does it play a big role in SA? What are your most popular podcast for example? Do you listen to podcasts?
18. Do you have Sout African copycats of popular US Web2.0 services? Germany has for example a huge Facebook clone, a Digg clone and so on.Or do you use just the US services, because you have no problem with the language?
19. Are there SA bloggers, who not blog in English, but in other languages? I know that there exist quite a few different languages in SA.
20. Do you see any trends in the South African blogosphere right now? What will happen in the future? How will it be like to be a blogger in about five years in South Africa?

As said - feel free to answer only a few and not all questions If you would like to add something apart from these questions feel also free to write what you want! If you don’t want to answer those questions on your blog, you can also email me the answers at: sebastian (dot) kuepers (at) gmail (dot) com.

Thanks again for everybody, who takes the time to provide me and my readers with a deeper insight in the South African blogosphere!