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1.) The Dumb Business Person: They read past fraud cases like quarterly reports. They are always blaming somebody for their losses and never learning from it. They are a sad species of leadership in business and everybody hates them in the food chain. These types are needed to provide food for scammers and fraudsters so that they too can keep and feed their poor, innocent families. Their chief challenge is a weak ego that cannot admit being wrong and so rather than learn their lessons, they offer up an excuse as a burnt offering which in effect prevents them from avoiding such mistakes in future. It is this ego that kept them from learning when they could have done it in the first place.

Sturvs.com, the Nigerian equivalent of digg has gone into hibernation. I have been to the website on several occasions now but the blank screen with a Nigerian 50th independence anniversarry celebration remains on the home page. Sturvs.com has been around for sometime and has quite a few users judging by the number of postings appearing daily. Obviously sturvs.com has gone back to the drawing board. Hopefully something good will come out of this. Lets keep our fingers crossed.

Interestingly, Digg.com just launched a new revamped website that has kept tongues wagging accross the internet. Several users have expressed strong dislike for the new look digg.com.

The old sturvs looks like this:

The menace of hackers and spammers remain a threat to any webmaster's success. As soon as a website begins to climb the ranking scale, these "evil geniuses" take notice and there is normally a relentless swarm of attacks. Just a few weeks ago, this site was attacked. I am still working on bringing back the data I lost here and on other sites that were affected. Last sunday, Truspot reported that they had lost most of their mp3 files due to a "bug". Despite not admitting it was a hack or virus attack, they spoke about "strengthening our security system". Truspot is a music blog showcasing mostly African artistes - especially the up and coming ones. In a public notice, they said:

The non existence of a viable online payment system has greatly hindered ecommerce in Africa. In Nigeria, for example, there is no mass accesible form to pay for goods online. Customers still have to pay physically into a bank account for items purchased online. Utilities like debit cards, credits cards are virtually non existent. There is a big market here - waiting for any courageous investor ready to bring about this massive culture change.

You may have noticed, this site was built with the Drupal Content Management System (CMS). I gave it a lot of thought before choosing this software over Wordpress. Of course Wordpress is very good for blogging - probably the best. The most annoying thing I found about Drupal is that you have to install the text editor yourself. Up to now, I am still trying out the available editor modules to find which would be the best for this blog. Some of the editors dont have the most basic of functions - uploading image from the hard drive or any other attached device. In Wordpress, among other things, you get a nice text editor allowing for image upload from anywhere and with most of the editing functions you would need.

Despite all the privacy issues, facebook just crossed the half a billion users marker. That is 500 million users! It also means 1/13th of the whole internet population. There is no stopping for one of the world's most famous websites. Barely six months ago, they had 400 million users. At this rate, they should hit 1 billion users on or before January next year. The only other website ranking more than it is Google and we know why - Google in itself is a part of our lives. Facebook is fast becoming like that too.

The other day, I came upon this heated argument on one of the popular forums about use of Content Management Systems (CMS). One web designer branded all CMS users lazy and lacking in imagination. Personally I dont see any reason why I should build a website from scratch if its going to have just basic features like on a blog or even a social network. Unless a utility is not available with existing software, it would be akin to re-inventing the wheel if one codes from scratch. Is it really worth the effort? In any case, a simple custom plugin will add any functionality to existing core codes.

Over this weekend, from 25th to 27th June, to be precise, this site was down due to an attack from a hacker. I have had to re-build the website from a backup as serious damage was done. I am in the process of re-posting all the articles that were there before.

Sadly, I lost all the mails and comments already posted. Users who previously uploaded their sites to the directory will notice changes in the descriptions. Please use the contact option (lower side of site) to request any changes you need done.

Thanks for your patience.

Depsite the lure of facebook and other foreign social networks, Nigerian built social sites still march on. They are not really an alternative to their foreign competitors but their richness in local content has differentiated and offered something extra lacking in the million dollar likes of twitter, LinkedIn etc. With, sometimes, zero funding and skeletal staffing, these yeomen of the Nigerian internet community continue to survive and build up their user base. A few have disappered over the years constrained by limited funding and technology. Others have soldiered on making do and improvising with whatever their limited resources can afford them.

I have been investigating the reach of twitter.com in Nigeria. The hype is too loud to ignore. Being on twitter is not only cool but can be very beneficial to a business. Twitter has not only been a service to use but an idea to copy or emulate as well. The evidence is in a plethora of Nigeria themed twitter clones. The 140 character blog platform is the rave of the moment.

The benefits of using twitter are too many to mention. Apart from being a massive means of cascading information quickly to friends, business partners and the general public, twitter is

Getting advert revenue from a single website via Google Adsense can be a very daunting task. It means you have to build up "quality and relevant" traffic. Its not necessarily in the number of hits a site attracts but getting the right sort of visitors who would find the content sensitive Google adverts attractive. In the end what matters is how many clicks you get for the adverts. In order to really gain from Adsense, sometimes its necessary to build more than one website.

Following the success of nairaland.com a myriad of smf based forums have appeared and dissapeared over the years. A few have blatantly copied the popular forum down to its simplistic home page. Several other rival forums have done their own thing and may yet proof formidable competitors in future. I did a search on Google for "Top Nigerian forums" and got the following results which I have whittled down based on a number of parameters shown graphically below.:

Its no news thousands of Nigerians are blogging these days. A few have been around for years. Others hopped on the blogosphere recently - some inspired by get rich quick dreams that soon get quashed by reality.