Organised by Smartxchange, eThekwini’s ICT incubator. The website says: “SmartXchange is an example of a successful public private partnership initiative within the Information and Communications Technology industry. It was established for the purpose of developing the business base of the Information and Communications Technology Industry in South Africa.”

The SmartCity Experience promises to be quite something – a conference and an expo.

“Come and attend the Conference where local and global experts in different sectors of the ICT industry share their knowledge and insight. Invited speakers include Clem Sunter, Mark Shuttleworth, Ng Wan Peng from Malaysia and Hamadoun Toure of the World Communications Union.”

I’m blogging about various aspects of the Smart City Conference so take a read.

Keywords? You ask how to find relevant keyword and how to apply them to the whole process of naming your blog, well I found just the article for you.

How-to for Naming your Blog by Elliot Back, explains about how good keywords can help your blog to be found.

Elliot Back looked at the names of 33,800 blogs to see what are the top 10 most frequently used words. His blog article has a lot of rather interesting details from his informal analysis.

Blogs are a strong tool for social media and companys trying to promote new products, special offerings, success stories and more if they are updated frequently and named correctly. This is why it is so important on learning How to Name Your Blog.

Mehdi from Strong Lifts – a good example of a blog that is focusing upon a niche topic and growing a readership quickly over the last 12 months.

Read this and you’ll see how to grow your subscribers from 0 – 13,000 in one year.

But somewhere along the line you’ll want to do things with your images – tweak them, edit, crop, resize – just make them look a bit better.

The top of the range programme fro this is Adobe Photoshop, but that costs plenty of bucks and is really beyond the reach of most people besides serious, professional photographers.

Photoshop has just released a free only version called Photoshop Express where you can do quite a lot of image manipulation and even store images.

I store images on Photobucket

But Photoshop Express isn’t the only one – Read:

4 Free Photo Editors – Edit, Tweak an Manipulate Images online at no cost.

Guy Lecky, who wrote this article is really smart about keywords and about Google’s Adsense and other related issues, so if you want a blog that will carry ads, this is a good place to start.

Of course there is the matter of the content if you want a successful blog, and promotion and focus and linking … but those are other posts.

According to Sokari Ekine who is guest blogging on Mediashift: In just four years the African blogosphere has grown from a hundred or so Africans to over 1,000 presently registered on Afrigator alone and I believe this figure is way below the real number. Despite the launch of an African wide aggregator there remains a tendency for bloggers and readers to remain within their own national and thematic spaces. This is not just an African trend as most blogs operate within a circle of blogs and friends and enemies mingling amongst themselves. Two sites launched last year, African Path and African Loft, have tried to address this trend and encourage bloggers and readers to move into a more continental and international space..

Read this very interesting blogpost, titled:

 How Bloggers Covered Kenya Violence, Deal with Racism, Sexism

Overview of Fax to Email

Fax to Email has changed the way faxes are transmitted through the implementation of an innovative solution which ensures that all faxes sent reach the recipients personal inbox. This solution provides the user with all the benefits of conventional email without losing the advantages of recognized fax services Fax to Email is a leading South African web-based Fax Solutions Company.

What is Fax to Email ?

Fax to Email is a company offering an innovative, cost effective solution to the current and somewhat cumbersome method of receiving and sending faxes. Fax to Email earns revenue through a rebate system from Telkom, for calls made to the allocated numbers which is sufficient for Fax to Email to distribute this fax reception service at no charge to the end user. Fax to Email has changed the way faxes are dealt with by aligning it closer to email than to traditional faxing.

So there you have it – this is just one of the smartest things I’ve heard – and Fax to Email is Free!

• relevant
• good
• interesting

So, I’m adding a link to a blog called Opportunities & Drops of Gem by an Australian writing colleague, Tel Asiado, which has a little bit of everything for small business people.

Tel talks about Excellence, about Job search strategies; Success, happiness, reality; Asking for what we want and many other practical and inspirational posts.

It is really worth a read.

The cherry on top, of course is to get your message to the right audience and to increase your blog readership in the right, targeted direction.

A lot of it is just putting your shoulder to the wheel and making a commitment to your blog and to regular, good quality blogging. But there are some really important elements to keep in mind if you want to increase your blog readership.

I can’t say it any better than Andy Mc Donald from the UK in his great Article – 20 Tips to Increase Blog Readership.

Accessibility – a good blog must be easy to navigate and enjoyable to read

Visually appealing – a good blog must be pleasant to look at – the text must be user-friendly and readable – I like lots of white space -and enough images without it looking too cluttered.

Regularity – a good blog must appear regularly.

SEO -stuff – a good blog needs strong keywords for the search engines and it also needs links and backlinks.

I read this article recently: A good blog -what is the recipe?

The writer begins with “Is there a recipe for the perfect blog? What makes good blog? What is a successful blog? How do you build a good blog? Difficult, complex questions, but the easiest way to answer it is by way of an example. I came across a new blog this weekend which I think is almost at the peak of what a perfect blog should be. “

Then he gives an example of a good blog – I had a look and I agree with him.