First Entry

Welcome to my weblog. For the uninitiated, a weblog (or blog) is a web page that allows for easy updates and postings, sort of like an online journal. There are two varieties of weblogs: group blogs, and individual blogs. This is an individual blog, although that may change in future. For more blogging terminology see this, and for a history of weblogs see this. I’ll use both the terms "blog", and "weblog" to describe this site.

I will use this weblog to comment on as many issues. I’m a South African, and so many of
my posts will be about South Africa (see also: this for more information about South Africa), but I won’t restrict myself, and I will discuss other parts of the world as well. I prefer reading USENET to blogging, but unfortunately, trolls have wrecked many of the forums used to discuss South Africa.

The reason why blogging hasn’t taken off in South Africa is probably because Internet
access is expensive, which makes updating a blog, a costly exercise. It’s
also the reason why I don’t have comments on my blog yet; I don’t have the time
or money to police a comments section. The purpose of this blog will be to
record my observations on what I encounter on the web. I have found very few
blogs about South Africa, or by South Africans, but hopefully this trend will change.

I post using an alias, but I thought you’d like to know I’m a young adult male,
living in Gauteng Province. You may be able to figure out more about me by reading my posts.

I visit the following sites daily, and I will probably rely on them heavily to compile my
blog entries:

antiwar.com and lewrockwell.com, for an American right-wing libertarian perspective on current affairs.

I visit Counterpunch and unmedia for a left-wing American perspective on current events.

Crooked Timber, an excellent academic weblog, and Anil Dash’s blog round out my daily weblog reading.

Lastly, I use antiwar.com , BBC News and Google News for world news, and Independent Newspapers and the Sunday Times for South African News.

Other sites that I visit fairly often are the UK Guardian, UK Independent, South Africa’s Mail and Guardian, MSN Slate Magazine, The Atlantic Online and exile.ru, a “Moscow based Alternative newspaper”.

So, you can see, my links will come from a large number of sites, and reflect a diverse
range of opinions. If you have any articles that are interesting, email me with the links, and I’ll consider them for inclusion in the blog.

A few administrative details:

I don’t do link exchanges, and I link to pages that I personally enjoy reading, or find
interesting. I don’t endorse any of the sites I link to, and I don’t
necessarily agree with everything I link to either. Don’t try to infer anything
about me based on the sites I link to, because you will probably be
wrong.

I may quote from emails sent to me, unless you clearly state that you don’t want me to
quote your emails. Hate mail will be printed regardless. All material on this
blog is copyrighted, although you may quote properly attributed excerpts for non-commercial purposes, without permission.

Update I'm slowly getting this blog up and running, I had to choose the url gauteng.blogspot.com, since southafrica.blogspot.com, and a few others were already taken (though the blogs have long since been abandoned by their owners). A few other features are being added, and I'm considering whether I should add comments, though I will probably have to think about that issue some more.

Update 2 I decided to add comments, and I added a link to Way South. The identical site templates, are coincidental (I didn't know about Way South when I set this blog up), though I found my comment provider from that blog.