Perspective

You'll find my blog Perspective on www.nitibhan.com

Perspective blog and NitiBhan.com

One year of tracking prepaid Africa

One dark Arctic evening early in January 2011, I started playing around with Tumblr as a way to track news on emerging Africa. Dirk Knemeyer and I had just discussed doing a series of articles on the emerging opportunities in Sub Saharan Africa to be published weekly over the course of the spring and I thought this might be a fun way to research and manage tidbits of interesting happenings.

Who would have ever imagined I'd reach the end of the year with The Prepaid Economy: African Edition and not only have it invited to be showcased by Tumblr in their Business section but organically gain almost 2000 followers without a whisper of a link or a tweet. Thanks.

Once upon a time...

In four short months, it will become 7 full years since I first started blogging. Unlike many of those who were already there before me and many who've come after, I did not stay put on one URL or blog address but instead, wandered all over the internet. Today my writing is fragmented and spread out it bits and bobs throughout the webz, and sometimes, if I stop to think about it, I do regret not having continued on with the original Perspective blog on this typepad address.

Yet neither have I stayed put geographically - when I started writing I was living in Chicago and when it became a fulltime focus on what design and business were all about I had moved to San Francisco. In the years since I've written from my desk out of Singapore and Helsinki.

I've experimented with Posterous and a group blog - REculture has inspired a print magazine. My Tumblr to track the economic rise of Sub Saharan Africa (begun in January 2011 as a tool to collate material for the African emerging technology series on the Involution Studios blog) was recently invited to join Tumblr's showcase of recommended blogs. I've written extensively on an open source project for a client on the Semacraft blog - it was a challenge for me to shift to a more formal professional blogging style away from the personal pondering I'd do my own spaces. For a short while I blogged in Finland - no trace remains of that experience except for that available through the Internet Archives. And for some godforsaken reason that doesn't make sense anymore I deleted 5 years of work from this domain. My homepage today is simply a blogspot without a personality.

So why am I back here and where is this need to reflect and ponder through the written medium emerging from again? For the past 12 months I faced technical challenges each time I approached a computer in order to serve my inner need to write my thoughts - that was my way of gaining clarity and my means to make sense of the world around me. I stopped writing - the physical barriers to typing were effectively more of a block to writing than any mental 'writer's block' that I could have faced and the intervening months of forced silence have changed me inside.

That internal image of a lone writer tapping away at the keyboard, alone in a room with a computer and internet, has gone the way of the dodo bird - extinct in its own way but the sheer pleasure I feel when I sit down like this and let my fingers fly across the keys and see the words emerge, like magic, still has the power to soothe my soul and nothing and noone can take that away from me.

Lets see where this goes...

Hello World

How does this post look like again on this