I read with interest a few posts on the local blogosphere about how South Africans whinge and whine about the crime rate, so I became curious whether this is true on the local blogosphere.

I did some digging into the statistical data I have on Amatomu.com and found the following that only 0,3% of the 15 093 blog posts recorded on Amatomu this month mention crime. Now, considering that Amatomu tracks about 30% of the active blogs in South Africa, I think that one can safely generalise this statistic.

As you can see looking at the same statistics over a three-month period, the trend is a slow decline in the number of blog posts mentioning the word “crime”, in all its different permutations:

June to July 0,7%
July to August 0,6%
August to Sept 0,3%

At first I was overjoyed — here we have a good sample of the technological elite of South Africa, the early adopters, and they aren’t that interested in talking about crime. Then the cynic in me took over and suddenly it seems like there a whole lot of questions we need to be asking about why this figure is so low. I’d love to hear some perspectives from other bloggers about this.

Author

  • Vincent Maher was the Mail & Guardian Online's digital strategist. He has worked in the web industry for 12 years, was the head of the New Media Lab at the Rhodes University School of Journalism and Media Studies and writes columns for Enjin and Intelligence magazines. He is a judge of the Telkom ICT Journalist of the Year Awards and the developer of Amatomu.com. His current area of focus is Web 2.0 and social media strategy for the traditional media.

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Vincent Maher

Vincent Maher was the Mail & Guardian Online's digital strategist. He has worked in the web industry for 12 years, was the head of the New Media Lab at the Rhodes University School of Journalism and...

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