 I'm a digital storyteller, which basically means that I use the medium of the internet to immortalize my thoughts, the only way I know how, by writing them down. When I'm not writing, I'm a community builder. I'm building blogging communities, bringing them together, and creating a place where the world meets Africa, as you like to call it. Quick show of hands. How many people are bloggers? Well, this is actually much, much more than the last people we had last year. My presentation is called, the website means community. The people of WordPress tell you that code is poetry. Well, I don't know any code in skills, but I can stream words together to bring you interesting things. What is a blog? To answer this question, I'll just delve briefly into the blogging culture. Blog comes from the word, weblog, which is, verb plus log. Blogging started sometime in the 90s, when it was mostly online diaries, and then the internet came, and yeah, it got fame, riches. And now here we are, 32% of the internet is powered by WordPress. And about 76.5 million WordPress.com blogs are the, what does this mean? It means there's a whole community of WordPress users out there. Last year I presented it, my WordPress talk was called, a website is a conversation. Now I'm working on that, I'm turning it into, it's actually, I'm building on that and saying that a website is not just a conversation, a website is community. Because on the internet, that's where websites go to die. Yeah, you'll have to forgive me. I actually came from another presentation for some other thing, so yeah, I've lost track of my speech. Here's a fun fact, though. Did you know that the WordPress platform started actually on a blogging platform called B2CafeLog, which was a blogging platform? And then the guy who started it just disappeared. And then one of the users was like, okay, so what do we do with our things here? And decided, okay, let's take all the cool things and take some other cool things, and we got WordPress. So something as simple as blogging could be updating anything on the digital space, putting something on your Twitter, Instagram. Now, I said a website is community. These are redwood toiletries. There's some in South America and some else. I don't know if anyone has seen these images. These trees go like 300 years and they go really high. No, 300. What's this, I'm sorry, let me just have a look. Oh, they grow really, really high. The sky is the limit. And funny thing about these trees is that their roots are really, really shallow. Yet they grow this ancient, yeah. The secret is in their roots. Their roots intertwine and connect together. And this is how they survive. I've been running my personal blog for about five years. I started off just doing my stuff, and here is now, in 2013 I was just posting, and then, well, but in 2018, and yeah, it's doing all right. And I decided, no, let's grow our community. Let's have people who are doing their blogs as well to just get together and let's all just shout out to each other and just grow. And I noticed that when I was looking at my specs that my engagement is rather low on this end and it's higher everywhere else. And I asked my fellow friends and I figured out, and I saw that some also experienced the same problems, although our content is for local communities. And we're wondering why it is like this. The prohibitive cost of data, people don't understand blogs, low reading culture. The prohibitive cost of data is actually a real thing. You'll find that 2.5% of people, no, sorry, one gig of data costs about 2.5% of a person's average monthly income in Africa. Although in our Melbourne situation with 90% for more unemployment, this is very hard so you can tell that accessing the net is really, really, really hard. And this is why our blogs suffer. Understanding blogs, this is one of the reasons why I decided to step up and just come up and say, no, anyone who updates their content up on the internet, you're blogging. When you run your website and you put content on there, that is blogging. So there are more bloggers than you actually think there are. People in this group, you're sitting there and you think I'm not a blogger. You probably are. So if you are a blogger, or maybe now I'm saying that you are, you should try and support us fellow bloggers and fellow people with their websites. One of the questions I had was like, monetizing my site, monetizing my site, it's very hard to monetize your site directly when you're over here because of the internet challenges and the expensive data. But you can use it in other ways. Let me quote, I call my blog a gentleman because it opens doors for me. Opportunities will come because you're using your space, the things you talk about, the things you share, all those little things, your stories that you have to write when you have your problems and you're writing about them. Someone will read and someone can connect and something can happen. This is how you support people's blogs. You read, subscribe, comment, recommend, when you like it, please tell someone else that this is a lovely space. Can we read it? In conclusion, I would just like to say, if you give me an internet connection, a website, and an audience, I can change the world. And this is me done. Questions.