Welcome back! – 2006

Welcome back to 2006 and what’s set to be a cracking, exciting year ahead for your favourite online hangout, Bruinou.com. Thank heavens the festive season is behind us, I don’t think I could take much more of the food and drink binges, the late nights entertaining and the monstrous hangovers. All this while trying to fit in quality time at the office trying to get things in order for the year ahead. Well, the rubber has hit the road and 2006 is already rolling.

First off the bat is the Bruinou.com mobile edition which we’ve just released. Simply access www.Bruinou.com from any suitably enabled handset and add yourself to our SMS mailing list amongst other things. Now you can checkout a scaled-down version of Bruinou.com, wherever you are. We definitely see Internet access from mobile phones as a major growth area and we’re positioning ourselves right there for when the bubble bursts.

Next up will be the launch of our much anticipated monthly newspaper in Johannesburg, The Footprint, which goes on sale from the end of February. Stay tuned for more info on this landmark event.

The first week in April will see Bruinou.com live and running, uninterrupted for 1 year straight. Our membership and traffic levels have swelled to record proportions and we’d like to celebrate this momentous occasion by putting together the mother of all events. So mark your diaries because it will be happening in London, Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town…all at the same time!

This year will see Bruinou.com taking up some critical media issues with the SABC. Most importantly, is why the Coloured community of South Africa does not have any radio station which directly caters for our unique needs, much like Lotus FM caters to the needs of South Africa’s Indian community. We cannot allow the wholesale media exclusion of a census defined group to continue unabated in 2006. We desperately need state sponsored tools with which we can free our communities from the shackles of poverty and create much needed opportunity for our 8.9% of the population. Failure to demand our own media channels will mean the Coloured community will forever operate on the fringes of South African society, misunderstood, maligned and resentful. This certainly can’t be what rainbow-nationism is all about now can it?

So, stick around with Bruinou.com, show your support at our events and contribute in our forums and by giving us regular feedback. And as you take 2006 by the horns, keep in mind there will be many new features on Bruinou.com and improvements on existing ones, to make the website one that we can be even more proud of. This year, we resolve to give you regular doses of original content, reviews of all our functions (and we have some fabulous ones planned for this year!), the low-down on all the personalities you should know about, an amazing one-year anniversary bash – in short, we resolve to be the ONLY worthy word on the street!

Regards,
the Bruinou.com Team