by Oge Okonkwo

Nigeria has taken the blogosphere by storm as The Naked Convos, picked up three awards at the recently concluded Black Weblog Awards which took place at The Ensemble Theatre, Texas, US, on Saturday November 2, 2013.

The Awards had 35 categories out of which TNC were nominated in five: Best Relationship Blog, Best Blog Post Series, Best Group Blog, Best Writing in a Blog, Best International Blog. The TNC team went home with three of these awards –   Best Relationship Blog, Best Blog Post Series and the highly coveted Best International Blog.

According to Olawale Adetula, founder of the site, winning the awards indicates a movement in the right direction not just for the TNC team but bloggers in Africa generally.

“I’d just like to say a big thank you to all the members of the TNC team and our amazing readers for making this happen. This wasn’t as a result of anyone’s individual effort. For the past three years, we’ve been writing some awesome stories; we shared great art on Tuesdays, we wrote some amazing relationship posts on Mondays and Wednesdays, we had exciting series on Thursdays, did some thought-provoking polls on Fridays, helped other young people like us on Saturdays and Sundays and made everyone laugh with our fantastic humour packed news roundup on Saturdays.

“All of this boils down to the collective effort of a very young, very dynamic and very hardworking team.”

The Naked Convos is an interactive initiative designed to create safe spaces where young men and women engage in open and honest conversations about anything and everything as driven by thought-provoking articles by young writers. The platform, which has been running since August 2010, celebrated its 3^rd Anniversary recently with upgrades to its user interface and the launch of its mini-social networking engine.

On the recent improvements on the site, Wole Talabi, Online Editor at TNC stated that it was about time TNC took the big step to accommodate its ever-growing audience.

“After two years of pushing out some of the best original content in the African web space, we decided to take things one step further and, fully exploring our ‘express you’ payoff line. We modified the site into a micro-social network,” Wole said. “No, it’s not Facebook! No, it’s not Twitter. It’s just TNC.”

According to him, visitors are now able to register as members, build their own profile, send and receive private messages from other members and also start their own conversations under different groups.

With their success at the Black Weblog Awards and the exciting new features of TNC 3.0, The Naked Convos is making a statement in the blogging world that it is here to stay.

The Black Weblog Awards was founded in 2005 to give recognition to Black bloggers (and those of the African diaspora) which were largely overlooked by other Internet award events online. The Awards has been featured in several mainstream and online media outlets, including NPR, CNN, and others with winners also appearing in other media outlets, like MSNBC, the Huffington Post, BET, and many others.