South African Web Design and Development company OBox has signed a deal with well known international blogging platform Posterous to provide them with custom designed themes.

Posterous is a micro blogging platform that makes it easy for users to integrate and automatic post to other social networking site like Twitter, Facebook and Flickr and even boasts integrated Google Analytics and custom themes.

OBox a South African Web Design company well known for their WordPress themes has signed the deal with Posterous to provide the micro blogging service with custom built themes.

OBox is to provide Posterous with five themes which will be made available to Posterous users for use. The themes will be available to all Posterous users under the Customise section of the Administration area and will be free of charge.

This is the second deal local Web Design company OBox has done. Earlier this year they also did a deal to provide another micro blogging platform Tumblr with premium themes.

Its good to see local companies getting in on the Silicon Valley action, well done boys you make me proud to be a South African geek.

Allot of bloggers normally falls into the trap of writing about content that others are also writing about, but the mistake they make is to simply copy and paste content.

Copying or echo others’ data makes your blog just another blog on the web, why do readers need to visit your blog if they can simply read what you are echoing on another news site? This is where the old saying comes in of “content is king”, and indeed it is.

Writing unique content on your blog gives readers a reason to visit your blog, I’m not saying not to write about breaking news, all I’m saying is make your content unique.

We have all done it, a news story breaks, we report on, quote a few sites and leave it at that. Rather than just echoing what has already been reported why not add your own personal touch to the topic?

Add to the topic, rather than just quoting other bloggers say why you are quoting them and what is it about the quote that grabbed your attention. If you think they missed something point it out and add what you think they missed to say about the topic.

Unanswered questions on other blogs is also good reason to add to the conversation, add your opinion to the topic or give your answer to the question by responding to it with a blog post.

You can also take things to the next level by not just adding to the opinion of one blogger but why not aggregate a few bloggers’ opinions in a post and add to it, this gives users all the opinions in one post rather than needing to go and read different sites for different opinions about a topic.

Next time you are reporting on something that is breaking news, add some personal flavour to it and give your readers your own personal take on the topic.