may UBHH

The May Uganda Bloggers Happy Hour is coming up next week: Thursday, May 17, 6:30 PM at Mateo's* on Kampala Road. Mark your calendars, enter it into your Blackberries and set your cell phone reminders.

In describing UBHH to the non-initiated, I've realized that "we hang out and talk" is perhaps not the most alluring way to portray who we are and what we do. This, in combination with suggestions from several UBHH regulars that we make things a little more formal, has led me to designate May as Generic Blog Question Month. I'm curious to what goes on in the Ugandan blogosphere besides posting and commenting.

Some things to think about:

• What blogs do you read regularly?
• What's most likely to make you return to a blog (pictures, design, writing, a personal connection to the author)?
• Do you use blogs more as a source of information about specific topics — politics, current events, pop culture, Turkish cooking — or as a way to stay in touch with your friends and family?

Get ready — I plan to go discussion-facilitator-mode on you guys, partly so that I can tell other people that we talk about specific things, but mostly because I just want to know. Who's reading an awesome Estonian knitting blog or gets all of their political news from a handful of bloggers? Come on, spill: what intriguing, sparkly blogtreasures are you hiding?

Also, depending on how tired they are after 36 hours of travel, there's a chance I'll be bringing two very special guests with me: my mom and my aunt, who are jointly responsible for my current knowledge of English grammar, how to format a term paper and what happens when you jam a finger covered in Vick's Vapo-Rub up someone's nose.

*Sorry for the earlier confusion — I'm terrible with dates.