LIVE LOVE AND LOL
 
I am sure you have heard about the new Gambian entertainment website WhatsOnGambia. The website carries news on Gambian music, movies and celebrities, a fashion segment, a video and picture gallery for Gambian entertainment events, an Event page where people can submit their events for [free?] advertising, interviews with Gambian personalities and the most loved and most hated segment, the gossip segment!

WhatsOnGambia carries gossip  on Gambian celebrities and regular people and a lot of people go on the website specifically to read them. This segment has caused WhatsOnGambia to arguably be the most discussed and most visited Gambian website today. Gambians either love them so much or hate them vehemently. Most of the people that hate them have either had false or private news about them or their loved ones published on the website. And considering how interconnected Gambia is, you can never guess what someone's feelings are about WhatsOnGambia until they express it. I have only met a few people who are indifferent to the website.

WhatsOnGambia seems to get its news (gossip) via tips and follow up "investigations" which is the standard for gossip sites.  They have a web form on their website where people can submit tips anonymously to the editors. 
 

There are a number of people who have been publicly outraged by  WhatsOnGambia's gossip segment, claiming that what they do is very bad-i.e- spreading rumors and exposing private information. These people are the first to read and share every new piece of gossip from WhatsOnGambia on social networks exclaiming how disappointed and angered they are about what WhatsOnGambia does. Doesn't reading and sharing defeat the purpose..eh?? 

Anyway, bottom line is  WE ALL GOSSIP regardless of what you (like to) think. Maybe we do not appreciate it being written down for everyone to see. This is all new to Gambia.

Regardless of our personal opinions, we should not let the gossip segment overshadow WhatsOnGambia's  work to expose Gambian talents to the internet generation. Most of us also do enjoy reading the interviews  with otherwise unreachable personalities, on there. The whole website concept is beautiful and is exactly what we need right now in this revolutionary age of Gambian entertainment.

WhatsOnGambia should keep doing what they are doing. But that is not to say they do not have room for improvement. They need to work on a lot of things like grammar and presentation. Some of their writers present  articles that are so painful to read that they make you cringe and gnaw your teeth. Since you decide to use the English language as your medium, you should run all articles by an editor who has mastery of the language and knows how to communicate  in simple sentences. Another issue is the clutter on their website. The website is so "busy" with graphics and ads jumping at you when you get on the page so it's hard to figure out where you would like to start and what order you would like to go because everything is jumping out at you daring to be clicked first. Another issue with the website that seems to have been resolved recently is those annoying message boxes that tell us that the stuff on the website is copyrighted whenever you tried to right click and read an article. This made opening multiple articles and maintaining an order while reading almost impossible. This has been resolved now-kudos! One last issue is performance. The website is relatively slow to load so maybe they should have their developer team look into that.

All in all, we are all entitled to our own opinions. I thought I would make mine known. Feel free to drop your opinion in the comment section :-)



PS: I am not affiliated with WhatsOnGambia or any of their staff or with anyone featured on their website. This is just an objective opinion piece. Happy reading! :)