D

espite the boom of Twitter and Facebook, Ndoro Kakung, one of Indonesia’s noted bloggers, said the growth of blogs in the country is still relatively small.

But Benazio Rizki Putra, or best known as Bena, may reverse the trend, rising to fame by his blog www.benablog.com.

For a while, his blog reminds people of Raditya Dika, as they offer wittiness and quirkiness on both of their blogs, and of course, due to the fact that Bena’s inspiration is Raditya Dika himself.

When having a bad day, it is a good thing to read Bena’s blog as he entertains you through his witty and comical style of writing and hilarious pictures.

His signature piece on the blog is putting on moving images or .gif images and creating his very own face as emoticons called “benamoticons” — which really give the exact emotions he is trying to present to
his readers.

His blog posts are mostly written in Indonesian language. Looking at his blog, anyone could easily see Bena as a creative person.

For many bloggers, it is tough to get the cyber readers’ attention when they are just writing about personal matters or treating their blog like a diary.

Readers these days want something more when they are surfing the World Wide Web. Plus, when it comes to young Indonesian readers, they usually tend to avoid reading, but they love to look at pictures — and the same thing also applies to blogs.

Yet, with Bena, he successfully attracts young readers and fans to his blog. Even though he usually posts his daily or personal experiences, he is able to create a story and turn it into something comical and fun that grabs the readers’ attention, leading them to wonder what happens next.

Through his blog, Bena has received many opportunities and recognition by various brands.

Last January, he was invited by Coca Cola for a three day trip to Sydney, Australia. Now he is giving away free iPads sponsored by Axe after they spotted one of his videos on his blog. He also did a feature with last year’s Sinta and Jojo, who hit popularity with their lip-sync video on YouTube.

Having a degree in IT, Bena created his blog in a unique kind way. He even put his most popular posts and Benablog facts that change every few seconds. One of his popular posts is Fashion Fail, which is when he tried to imitate fashion blogger by putting on clothes and posing in front of cameras just like fashion bloggers. However, he is doing it in “Bena’s style”, as he turned it into a comical and “failed” fashion post.

With his afro hair trademark and huge geeky glasses, the fresh graduate of Bina Nusantara University, who had to defend his thesis on Valentine’s Day (you can read more about this on his blog, of course), had won the Best Teen Blog of 2009 during Pesta Blogger 2009 event, Prambors BLOGAN 2009 from Prambors Radio and several other awards.

He is also one of the administrators of Rumahblogger (www.rumahblogger.com), a community-based website for Indonesian bloggers. As for now, he regularly hosts blogging seminars at various places to spread his blogging knowledge.

He is also available on twitter www.twitter.com/benakribo and his several other website projects and you can find the links on www.benablog.com. Happy blogging!