As many of you know, I’ve been supporting Kiva for quite a while, though my total sponsored is still not great! Anyway, my second borrower has been fortunate enough to find that his request for a loan has been disbursed! I just received notification today. So I would like to congratulate him, and hope that one day his business is such a success!

Here’s a little about the micro-borrower Efrain Montuffar Olguin from Kiva.org: “Efraín has been running his business for a year and a half. My business is a money-exchange shop near the border. People need to convert their money into U.S. dollars to go shopping in Texas, and that is how I provide a service to my community. I would like to invest more money into my business to increase my earnings, but I have not been able to. I’m asking for $1,200 to invest in my business.”

The official note stated:

Thank you for your loan. It has been disbursed to Efrain Montuffar Olguin by Fundación para la Vivienda Progresiva in Mexico. We are excited to watch this business grow. Over the next 12 – 18 months, Fundación para la Vivienda Progresiva will be collecting repayments from this entrepreneur and posting progress updates on the Kiva website.

It’s exciting to watch others build their business much as we did 7 years ago! So all our best wishes are with Efrain Montuffar Olguin.

For those of you who would like to support my efforts in this area, perhaps you would care to take part in my Kiva competition, or donate directly to Kiva.org.

Thanks.

The latest in my May 2007 Promotion is up for its buzz! Let’s welcome Lugnut22.com which is owned and blogged by Lars Krumme.

Lugnut22.com focuses on making money online and will detail “basic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies, different paid blogging platforms, advertising platforms for your blog, and different strategies for developing and targeting content for your blogs or websites.”

When I visited, I found it to have got off to a promising start with a better and pleasing appearance and some well-written content: it is off to a far better start than even my own blog last year! It’s nicely designed and Lars has added some good features to benefit his blog and his readers – DoFollow, I-Disclose, Adsense, and a few other features. However, this blog looks like it has fallen by the wayside in the last few weeks, so please visit, leave comments and let the blogger know we haven’t forgotten!

In Scots, to ‘lug something’ means to carry it especially something that’s heavy. Perhaps we can encourage Lars to ‘lug his blog’ just a little bit more, so soon the burden of updating it will seem light enough! It’s much too easy to become discouraged in the first few months!

Thanks. If you would like a little buzz for your blog, it’s not too late… join our June promotion!

May’s promotion is almost over, and I’m working on the last three! You know, I’m kind of sad! This month’s promotion has been very successful for me, as I had the chance to discover 10 (woops! 11) great blogs! Each blog has unique features and each blog has taught me something different!

Cynthia recently emailed me to ask if she could ask to take part in May’s promotion. So here are jpegs of her two blogs:

The first is Tiptail: a blog which has changed focus to dogs, which is an important part of Cynthia’s life. In fact, the proceeds from this blog go to help Utah Collie Rescue. This quite appeals to me as I come from Scotland where Collies have traditionally been used as they are easy to train and make excellent dogs for herding sheep. In fact, our first pet at home was a collie/labrador cross, we called Patty! I’d love her to use a photogallery plugin to add pictures of her dogs in one gallery. That’d be a great touch!

The second is Luna Tail: This blog took over from Tiptail as Cynthia’s personal blog, and it looks quite different. It uses the theme Palaam from Sadish who always has great themes! I’m using WP-Misty on this blog, but there are many wonderful themes, some of which are free, some of which are not. Cynthia covers a range of topics of personal interest: cooking, health, politics, personal issues, and, of course, dogs! I should forward this blog to my friend, Cindy, who loves dogs! Good idea!

You’ll notice a couple of nice touches that she adds to the top of both blogs: her ‘Graffiti Wall’ that allows visitors to add any comments without necessarily responding to a particular posting. That’s a great touch!

So that’s Cynthia’s Double Blog Buzz. Hope you can visit her blogs! They’re something different!