Winners of the South African Twitter Story Competition!

Mandy de Waal, one of our esteemed judges has recently coined the phrase “twiction” to represent micro-stories, especially those created within 140 characters on the micro-blogging platform, Twitter. I found it extremely appropriate to put this new term into use for this competition.

What a ride! The South African “Twiction” competition has now come to a head with the winners in sight and the prizes ready to be sent off. Thanks once again to all the contestants, the beautiful and intelligent Judges and, of course, the sponsors!

Okay… Let’s get to it.

First Prize: @JasonEsch

“He was both at a loss and lost, staring at the road sign that seemed more to describe how he was feeling than where he was going: Bakgatla.”

Judges comments:
“A journey at a crossroads, with a real sense of character. The ending wins it for me.”

“Beautiful use of metaphor for such a short form, and strong expression on the archetypal journey and ability of humans to get lost on that journey.”

@JasonEsch wins a T-shirt from SpringLeap.com! Congratulations!

Second Prize: @yusufk

“Vuvuzela in one hand,phone in the other,he watched the cross float by 3 defendenders,deflect off a forehead into the net. Tweet:”SA Scores!”

Judges Comments:
“Sports offers up great narrative. The themes of struggle, perseverance and victory are timeless. The ‘tweet’ added a nice touch.”
“Another strongly descriptive entry, which conjures images of our strong sporting nation.”
“I am so excited about World Cup coming to SA, and I think it will be great for the country spirit. And every goal will help. So this captures that hope beautifully!”

Yusuf’s entry was a close contender for no. 1

@yusufk wins a $20 Amazon.com voucher from the guys at Qatarliving.com! Well Done!

Third Prize: @samanthaperry

“A writer entered a story competition, lost, and killed herself. The judges denied guilt, claiming the writer had terminal Bulwer-Lyttonitis”

Judges comments:
“ For the benefit of those who don’t know the reference – click over to http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/ Clever entry; complete and concise.”
“Smart. Funny. Self evasive. Another complete story in 140 characters.”

Samantha’s entry was very close to snatching second place. She wins 40 Minutes Free wi-fi access which she can use anywhere in South Africa. Great Work Samantha!

Runners Up:

These were entries which were contending with the three winners and made some great efforts which put them onto the list…

@takilla786: Innocent window washes, innocent sells, innocent begs, innocent smells.Innocent pleas, innocent harps,all so that Innocent Jnr never starves
@blacktiemedia: Thembi stood contrasted against the sky of hungry fire. Smoke filled her lungs, blood stained her clothes. “Ubuntu” she whispered tearfully.
@nicharry: We’ve lost our ubuntu. 14 years gone and we are too scared to stand for our countrymen. Instead we fall for anyone carrying a knife or a gun.
@Sznq: He said: 1.Like it or 2.Hamba Kahle.When he wasn’t looking,she left.Now why can’t he buy her back ? Such bitter sweet things,ultimatums.
@qudsiya: One day she clicked on his nick and typed “hi”. A year later, she shook his hand and said, “Nice to meet you.” On 19/01/07 she said, “I do.”
@ismaild: its dark and she misses him, hears a sound in the kitchen! “WTF? Should she check? slowly tiptoes, damn those skelm tokoloshe with munchies
@shaunoakes: ! I said “Fok, Chyna” said a frustrated God, after another misunderstanding with an apologetic Mother Nature. “Now look what you’ve done!”

The competition overall showed the great variety of experience and expression in our great nation. Different stories, varied perspectives, emotion and intellectualism all in 140 characters. A tremendous example of creativity :) I was humbled at the outstanding creativity in each entry and I know for a fact that it made the judges’ jobs all the more harder to choose the overall winners.

Last Word from the Judges:
Saaleha Bamjee-Mayet – “Such stellar entries made the judging process really difficult. To facilitate the process, I tried to look for the most complete story in a twitter format, ones that gave a sense of a beginning, middle and end. SA twitterers have a wicked way with words, and I hated to let some really poetic entries go.”

Mandy de Waal – “For me the biggest skill in the short form is not only the concise concept and the writing, but the re-writing. The ability to shave off everything that’s not necessary, leaving only the bare bones of the story. Short form is essentially fiction that tells a story in anything from five thousand words to a couple of paragraphs. Imagine then how ruthless one must be with Twiction, which surely must be the shortest form of fiction ever written.”

Eve Dmochowska – “Overall, I think that the entries were fabulous, creative, inspired and mostly a whole lot of fun. And It was wonderful to see so many entries .. it shows that the twitter community is quite a cohesive one in this country. Well done to all the entrants!”

Winners, please contact me to collect your prizes :)

Till the next competition, Keep Tweeting!

: Twitter Story Competition, South Africa, Winners

So Who is this Madiba Chap? eh?

What can I say… the man is an inspiration to millions, but what I’d like to highlight about his life is a fact which he mentioned himself…”I was not a messiah, but an ordinary man who had become a leader because of extraordinary circumstances.” He was just a man… just like any one of us, but what made him great was his purpose and his dedication which he stuck by and fought for till he achieved it. That’s what catapulted him out of the ordinary, doing the things which others shied away from or were to fearful to carry out.

In the face of death, detention and exile he persisted. We all need to learn from his lesson that the greatest obstacle can be overcome by simple, truthful ideals.

Happy 90th Birthday! I’ll catch the Hyde Park dedication concert on TV tonight.
: Madiba, 90th Birthday, Hyde Park, Lesson

The Ultimate Scratch: You Can’t Beat This

This from the New Yorker…

“Scratching is one of the sweetest gratifications of nature, and as ready at hand as any,” Montaigne wrote. “But repentance follows too annoyingly close at its heels.” For M., certainly, it did: the itching was so torturous, and the area so numb, that her scratching began to go through the skin. At a later office visit, her doctor found a silver-dollar-size patch of scalp where skin had been replaced by scab. M. tried bandaging her head, wearing caps to bed. But her fingernails would always find a way to her flesh, especially while she slept.

One morning, after she was awakened by her bedside alarm, she sat up and, she recalled, “this fluid came down my face, this greenish liquid.” She pressed a square of gauze to her head and went to see her doctor again. M. showed the doctor the fluid on the dressing. The doctor looked closely at the wound. She shined a light on it and in M.’s eyes. Then she walked out of the room and called an ambulance. Only in the Emergency Department at Massachusetts General Hospital, after the doctors started swarming, and one told her she needed surgery now, did M. learn what had happened. She had scratched through her skull during the night—and all the way into her brain.“

That’s unbelievable… I can’t imagine having an itch that bad that I’d scratch right through bone? I’m skeptical as to whether this story is even true, seems extremely bizarre and also very scary.

Watch your fingers.

: Weird, Scratching, Science, Itch

George Carlin (1937-2008)

This guy was a legend. Reading a recent interview by Democracy Now!, here’s what someone who knew him very well had to say…

“…in the late ’60s, when this country really went through a cultural revolution, you know, he was the guy, I think, who brought stand-up comedy into that cultural revolution. I mean, he was short-haired comic, sort of skinny-tie guy, who did sort of straight-laced material on the Ed Sullivan Show. He looked around in the late ’60s, and, you know, he was hanging out with musicians, he was singing with the protest movement, and he was seeing what was happening. And he decided he was doing material for the enemy. He wanted to talk to a different audience, the college audience. He wanted to go back into the coffee houses. And this was a radical thing for a guy to do with a successful career. So he started all over again, and he started doing material that really reflected the attitudes of that counterculture generation.” – Richard Zoglin

… and just one of my favourite Carlin stand-up routines…

It’s the old American double standard, you know, say one thing, do something different. And, of course, the country is founded on the double standard. That’s our history. We were founded on a very basic double standard. This country was founded by slave owners who wanted to be free. Am I right? A group of a slave owners who wanted to be free, so they killed a lot of white English people in order to continue owning their black African people, so they could wipe out the rest of the red Indian people and move west and steal the rest of the land from the brown Mexican people, giving them a place to take off and drop their nuclear weapons on the yellow Japanese people. You know what the motto of this country ought to be? You give up a color, we’ll wipe it out. You got it.

So, anyway, about eighty years after the Constitution is ratified, eighty years later, the slaves are freed. Not so you’d really notice it, of course. Just sort of on paper. And that was, of course, during the Civil War. Now, there’s another phrase I dearly love. That is a true oxymoron if I’ve ever heard one: civil war. Do you think any country could really have a civil war? “Say, pardon me” [gun shots]—“I’m awfully sorry. I’m awfully sorry.” Now, of course, the Civil War has been over for about 120 years, but not so you’d really notice it, because we still have these people called Civil War buffs, people who thought it was a really keen war, and they study the battles carefully, and they try to improve on the strategies and the tactics to increase the body count, in case we have to go through it again sometime. In fact, some of these people actually get dressed up in uniform once a year and go out and refight these battles. You know what I say? Use live ammunition, [bleep], would you please? You might just raise the intelligence level of the American gene pool.

But what do you expect? Hey, come on, this is a warlike country. We come from that northern European, basically the northern European genes, the blue eyes. Those blue eyes. Boy everybody in the world learned real quick, didn’t they? When those blue eyes sail out of the north, you better nail everything down [bleep]. Nail it down, strap it down, or they’ll grab it. If they can’t take it home, they’ll burn it. If they can’t burn it, they’ll [bleep]. That’s what happened to us. And it’s a warlike country. C’mon, I mean, forget foreign policy. Even the domestic rhetoric is warlike. Everything about our domestic policy invokes the thought of war. We don’t like something in this country, we declare war on it. The war on poverty, the war on drugs, the war on crime, the war on AIDS, the war on cancer. We’ve got the only national anthem that mentions [bleep] rockets and bombs in the [bleep] thing. You know what I mean?

RIP… he said it like it was and is.
: George Carlin, Comedian, Legend, RIP

SA Energizer Ads win Cannes Grand Prix

What a brilliant concept, you can just feel the anxiety parents will have if they see their kids in this situation. Very insightful intot hte target market and a very interesting twist. The ads were created by DDB South Africa and the Creative Director is Gareth Lessing, who, if I remember correctly, used to be with Lowe Bull and was also behind that brilliant Axe Campaign “Get a Girlfriend” about a couple of years back.

Really good work. I think this works both creatively and from a sales perspective. It would grab attention.

: Energizer, South Africa, Batteries, Cannes, Grand Prix, Winner

Charlie Chaplin vs Adolf Hitler: It’s the hat.

What a brilliant ad…

I do think that Hitler actually shaped his moustache because he liked Chaplin.  I recall a while back a story coming out about Hitler drawing pictures of Disney characters because he liked them so much.  Strange man that one.

Beautiful ad this one.  Clever.

: Charlie Chaplin, Adolf Hitler, Advertising, Cool

Joe Jaffe Slams Brands for Social Media Screw Ups

Marketing Guru, Joe Jaffe takes on brands who abuse Social Media for marketing purposes.

Speaking at the Association of National Advertisers’ Integrated Marketing Conference, Joe Jaffe calls out five brands for abusing or not taking advantage of the increasingly social nature of media or, to paraphrase his new book, Not Joining the Conversation. From Sony’s fake PSP blog to the fight between T-Mobile and Engadget over the color Magenta to Target’s refusal to engage with a blogger who took issue with one of the brand’s billboards which showed a woman on Target’s target. Link

: Joe Jaffe, Marketing, Social Media, Web 2.0, Brands

Online Bookstore Voyeurism – Book Rabbit

What a cool Idea. BookRabbit.com< allows users to upload a picture of their bookshelves so that everybody else can see them in an effort to encourage interaction, comparisons and more shopping!

BookRabbit, which just went through its public launch in May, aims to be an online bookshop that “dynamically connects readers, authors and publishers through the books they own.” It also claims to be cheaper than Amazon on the top 100,000 titles, and offers free delivery within the UK. More interesting, though, are the ways users of the site can share their passion for books, including creating their own personal bookcases and catalogues online and making recommendations to other readers. Each user is invited to upload a photo of his or her bookshelf—along with a user profile—and to tag the individual titles therein. Other users can then view all the bookshelves on the site, compare with their own and make connections with other readers based on the titles they have in common. More than 900 bookshelves have been uploaded so far, and they’re viewable by “latest,” “most connections” or “most discussed.” The winner for most connections so far, for example, is a user named Glynis, who has more than 100 books in common with other readers.

Of course, in the process of viewing and comparing bookshelves, BookRabbit no doubt hopes users might get inspired to buy some new titles and expand their own collections. The site includes an affiliate programme that lets users put links on their sites or e-mails to show off their bookcases and earn a fee if anyone buys anything through them. Link

: Book Rabbit, Entrepreneur, Voyeur, books, Website

Royal Enfield targets “Indian Mama’s Boys”

Royal Enfield, the motorcycle manufacturer, has just launched a brilliant campaign in India using a very widely known trend in India… the “Mama’s Boy”.

From the Press Release:

“The campaign is based on a big social truth that most Indian men are ‘mama’s boy’.”

The campaign: “Leave Home” for the Thunderbird Twinspark

The agency is Wieden & Kennedy and the ad is due to be flighted in Indian Auto and Lad magazines.

Other Prints:
Revolution.
Kid.

Link

: Wieden & Kennedy, Royal Enfield, Indian, Marketing, Advertising

Real Hip-Hop: Immortal Technique’s “The 3rd World”

Immortal Technique just released his new album and it’s available for Pre-order from CDUniverse.com.

This CD’s was supposed to have been released like in June 2007 under the title “The Middle Passage” I guess he title has since changed. I’ve been waiting for this one for ages, Immortal techniques lyrics are the most hard-core I’ve ever heard and he does it with passion and style. Definitely a wake up call to the blinged-out , instant self-gratification generation which commercial hip-hop culture has spawned. This is REAL Hip-Hop.

He has since also released 3 mp3′s to give you a taste.. and here they are…
1) “The 3rd World”
2) “The Payback”
3) “Reverse Pimpology”

Enjoy!
: Immortal Technique, 3rd World, New Album, The Middle Passage, MP3

Next Page »