Playboy hosts “Hottest Blogger” Contest

Playboy is hosting a hottest blogger contest including Violet Blue and Boing Boing’s Xeni Jardin among others. Boing Boing recently made a really bad move by deleting content which was published on Violet blue’s site and Playboy is now capitalising off all of the publicity with this competition.

Who said blogging was all about content? This just goes to show, it doesn’t matter what you write… as long as you’re hot, you’ll get publicity :P

Source: Adrants

: Playboy, Contest, Bloggers, Hottest Bloggers

South Africa’s First On-line Book

Andy Hadfield at Techleader at posted about an on-line collaboration between some of South Africa’s best bloggers in order to create a book which glorifies this great country we live in, A Piece of Significance.The content of the book is a positive viewpoint on South Africa, amidst the many sad tales and general negativity about the country.

See Darren’s (the one who started the initiative) Post which covers all the Chapters.

Contents

Introduction
1. The new South Africa – is it real?
2. Is SA rich or poor?
3. What the world thinks of South Africa and what our global opportunities are
4. The importance of each individual’s contribution collectively
5. SA Inc and the business of doing business in SA
6. The beauty and grandeur that surrounds us
7. The importance of technology in SA’s global emergence
8. Building brand South Africa
9. Making the most of SA’s creative talents and abilities
10. Innovate for a better South Africa
11. The role of the younger generation in SA, and what we need to do to support them
12. Connecting South Africa – Communities that transcend technology
13. We are African – the role of collaboration in South Africa’s growth

Image above copyright Darren Gorton 2008. Content copyright of the respective authors and indicated on the relevant posts.
: South African, Blogging, Books, On-line book

New Era Citizen Journalism – The Instablog Video Initiative

Instablogs.com has launched a new initiative taking advantage of their wide “citizen journalist” base which blog on its site on a daily/weekly basis. What the new initiative entails is a call to one of these “citizen journalists” who will answer the phone and immediately launch into a news report of whatever news happened to have occurred in their respective countries.

This call is recorded in MP3 and Instablogs.com edits it ad inputs it with relevant video clips they have of the situation in the country or even an image or slideshow. The end result is a video show of sorts aggregating news from all over the world for that day/week and instantly downloadable from their site.

This is an example of some real creativity and utilising all forms of media for the aim of spreading news. I think this formula is similar to that used by major news organisations, however, this is raw and its opinions are not from seasoned journalists who speak in that instantly-recognisable tone in which news reports are characterised. This is from the grass roots, people who have an opinion and all this is aggregated, not in text, but in audio and video. Absolutely amazing, I can never cease to be amazed by human creativity and the application of media in Web 2.0.

: Citizen Journalism, blogging, instablogs.com, Media, Video, Audio, News, reporting, journalism

Million Dollar Social Media Campaign with Amazing ROI

Todd Defren, responding to Rohit Bhargava’s session on “The Future of Marketing & Advertising.” at the NewComm Forum. The story goes like this…

Rohit asked “What keeps you up at night? What do you fear in this brave new world?”

Rohit’s answer… paraphrased by Todd …“I’m afraid of what happens when a big corporation peels $1M from their advertising budget and hands it to me for a Social Media campaign. The types of demands they’ll make regarding ROI for that kind of budget won’t be easily answered.”

Todd then goes … Heck, give me a million dollars – I double-dog-dare you – and we can talk about how we’ll use that money to generate more positive word-of-mouth for your company than any single advertising campaign could ever accomplish. … and gives a breakdown of what he would do to generate the most amount of word-of-mouth anyone can get with $1m.

Read his entire blogpost... It’s very enlightening and entertaining.

Technorati Tags: Todd Defren, Social Media, Marketing, Media, Advertising

Youtube Launches Citizen News Channel

Youtube has launched a Citizen News Channel in order to highlight some of the best news content on the web.

Technorati Tags: Youtube, Citizen News Channel, Media, New

Twitter Writing Contest on Copyblogger

Live Blog Post: SA’s First Foodie Social Networking Site by Stork

First cover on the Live blog from the CTICC Good Food & Wine Show is the local margarine brand, Stork. Stork, if you remember, a couple of months back had a 6 month running ad which involved a mother describing how her son got her into “Blogging” and how it inspired and facilitated her creativity. Well, the brand is now back in the Web 2.0 spotlight with a new initiative to connect with their consumers.

Stork, Unilever’s local margarine jewel, has launched a social networking site specifically focused around food and recipes. The site is called “Food Creations” and obviously, the main recipes revolve around using Stork brands to make delicious food.

So from “talking about blogging” to actually setting up a Social Networking Site, makes it seem like the Stork Brand Office is really trying to get into the mix of “Web 2.0″. The site has just been launched, so let’s see how successful it is as both a social networking site catering for South Africa’s Food Lovers as well as a brand building activity for Stork.

So… if you love food (or think your mom might be interested :P) check out www.foodcreations.co.za
log in, and as the website says… crEATe.

Magnify.net Introduces Live Posting of Relevant Video to Blogs

This is an amazing development by Magnify.net, what they’ve done is integrated their site’s functions into MovableType and WordPress Platforms where you can integrate relevant video’s or photo’s straight into your post on any topic you desire.

How it works is that in your WordPress/MovableType post page, you click a little orange button (which gets integrated via your plugins) and a search box appears… you type in a search term and out pops various videos from Youtube, Google Video, etc. for you to choose from and you can simply then just add it into your blog post.

Simple, Effective, Amazing… and your blog readers will appreciate the relevant media content.

Blogger’s Code of Conduct

Recently there have been calls for a Bloggers Code of Conduct, unfortunately, no one seems to be listening yet… at least not any of the bloggers I know of.

Maybe bloggers should get more involved in drafting this, also a more credible agency needs to be responsible for implementing the code, otherwise it’ll just be another blogpost on its own. Something I think would really work is if a body is formed which can validate various blogs who apply and they can get certified as adhering to the code of conduct.

This is a good initiative but I can’t really see the practicality of its implementation.

Some other blogs have already have their codes of conduct up for some time anyway.

Another question to ask is… what would this really change? Isn’t it just another regulating feature of a phenomenon which can’t really be regulated?
Technorati Tags: Blogging, Code of Conduct

Access Denied: A Global Study of Internet Censorship

Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering is a new book which is hitting the shelves, providing the first rigorous look at Internet Censorship and filtering practices in over three dozen countries world-wide. It’s always been known that many countries censor all types of sites on the net covering political, sexual, cultural and religious issues but this is the first study to give us a clear sense of the nature Internet Censorship.

Technorati Tags: Blogging, Internet, Censorship, Access Denied, Study

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