The Chilean Connection

The more time I spend in this Santiago the more I see the resemblance of so many disaffected developing countries with parts of town in urban decay and others in great development. I get images of Johannesburg town, Pretoria – specifically Marabastad, Durban town. Specifically South African Urban centres come to mind since that is my experience. Not so much London because London is first-world very clean and tidy urban settings. Even the decaying parts just don’t have the same feeling I get in South African and now in Santiago.

Pictures speak louder than words… I will need to find time to upload them. Right now the ‘official’ summit is over but the Global Voices meetings and breakaways are going to continue throughout the weekend. I’ve made a lot of new lifetime friends and am grateful to just be here.

Here’s the Flickr SlideShow for the GV Summit 2010…

Yeah Baby! Social Media is the New PUNK ROCK!

I’ve always seen Punk as a philosophy rather than a once off bunch of noisy kids with spiked hair and bad attitudes. It was about standing up to the establishment, breaking the rules, going against the norm.  They are the ultimate modern form of talking straight back with their own interpretation of how to talk back in the first place.  Hence, the below video, is a bit misplaced with comparing punk rock only to social media… it’s bigger than that.  The philosophy, I believe, transcends all media because it addresses the underlying intentions behind WHY we communicate.

So if you question the norms, don’t agree with them and voice your opinions with any media whatsoever… you are a PUNK.  Word… Enjoy the video :)

Technorati Tags: Punk, Punk Rock, Music, Philosophy, Social Media

A Short History of Marketing

This is one of the simplest, most brilliant explanations of our current predicament in Marketing. Specially focusing on the relationship between branding and the consumer’s perception of brand and it’s evolution from the time products started getting packed and put onto shelves. Brilliant.

The short animation is done by Scholz & Friends.

Blog Action Day: Conquering Poverty in South Africa

Today is Blog Action Day: The Conversation on Poverty

With regards to the current context in South Africa, poverty is ,and always has been, a very big problem.  Most people even point this out as the source of all the other problems which South Africans face on a day-to-day basis.  Things like violent crime, lack of education, corruption, etc. are all rampant in South Africa at the moment.

But let’s not all this deter us from one simple fact: WE ARE DOING NOTHING! except, ofcourse, COMPLAINING.  Right, get off your asses and high horses and do something concrete to uplift your communities.  There are NGO’s and other institutions available and you also have your own God-given brain to figure something out to help out people who really do need helping out.

So if you never gave a 5cent piece to the guy at the traffic light begging for change, make a change and start with that. however, I do urge you to aim a little higher ;)

Here’s some South African Welfare organisations which are pretty active in helping out the indigent…

• Gift of the Givers Foundation – The Waqful Waqifin (Gift of the Givers) Foundation is a humanitarian relief organisation supporting the impoverished worldwide.

• Al Imdaad Foundation – The Al Imdaad Foundation is a non-profit humanitarian aid organisation, registered in South Africa.

• Muslim Hands (South Africa) – Muslim Hands is an international relief organisation. Website features reports from projects. Online donation system available.

• Islamic Relief – Islamic Relief provides you with an opportunity to support the poor locally and internationally, by assisting widows, orphans, disabled and the illiterate.

These are the Muslim organisations I could find off hand which are doing really good work in South Africa to alleviate poverty, not only from helping people out, but also from upgrading their skills and education to help them help themselves.  Please send me links so I can add to this list of other organisations in South Africa so that we can get moving with uplifting communities out of Poverty!

The Conversation Agent site gives 3 things we can do to alleviate poverty in one way or another:
1) Volunteering
2) Mentoring
3) Giving

Let’s try and do at least one of these things on an individual level to help those less fortunate than us.

Peace.
: Activism, South Africa, Blog Action Day, Volunteering, Giving, Mentoring

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

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

Web Review: Kwippy.com

Kwippy.com is basically an alternative to Twitter and Plurk.

The functions are simple enough featuring the main aspects of Twitter… Microblogging, with permalinks to the various posts (called “kwips”) and the ability to reply. As per my previous post which put Twitter against Plurk, I have no idea if kwippy.com’s API is being shared or released. Also, it has the same downfalls as that of Twitter when compared to Plurk, where the design is not very Web 2.0 and it’s limited to passing links and is hindered by functionality to include pictures and videos. It does have IM updates via Google Talk though, which makes it a bit easier to post and deal with. Twitter used to have this before it started experiencing its problems…

So far, kwippy.com functions as Twitter, but without it’s API being widely available and having it’s functionality widely dispersed throughout the open source community and the web 2.0 community. Open Source is a major ingredient of web 2.0. Functionality in this regard and the ability to pass content easily between desktop and web applications is paramount.

This is what I see as a major stumbling block for this new Indian startup. They do have a feedback section though… so let’s hope we see some really good development from them in future… you never know, with the way things are going these days, they might surpass both Twitter and Plurk. Let’s wait and see.

Another major stumbling block at the moment – It’s invite only… I may have some available – just get hold of me if you want one – leave a comment or catch me on Twitter.

: Kwippy, kwippy.com, social media, Micro-blogging, Twitter, Plurk, Review

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

Twitter vs. Plurk

vs.
With Twitter going down every so often, (reminding me of Eskom’s load-shedding), lots of people, including me, have been searching for an alternative. Well, we found it with Plurk. So after a few days of using it here’s my comparison of the two micro-blogging platforms.

Twitter, has amazing functionality and given that it’s API is freely available it’s very malleable and we can use it to do a million and one things. The only thing wrong with it is its periodic shut-downs and general irritability with some of its functions (like device updates via IM) working only on random occasions.

Plurk on the other hand looks very cool and puts all your “updates” on a time line so you can track who said what when (if you check the everyone list, this timeline is split by the second.) They have some other function a like a widget and gaining points called “karma”, which I’m not really sure how that works yet. I do like the reply function which is really easy and targeted towards various posts on plurk. The ease with putting up videos and photo’s is also a plus. You’ll find the little icons which you can represent yourself with are also a bit weird, cthulu-like thingies, with tentacles and spots and bones sticking out. Weird. Plurk’s downfall is it doesn’t share it’s API… so you get what they give you and that’s it. Their widget is only editable vertically which irritates me as it doesn’t fit on my blog sidebar and overall I just can’t seem to like it.

Twitter, however, could learn from Plurk’s visual standards, quirky nature and easier video and photo micro-blogging. It would also help if Twitter didn’t drop the ball so often.

Overall opinion… Plurk is very limiting compared to Twitter. If twitter sorts itself out, that’s where you’ll find me.

UPDATE: >Plurk is releasing their API! – Let the Micro-Blogging Wars begin! This will sway my opinion of which micro-blogging platform to use :)

Technorati Tags: Twitter, Plurk, Social Media, Micro-blogging, comparison

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