Mike Stopforth

By day a photographer for the Citizen newspaper, Neil McCartney is one of those unsung heroes who bring us the sometimes uplifting, other times devastating images that capture the history of now.
I’m not sure what he does at night though.
Opting to publish his images on a personal blog too, Neil’s site often tells [...]

It had to happen eventually. Someone with some time, skill and a sense of humour has created Rex the Lion (rather smartly too) to poke fun at the local egosphere. Bravo - this should be fun. Early celeb mentions are Rich…!, Nic and Cluckhoff. Good times!

Yesterday the Afrigator team and I made a big stink about how we thought Regator looked a whole lot like our project.  As is often the case I think we got on our high horses a bit and I regret not doing my homework properly because after Scott Lockhart, founder of Regator, got in touch with us to explain that any similarity betwen the two sites is pure coincidence, I’m feeling rather sheepish and need to retract my previous post.

As Justin has outlined the sites aim to achieve different things and might even be complimentary, who knows.  Either way learn a lesson from me and make contact before mouthing off (one would think I should know better by now…)

Good luck to the Regator team as they grow their userbase off a good start.

On TechCrunch, Mashable and RWW yesterday, the announcement of new blog aggregator Regator.  Here’s what it looks like:

Remind you at all of this?
Maybe I’m just having a bad day, but it wasn’t even Justin or I that originally picked up on the similarity(ties). It’s all over Muti thanks to Robin Pietersen and there’s a [...]

On 12 November 2006 I published a post on this blog and later repurposed it for Biz-Community commenting on how I thought Stork had missed the point completely with their “blogging housewife” 30 second spot for TV.  After my Biz-Community article went live I got a call from Unilever’s agency, McCann’s, to set up a meeting and explore the possibility of acting on what I had suggested.  I was pretty chuffed they’d listened, put my ideas to the agency who subsequently presented to Unilver.

Unilever’s answer? Loosely quoted, “we’re not sure blogging will translate to business”.

This after spending who knows how much on producing the blogging ad and flighting it hundreds of times.  Crikey.

Anyhow, I let it rest on the understanding that they were probably not going to shift, and besides, I had gotten pretty busy on some other accounts.

I use the Stork ‘Half-baked’ attempt at piggy-backing the social media trend as a classic ‘how not to’ in my presentations, but can’t anymore - it seems they’ve come around.

Longtail have developed foodcrEATions for them - “an interactive kitchen to share ideas, inspirations and tips about cooking, crafts and life”. It’s a good looking site in the early stages of adoption but it has super potential - congrats to Japie and team.

It was inevitable that the 27dinner movement would eventually outgrow it’s PBwiki-hosted home in time.  The movement has grown substantially and truly exciting things are coming up.  The new site is up at 27dinner.com.

I’d like to humbly request that you understand that the new site is (and will continue to be) a work in progress, it’s not meant to be perfect this first time around so your feedback and insight would be greatly appreciated.

Nothing changes about 27 - you still get to attend for free and we’re going to try ensure that the content is not only up to standard with some of what you’ve seen before, but even better so.  We’ve also decided to respond to the numerous enquiries we’ve had from companies wanting to get involved in the form of sponsorships, etc. in such a way that it doesn’t detract from the ethos and culture of the movement.  In other words, we’ll only allow companies to get involved if it adds to your experience and pumps energy and value back into the community.

So check it out, let us know what works and what doesn’t, and what needs to change.  And thanks especially for you continued support of the dinners countrywide.

It doesn’t matter who you are - if you haven’t yet gorged yourself on the veritable goldmine of inspiration that is the collection of videos of talks presented at TED conferences and freely available at TED.com, you’ve either been hiding under a rock or you need better friends.

For those of you who don’t know yet, this is how the TED site describes the TED phenomenon…

The big news in the South African social media scene today is the acquisition of a 40% stake in popular social media sharing site Zoopy by mobile operator Vodacom.

TECH4FRICA, a “web and emerging technology conference for Africa” being organised by Gareth Knight (of Kindo fame) has officially launched it’s website with info about the upcoming event.
It’s due to be held at The Forum in Bryanston over 3 and 4 October and already at this early stage has a very impressive speaker line up.
I [...]

I have a confession to make - I clicked on a banner ad on Facebook.  The ad asked whether I was a cricket or rugby expert (aren’t all fans experts??) and encouraged me to share my thoughts and opinions on a new global open source sports network called the Bleacher Report…