MIKESTOPFORTH

South African Blog Showcase: Neil McCartney (neilmccartney.blogspot.com)

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 [...]

links for 2008-07-09

Home | Rocking the Daisies Competition Awesome idea to promote the Rocking the Daisies festival down South – a game of blog tag! (tags: competition festival music blog blogging tag tagging) Wordle – Create tag clouds with a difference This is the best time-waster I’ve found all year, with some potentially awesome applications! (tags: tagcloud [...]

Rex The Lion Graces Me With A Mention

I feel very important. After mentioning Rex the Lion, the SA blogosphere’s newest celebrity (which isn’t saying much but still) on this site yesterday I got a brief mention in his second video… To answer his question – what is it I’m concentrating so hard on in my header? Well, the answer is not much. [...]

He’s Rex The Lion, Hear Him Roar

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!

Afrigator Speaks To Regator, Issue Resolved

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.

Regator Looks Mighty Familiar

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 [...]

Stork Comes Round

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.

links for 2008-07-02

A Beginner’s Guide to SEO | GottaQuirk Super introductory post to SEO from the guys who know (tags: SEO basics introduction Quirk 101 learning) Make your Mac sing A bit of Mac-related fun from my design guru bud (tags: Mac Apple fun humor Mark Forrester)

27dinners.com Gets A New Look (And Attitude)

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.

links for 2008-06-28

a shel of my former self Shel shares some poignant thoughts on social media as B2B tools (tags: socialmedia b2b socialnetworking business social) Ideate – Small Business in South Africa The ideate guys show us the viral videos Rui Esteves and gang used to promote Vida caffe’s via email in the early days – super [...]

TED’s Top 10 Videos – A (Free) Goldmine Of Inspiration

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…

I Want To Have Lunch With Henk Kleynhans…

…because after this he’s going to be hard to get hold of.

Henk is the founder and MD of Skyrove (who I advertise on my blog not because he pays for it, but because I love them so much :P) and without doubt one of the nicest, smartest and most humble people in the industry.

I hope this compliment to him and his hard work will mean even more success. Well done bud!

Chris Pirillo On WordPress Vs. Drupal

Vodacom Forks Out For Zoopy

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.

links for 2008-06-26

nicharalambous.com » Blog Archive » Images of the Gautrain Train Nic Haralambous scoops pics of Gautrain’s train – nice! (tags: Gautrain South Africa development innovation)

TECH4FRICA Website Launched

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 [...]

Looking Back On Three Big Years

Today has been an embarrassingly sentimental day for me. It marks the three year anniversary of my first ever blog post. Ha ha. Had I known in advance the realms of geekiness I would be sucked into I might never have ventured so far, but in retrospect I’m glad I did :)

Just after that first post on the faith-themed Idle Banter and before starting this blog, much of my creative energy was invested in TomorrowToday’s blog, which you can check out here… My foray into citizen journalism sparked a chain of events that included quitting a comfortable job at this company to work with people at another completely different company, trying to build what I called a ‘blog consultancy’ at the time (yikes) that eventually evolved into Cerebra…

The Bleacher Report Open Source Sports Network

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…

links for 2008-06-20

Home | School of Everything Everyone has something to learn, everyone has something to teach – this site brings them together! (tags: collaboration community cool education learning web2.0 school teaching social)

Why Have We Been Ignoring MyGenius.com?

For some reason I’ve been ignoring MyGenius.com – the Southern African social network for business people. I have been a member since late 2006 – MyGenius’s very early days – and never quite got in to it. I get the odd message from a MyGenius member wanting to connect but have spent little no time on updating my profile or adding content to the site.

Recently I decided to give MyGenius another go based on two realisations. Firstly, the value of social networking is undoubtedly found, or much easier mined, in niche communities. The quintessential example is Charl Norman’s Zooped Up community for owners of modified cars and suchlike – completely useless for me but absolutely invaluable and addictive to people entrenched in that community. MyGenius cannot be compared to MySpace, for example, because it’s not trying to be a globally dominant player. It’s simply trying to do what it does well.