Archive for the ‘General’ Category
Gone fishing … September 24th, 2007
![](http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1211/1424151991_5e47f3f825.jpg?v=0")
You may have noticed that this blog isn’t as active as it once was. In a nutshell Victoire and I have been pretty focussed on our respective day jobs/projects and this has meant that we have had to go on a little bit of an hiatus with chilibean. In the meantime I have published the final part of my interview with Merle Dieterich from JoziKids and it is worth downloading and listening to. I don’t have any further episodes lined up just yet. My apologies to those of you who are subscribing to chilipod and hoping for more regular episodes. I am not quite abandoning podcasting as a medium and hope to back sooner rather than later with more for you.
In the meantime you can catch Victoire here and here. I am still available pretty much all over the place but perhaps the best way to keep track of what I am doing is via my Jaiku stream.
(Photo credit: Photo titled “Closed, Gone Fishing” taken by DetroitDerek and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NoDerivates 2.0 license)
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Digg Surrenders to Mob May 4th, 2007
Something interesting happened on Digg recently. Some users started publishing a decryption key for high definition DVDs on the site and the Digg team started removing these posts due to concerns that they would be sued for publishing this means to break copy protection which is illegal under US copyright legislation. The problem is, the community pushed back. According to TechCrunch:
To say what happened today on Digg was a ‘user revolt’ is an understatement. The Digg team deleted a story that linked to the decryption key for HD DVDs after receiving a take down demand and all hell broke loose. More stories appeared and were deleted, and users posting the stories were suspended.
That just got the Digg community fired up, and soon the entire Digg home page was filled with stories containing the decryption key. The users had taken control of the site, and unless Digg went into wholesale deletion mode and suspended a large portion of their users, there was absolutely nothing they could do to stop it.
Digg CEO Jay Adelson responded on the Digg blog earlier this afternoon but it was clear he did not yet understand the chaos that was coming. The post only added fuel to the fire. Just now, co-founder Kevin Rose posted yet again on the Digg blog, effectively capitulating to the mob’s demands: He says
But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.
If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.
I wonder how this is going to pan out if Digg is sued to publishing the decryption key? The one thing that occurred to me is the safe harbour provision in the US Digital Millenium Copyright Act which provides a certain amount of protection where content under copyright is published to a site by its users provided the service provider concerned complies with certain requirements. We have a similar mechanism in our Electronic Communications and Transactions Act and in our law a service provider is protected from liability for copyright infringement provided certain conditions are fulfilled. These include the requirement that the service be automated and that the service provider respond to take down notices to remove the offending content.
In this case Digg was taking down the posts with the decryption key but the community pushed back and kept republishing the posts. They did it in such a way that Digg was virtually brought to its knees. So this raises an interesting point. Could Digg argue that they are incapable of controlling the flurry of posts with links to the decryption key and similarly incapable of complying with take down notices and therefore should not be held liable for the actions of its users? What happens when users take over the service and use it to infringe copyright?
Technorati Tags:
digg, dmca, safe harbour, decryption keys, hd dvd
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Tyler Reed - podcasting proud April 12th, 2007
Tyler Reed, who recenly joined (yesterday in fact!) the podcaster in-crowd, has another achievement to be proud of… That of winning first place in the Apple ipodcast Comedy & Standup Category (Week 3) with his podcast, Jannie’s GPS System!
Well done Tyler! We can’t wait to hear more of it!
Posted in Fun, General, People, Podcasting, Podcasts | Comments (3)
Open road ahead … March 25th, 2007
Many of you will probably have noticed an interruption in your access to the site (in technical terms the site was spaghetti for a day or so). We moved the site (again) to Hostgator the last day or two. It was the last site to be moved away from Media Temple (those of you who visit my other blogs like Wired Gecko will have noticed that the commenting issue has been fixed by the move) and there was a small hitch connecting the migrated database to the new installation of Drupal on the new servers. It all seems to be working now and I apologise for the inconvenience.
Technorati Tags:
drupal, hostgator, media temple, wired gecko, site down, spaghetti is a technical term
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One month of chili luvin’ March 14th, 2007
Hooray! Today is the one month anniversary of our “big announcement” - chilibean media’s launch! What a month it has been.
To start off, we launched with a video, which gave you - our readers - an insight into who we - the chilibeaners - are. Paul talks alot, I laugh alot. Hopefully you feel like you could wander over to either of us and have a chat, now that you could recognise us from a mile away.
The video was also an introduction into this medium for us, one we found rather fun to dabble in (however time consuming the post production may be). I am sure that you will see more of chilibean on video sometime in the future, but for now we’re keeping our “made for podcasting” faces just there… on the chilipods!
The launch video, subsequent feedback from the general blogging community, and a rather official chilibean meeting lead to us formulating the chilibean manifesto, which Paul introduced on Episode 2 of chilipod, and which I will be putting up on the site this week. We were given an opportunity to tone down on the jargon and to express what we have in our hearts regarding chilibean’s offering… in plain English even we can understand.
Talking of podcasting, chilibean got to podcast the Quirk eMarketing WebPR+ conference in this month too. We met Sally Falkow and a whole wack of Quirk people, including Rob Stokes and the Sarah’s. We learnt tons about Marketing and PR, and got a great insight into where New Media can be implemented in this industry… right now!
I’ve also been rather busy in another venture - the SA Blog Awards 2007 - where chilibean has been nominated as a finalist in two categories!
I was invited to be a part of the judging panel. This has been an awesome chance to get to know the bloggers behind the blogs we read, as well as an opportunity to scrutinise the SA blogs themselves… There is a wealth of talent out there, if only there were more hours in the day to just explore the SA blogosphere! With the enormous responsibility of having a hand in choosing the best of the best comes much learning - The judging process is a complex one, and the Cherryflava team really put much effort into making it better every year. Having been a part of that process this year, I can see that there is a gap for the local blogging community to add real value by stepping in and giving their constructive feedback. As a passionately SA blogger I will definitely be helping out wherever I can.
And in between all of this we’ve continued to deliver quality blogging content to your screens! Here’s to another month of chilibean fun and excitement…
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Support local yokels internationally March 10th, 2007
There is a fair amount of emphasis on how locals are doing it for themselves. A good example is the local online video sharing scene which Tyler has done a great job covering. Another issue which has come up is localised search which Mike has written fairly passionately about in his post titled "Why I Want Localised, Specialised Search". I support the idea that we should have a way of limiting our searches and tracking activities to local content and I discussed this with Mike a few months ago. It is a project I would love to see developed and the big question is how to identify all those South African sites spread across the many domains that we tend to use. If there is a way to tag all those sites then we are in a great position to start grouping South African sites together and running localised searches on those sites.
I’d like to see something else happen as well and it came to me when I was writing about the Stormhoek / 2007 SA Blog Awards saga over on Wired Gecko this morning. Mike had a screenshot from a Technorati search on Stormhoek showing Stormhoek’s rating in the blogosphere as tracked by Technorati on his post:
Look at that ranking. Stormhoek’s blog is ranked at 9 187 out of around 65 million blogs tracked by Technorati. There are 816 links from 339 blogs. How many of you can boast as good or a better ranking on Technorati? Why is this important? Well, people searching for things on the Web on Technorati or even the usual search engines are more like to find your blog if you have loads of people linking to you and talking about you.
The thought I had was that we, as a community, ought to also be working towards boosting the profile of South African blogs on international search engines like Technorati and Google in addition to promoting each other from within. One simple way to do this is to link to each other and talk about what we are all doing in addition to our posts about what is going on north of the Limpopo. Obviously we can’t all link to everyone else but perhaps give that a little more thought next time you link to a source blog post. Let’s boost the profile of local blogs and content in international search results as well. Let’s show the international community what great stuff we can generate.
Tags: technorati, google, south africa, south african content, blogs, linking, talking about south african blogs, share, promote south african content
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chilibean is a finalist March 6th, 2007
News just in: The SA Blog Awards 2007 finalists have been announced!
chilibean has done very well this year, coming in as a finalist in 2 categories!
So head on over to the SA Blog awards page and vote chilibean:
- Best SA Blog about Technology / Computers / Web Development
- Best SA Business Blog
With the announcement of the finalists comes another surprise, the unveiling of the judges! Although we’ve been keeping mum over this side, chilibean’s Victoire is a judge on the 2007 panel! We’ll keep you posted on the awards developments…
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Behind the Scenes with chilibean February 26th, 2007
Paul and I announced chilibean media’s launch on the 14th February with a special launch video - what you saw was "chilibean on the rocks", but behind the scenes it was more like a cloud of dust, as we scrambled with the technicalities of recording and editing in a medium we’ve not had much experience in! However, when all the dust settled the video was miraculously edited, the chilibean flash banner converted into video, and we were ready to rock! All of this is thanks to an awesome team of outsourced talent:
- Office For Design’s Paula and Lize for their outstanding design work and excellent service delivered with a smile,
- Nico from Aquila Online for being our swish cinematographer, and then burning the midnight oil getting the video just right - cuts and all.
After all the editing was done, Nico surprised us with a montage - the chilibean bloopers - revealing the candid and un-edited face of the chilibean team. Keep an eye out for the chili dance, which I referred to in my del.icio.us chililuvin post last week!
Tags: chilibean media, chilibean, video, bloopers, aquila online, office for design
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del.icio.us chililuvin February 22nd, 2007
chilibean is all about passion, and lots and lots of luvin… Indeed, everytime we hear people talking about us our hearts do a little chili dance (watch this space - I’ll be publishing evidence of this soon)!
Our chilibean passion came to fruition when we launched chilibean media on Valentines day - the international day of luvin - and now we’ve caught wind of a growing chilibean fan base. You must know what that does to us - infact, I’m still trying to locate Paul in the stratosphere!
However, we don’t really know who you, our chili fans, are.
It’s with this in mind that we’ve devised a strategy through which we’d be able to get to know you better, and the best part of all is that it’s really easy to do. Bookmark your site with the tag "chililuvin" on del.icio.us. We’ve already set up the feed so that the moment you add the chililuvin tag to your site we’ll know who you are.
These are the steps to follow:
- Set up a del.icio.us account if you don’t already have one - Mike Stopforth has quite a comprehensive blog post about del.icio.us which describes how to do this
- Install the tools for saving del.icio.us bookmarks - The links to these are at http://del.icio.us/help/
- Click on the "Tag" button on your new browser toolbar and enter chililuvin in the "Tags" field, then click on "Save"
Voila! You are our newest fan, and by association, we are yours. So tag your site with "chililuvin" and join our fan club… you know you wanna!
Oh, and if you haven’t quite had enough of all the chililuvin going around, why not spread the love and add our funky flash banner widget to your site?
Tags: chilibean media, chilibean, chililuvin, launch, del.icio.us, fan club, mike stopforth
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The Lulu Blooker Prize February 21st, 2007
No, I didn’t misspell that. The Lulu Blooker Prize is a prize devoted to books which have their origins in blogs. As the name of the prize suggests, the prize is sponsored by Lulu, a pretty popular print-on-demand service that enables authors to have their books published pretty inexpensively and flexibly. The first prize is $10 000 and a tremendous amount of exposure by virtue of being the winner of the prize. There are also category prizes of $2 500 each.
I took a look at the list of entrants and look what I found:
Our very own Tertia Albertyn has entered her book, So Close, for consideration. I’m certainly holding thumbs and toes for Tertia. According to the site, the short list will be published on Monday, 12 March 2007 so we’ll know who will be up for the prizes then. If you are wondering who the judges are, they include Paul Jones, Arianna Huffington and Julie Powell (the first winner of the prize in 2006).
What I find really exciting about this prize is that it celebrates the writing we see on blogs every day and highlights the fact that a blog could just be the beginning of a publishing career. In fact, Tertia is a great example of a person who began writing about her experiences with IVF and her struggle to fall pregnant and those writings translated into a wonderful, powerful and heart wrenching book.
Tags: lulu blooker prize, lulu, self-publishing, tertia albertyn, so close, arianna huffington, paul jones, julie powell
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