Archive for the ‘Blogging’ Category
The state of the SA blogosphere May 5th, 2008
I just read a post Arthur Goldstuck published to Tech Leader (Mail & Guardian’s latest group blog and companion to the very successful Thought Leader blog) about how the SA blogosphere is beginning to mature.
The numbers are pretty revealing. In December 2006 there were roughly 4 941 South African blogs. A year later there were 26 179 although of those, only 3 789 blogs were active. These numbers are pretty insignificant in the context of the global blogosphere (Technorati is presently tracking around 112.8 million blogs) but the growth rate is still pretty impressive. The explanation of what active blogs are compared to the total number of blogs is worth repeating:
The total number of blogs represents the extent to which blogging captured the imagination of aspirant bloggers. Active blogs, on the other hand, are a barometer of the commitment of bloggers. This indicates that, despite many blogs being deleted and many bloggers going back to their day jobs, commitment to blogging is still growing at a rapid pace.
Of course the number of active blogs is not terribly impressive if no-one is reading them. This is not the case in South Africa. According to Goldstuck, the average monthly page views for 2007 was around 5 226 million page views a month. In January 2008 alone, there were roughly double this number of page views - 10 448 million page views. That is a lot of people reading blogs and proof that blogs are not just a fad. I would like to know how significant these numbers are in the context of Internet usage in South Africa generally. That could be pretty interesting. Arthur?
Technorati Tags:
blog, south africa, blogosphere, statistics, arthur goldstuck, tech leader
Posted in Blogging, Blogs/Sites, Our blogs | Comments (0)
Is Pownce emerging as the new Twitter? March 3rd, 2008
There must be something in the air (pun not intended!) or it is that time of year again. SXSW is coming up in two weeks and I wonder if any particular service will emerge from SXSW as the Twitter of 2008? You may remember that Twitter rocketed in popularity during and after the 2007 SXSW and has been cruising since then. Unfortunately Twitter has also been plagued by a series of outages to the point where it is no longer news that Twitter is down anymore. That isn’t great news for Twitter and it must be really frustrating for the Twitter people that the service isn’t coping with the phenomenal demand.
It was probably only a matter of time before talk returns to Twitter alternatives like Pownce (although people who I have read who are talking about Pownce and Twitter are talking about each as having their place in the ecoystem rather than Pownce being a Twitter killer). There is a little buzz at the moment about Dave Winer’s post raving about the updated Pownce API.
Sorry Ev and Biz and Jack, but they got your number over there at Pownce.
I’ve been asking Twitter to support payloads for months now, and now I have what I was asking for, but it came from Pownce, and it’s beautifully implemented, far more than what I was asking Twitter for.
…
Twitter was my first love, but now I’m seriously considering a fling with Pownce.
Leo Laporte chatted to Winer on This Week in Tech 134 (looking forward to that one) and I am sure there will be even more about this in the coming days. What I am wondering is whether Pownce is going to suddenly pick up loads of users in the coming weeks due, in part, to frustration with Twitter going down so often. While Pownce and Twitter are intended for different things, you can use Pownce for status updates and IRC-style chats that people use Twitter for. There is even a mobile client for Pownce in addition to the AIR app. I am not saying Pownce is going to overtake Twitter and become the new black. I just think it will be really interesting to see what happens next.
Technorati Tags:
pownce, twitter, dave winer, twit, leo laporte
Posted in Applications, Blogging, People, Sharing, Tools | Comments (0)
Lifestreaming is all the rage back home March 2nd, 2008
I’ve been on a lifestreaming kick for a couple months now, in fact I’ve been talking about lifestreaming in one form or another since I started using Jaiku about a year ago. The basic idea is that a lifestream is a stream of content from a variety of services in one location so your friends/followers can visit one site and see which photos you uploaded, what your Twitter updates are, your latest blog posts and more. Here are a couple examples of lifestreams, they really explain the whole idea pretty well:
First, my Plaxo Pulse lifestream
Next, my FriendFeed lifestream
There are a couple issues and questions that emerge from what seems to me to be a surge of interest in lifestreaming. The one question I find myself asking is about the value of “traditional” blogging when much of the content people might blog about are fed directly into the lifestream. What I mean here is that before my various lifestreams (I think I have 4 or 5 running concurrently in various locations) I would blog about just about anything that happened that I wanted to talk about. If I took a cute photo of my puppies, I would blog about it on my personal blog. If I found a great link or blog post and wanted to mention it, I’d blog that too.
Of course there are services like Flickr, del.icio.us and StumbleUpon to do those sorts of things too but that also meant that my followers would have to subscribe to or visit each of those services to keep up to date. That isn’t really a big deal in this age of RSS feeds but if someone has more than a couple people to keep tabs on, the process of tracking all those feeds/sites becomes a pretty time consuming one.
Social networks like Facebook can do a pretty decent job of giving people a single point of contact. If most or all of your friends are on Facebook then you only really need to visit one site to keep up to date on what everyone is doing. It is a great idea the immense popularity of these sites is a testament to that. The big thing, for me, is being able to put my stuff out there and have multiple points of contact to enable me to reach out to the most people. Not all of my friends use Facebook. Some use Jaiku, Pulse and, increasingly, FriendFeed … just to name a couple examples. Facebook is great but it doesn’t really allow me to distribute my content freely so I plug my various content streams (such as Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, blogs, interesting feed items, bookmarks, Last.fm profile and many others) into my various lifestreams and create multiple (and hopefully consistent) update streams for my friends using those services. If course friends are free to subscribe to the original content streams too. These items are convenient ways to keep up to date of pretty much everything I do online.
So, back to blogging. With all this source content zooming through lifestreams of one sort or another, does blogging become less relevant? Would you blog less if you used a lifestream as your primary content distribution channel. Although this post has the makings of “Blogging is dead” post, I think anyone thinking along those lines is likely getting caught up in some hype and/or drinking too much of the Koolaid. As this post clearly shows, there is still very much a need for longer form blog posts or even blogs that are more customisable than the lifestreaming services permit. The value of a lifestreaming service is its utility and the content stream itself. Blogs can take it a step further and some bloggers create fantastic experiences on their blogs that enhance their posts. Lifestreams really won’t kill blogs, they will, however, help spread blog content further if you plug your blog feeds into your lifestreams. Each of the services we use have their place in our information/content creation activities, the challenge is working out those roles and using them effectively/efficiently.
As I was writing this post John McCrea (VP of Marketing at Plaxo) raised a really interesting issue in a comment on one of my status updates on Pulse:
I think there’s an interesting tension between lifestreaming in public and richly sharing with one’s family and friends. An interesting strategic question for Plaxo as to which is more important for us in the near term.
To me this question begs other, interesting questions about the value of more personal lifestreams to a service provider. There is a lot of focus on business and on people who are tech savvy and who don’t think twice about sharing everything with everyone but what about the majority of people who just want to share their stuff with their small group of friends or their family members and not the rest of the world? I don’t think there is enough attention on this invisible majority. Six Apart focussed specifically on these people when it released Vox which Mena Trott, one of Six Apart’s founders, said was a blogging service her mother could use. A lot of these people who are using the Web use services like Facebook and it works out really well for them. My mother in law uses Facebook to see what we are all up to. Introducing lifestreams to these people is the next step although it may still take a year or two before ordinary (as opposed to us geeks) people start exploring lifestreams more consciously (people who use Facebook are lifestreaming to a degree anyway, they just don’t think about it that way).
Depending on how you present lifestreaming to this massive potential group of users and how you build a sustainable revenue model around that group, this could be a tremendously lucrative model. It sounds a bit cold to talk about it that way but money is what keeps businesses, well, in business. Once the money is taken care of there is more time to focus on making the service appealing to these non-technical users.
These are just a couple thoughts I have had and I am sure there will be more ahead. What are your thoughts? Do you use any lifestreaming services? Are you going to try them out?
Technorati Tags:
blog, facebook, lifestream, plaxo, pulse, vox, mena trott, john mccrea, friendfeed, trends
Posted in Blogging, Blogs/Sites, Lifestreaming, People, Sharing | Comments (3)
What happens to blog-posts after you click Publish January 28th, 2008
Ever wonder what happens to your blog posts when you click “publish”? Take a look at this item on Wired titled “The Life Cycle of a Blog Post, From Servers to Spiders to Suits — to You.
(Source: Boing Boing)
Technorati Tags:
blog, lifecycle, what happens, publication
Posted in Blogging | Comments (0)
The end is overrated January 15th, 2008
Ok, so we told you we were closing up shop and we did. I have been keeping an eye on subscriptions to this blog and 2 months after we closed up, people are still coming here so there must be something worthwhile here for all those people.
I chatted to Victoire and we decided to kick open the doors a crack and let some new light in. We’re going to start blogging here again about new media and what that means for us down here in the South and elsewhere. I am going to do a little work on Drupal and see if I can’t get some anti-spam stuff up and running and probably upgrade this blog to the latest release version of Drupal.
Let us know if you have any suggestions. Otherwise, I hope you enjoy the new posts. I won’t make any promises about frequency of posts or anything like that. We are both still pretty darn busy but here goes …
Technorati Tags:
chilibean, open for business, more posts
Posted in Blogging | Comments (1)
Microblog upgrades August 30th, 2007
Jaiku users will be pleased to see that there are a couple handy additions to their Jaiku service. Many of these features have been requested many times and it is great to see them incorporated. For starters, the Jaiku IM service has been released to the masses. It runs on a Jabber platform so you can send and receive Jaikus using Google Talk or your preferred Jabber compatible IM client. This is one feature which Twitter has enjoyed for some time (even though it doesn’t always work) and which Jaiku users have been virtually begging for.
Other additions to the Jaiku service are focussed on the Jaiku site and include person and channel search (I have been asking for this for a while now and I am really glad it is finally here), a more streamlined Explore page which only shows new Jaikus. I really love the Google search results when you run searches for people or channels. The search results seem to be drawn from Google searches on the Jaiku site itself. Just the same, they add some balance to the results.
The Explore page also includes a side panel with the most active conversations on Jaiku at the time. Some of these conversations have quite a following and this is a fantastic way to generate and sustain buzz about a particular topic.
Of course Jaiku isn’t the only microblogging service to have revealed some upgrades. Twitter recently announced some handy new features. Twitter users now have a search function so they can find all their friends on Twitter and add them. This is aided by the ability to search through your Gmail contacts for Twitter users based on their email addresses. I tried this out and found a number of my contacts active on Twitter and I was able to add them all by clicking on a single link.
These additions have certainly enhanced my experience of both services, particularly Jaiku. The IM option is a great help because I can now spend less time on the Jaiku site posting updates (or running 3rd party software to do that) and I can use the tools I am already using to keep up to date and to keep my updates flowing.
Technorati Tags:
jaiku, twitter, upgrade, features, jabber
Posted in Blogging, Tools, Useful stuff | Comments (0)
Stormhoek featured on CNN.com August 8th, 2007
I just saw a post by Hugh MacLeod on Twitter that Stormhoek is the subject of an article on CNN Money about the now famous story of Stormhoek’s successful marketing campaign formulated by MacLeod. The story is a testament of the power of a strategy that appeals to bloggers and what bloggers can do for a small wine farm in the Western Cape.
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stormhoek, hugh macleod, cnn money
Posted in Blogging, People | Comments (0)
Interview with Laurian from Wibble August 7th, 2007
I published a post about Wibble a little while ago and mentioned that I hoped to interview Laurian (aka Peas on Toast) about this new media startup. I sat down with Laurian this afternoon at the Europa in Melrose Arch for a brief interview:
I enjoyed chatting to Laurian and I think it is going to be pretty interesting seeing how Wibble develops in the coming weeks and months. The site certainly seems to be attracting a decent amount of traffic so be sure to take a look for yourself.
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interview, wibble, laurian clemence, laurian
Posted in Blogging, People, Sharing | Comments (0)
About that … August 5th, 2007
You have almost certainly noticed a decreased number of posts being posted to this blog in the last couple months. We have unfortunately been completely bogged down with a number of existing work projects and the end result has been far fewer posts than we had hoped. For my part my wife and I have a little one on the way so I have pretty much had my head down and have been focussed on my work to prepare for the little one’s arrival in November. This has meant a teensy bit of a decrease in the frequency of posts to this blog (and just about all my other blogs with the exceptions of my Twitter and Jaiku posts) as well as a delay in a couple podcast episodes I have in the queue.
Victoire and I are working to block off more time to post more to this blog and I am working on getting those podcast episodes out (apologies to everyone waiting for them) as soon as possible. I apologise for these interruptions! Thank you for coming back from time to time and for not deleting us from your feeds!
Paul
Posted in Blogging, Podcasting | Comments (1)
Ready to Pownce? July 7th, 2007
Kevin Rose (of Digg fame) and some of his friends/colleagues have unveiled their previously top secret project and it is a service called Pownce. At first glance it looks a lot like certain other services I have spoken about here before:
When I first heard about Pownce I was somewhat sceptical. It seemed like an effort to piggyback off the success of Twitter and Jaiku (to a lesser extent). As with the Twitter/Jaiku debate there is no clear winner unless you are very specific about your requirements. For starters, Pownce has a different focus to Twitter or Jaiku even though it has a Twitter/Jaiku-style interface:
Pownce is a way to send stuff to your friends. What kind of stuff? You can send just about anything: music, photos, messages, links, events, and more.
Twitter is about answering the question, what are you doing? Jaiku is about status updates, presence, mobile presence and sharing via content aggregation. There is definitely some overlap but neither Twitter or Jaiku enable users to send files or event notifications quite like Pownce and for those users who want to be able to do that, it makes sense to use Pownce.
There are other similarities. Like Jaiku, Pownce allows for replies to posted items and what I like about the replies is that there are available through a link and not simply posted as and when they come in via the normal stream. There is also a star based rating system (you can see the Digg roots coming through) for each post. The reply handling is pretty nifty. Jaiku does a decent job of the comments although they are still presented in the main stream so it can be overwhelming if there are a number of comments to a number of posts. The rating thing is just a bit of extra fluff.
Another great tidbit is the availability of a feed for Pownce notes although the feed includes public friends’ notes as well. Jaiku handles feeds better because it gives you a combined feed for your posts as well as your friends’ posts and is also gives you a separate feed for your own posts exclusively.
Pownce gives users more privacy options and you can choose who gets to see what information about you and emanating from you. Here it becomes similar to Facebook’s privacy options and that really comes in handy because Twitter and Jaiku don’t really have the privacy options (Jaiku allows you to hide posts from the public or display them) Pownce provides if that stuff is important to you.
There is also a desktop client that runs on Adobe’s new AIR platform (you need to install AIR and then the desktop client). You can see what the whole system is based on and who the team members are right here.
At the moment there is no mobile or IM interface for Pownce (given the way it works, I am not sure a decent IM experience is possible although I can see a mobile client for Pownce working out). Pownce doesn’t have the aggregation features of Jaiku or the single-minded focus of Twitter which has been a big contributor to its success. As far as status messages go, I just don’t see the point moving over to Pownce. Where I do see the appeal is in the file sharing and possibly the event management posts. Those could come in handy if your friends are all on board. I haven’t mentioned that there is a link post option in Pownce too but given del.icio.us and the same function on my tumblelog, this feature doesn’t really rate a mention.
As I type this I can see how Jaiku will pretty much cover Pownce’s bases as far as content sharing goes, bearing in mind that I tend to upload my content to YouTube, Vimeo or Flickr and then share that content. On the other hand if you want to just send a file to someone without bothering with the uploads to other services and where your email client won’t handle the file size (you can upload up to 10 MB with the free Pownce service - there is a “pro” version where you can send files up to 100 MB) then Pownce is once again for you.
As with other services, one way to decide whether you want to use it is to try it out. At the moment access is by invitation only and it turns out I have a few invitations available so send me an email if you would like one. First come, first served! Then let me know what you think?
Technorati Tags:
pownce, jaiku, twitter, file sharing, events, kevin rose
Posted in Blogging, Tools | Comments (2)