Archive for the ‘Blogging’ Category
Wibble: hosted blogging for business July 7th, 2007
There is a new hosted blogging service in the market called Wibble. I had an opportunity to sit with Laurian from Wibble to chat about their new hosted blogging solution for business. The idea with Wibble is to provide businesses that don’t have blogs of their own a service which they can use to publish a blog for their business on Wibble. The service is intended for people who are not necessarily veteran bloggers, who want a web presence and who don’t mind having their blog hosted on Wibble’s servers. Hosted blogs range from R3 000 and this generally includes an end to end service for their clients ranging from corporate identity to the development of a specially designed blog. Advertisers can also place banner ads on the site range from around R3 000 or so.
Wibble is a cross industry service and will cover tech, business, lifestyle, entertainment, sport, news and politics and reviews. I see it as competing with web hosting/development companies who would usually do all of this work for their clients. Obvious challenges for Wibble will come from services like WordPress.com and Blogger which enable users to quickly and easily set up a blog and customise it within minutes with a range of theming options. Of the two I see Blogger posing a bigger challenge mainly because Blogger allows users to edit the html of the pages whereas WordPress.com is more restrictive.
I do have one suggestion from a branding perspective and that is to allow users to use their own domains rather than the existing domain name structure which is something like http://wibble.co.za/hosted/COMPANYNAME. I think this is an important feature and could dissuade potential clients from using the service. At the very least a domain name like http://COMPANYNAME.blogger.com or http://COMPANYNAME.wordpress.com is somewhat less cumbersome than Wibble’s existing domain name structure. My sense is that the service provider should be as transparent as is possible and should allow the client’s brand and site to be the most, if not only, visible thing.
That being said this is a pretty interesting concept and I am looking forward to seeing how the service works out. One thing for sure is that it focuses attention on developing a social media-based platform for clients rather than the usual web site and it will distinguish Wibble from web designers/developers still rooted in Dreamweaver and the late 1990s.
I am hoping to get together with Laurian and interview her and her partner Craig fairly soon. There is a social media consulting side to Wibble as well and I think it will be beneficial to hear about this from them directly.
Technorati Tags:
wibble, hosting, blog service, blogging, hosted service, social media, domain name structure
Posted in Blogging, People, Sharing, Tools, Useful stuff | Comments (0)
A quick look at Amagama June 25th, 2007
I have been meaning to publish a post about Mail & Guardian’s relaunched blogging platform, Amagama, for a couple weeks now and just haven’t gotten past staring at my open browser tabs before tumbling back into some other task. So what is Amagama? Well, put simply is is a public blogging service based on the WordPress Multi-User edition where anyone can create a blog and be up and running in just a few minutes.
I asked Vincent Maher, one of the brains behind Amagama, about their plans for the service and whether they involve world domination. He hesitated, briefly, before changing the topic. Amagama is the successor to the first hosted blogging solution in South Africa called Blogmark. Interestingly, Blogmark ran on version 3 of Drupal, the ancestor of the content management system which powers this site. Blogmark had about 5 000 blogs and of those about 3 500 were identified as inactive or identified as spam. 1 500 blogs were migrated across and the response has been interesting. Some bloggers objected to the default comment moderation. Some people have raised concerns that bloggers can edit comments left on blogs and yet more who first threatened an armed revolt armed with nail files and who subsequently capitulated and made offerings of Jagermeister.
For the most part Amagama is part of the Mail & Guardian’s social media strategy that fits with other social media developments like the popular Amatomu. Vincent told me that there are more developments coming that will expand the social media offering and judging from Amatomu (which I am a big fan of, personally) and Amagama, I think the social media space in South Africa is going to be a more vibrant space very soon. One of the other big players in this space is Johncom which operates the Sunday Times and its spin off, The Times (disclosure: I write for The Times and am being paid for it) and it interesting to see how each media company is developing its own social media platform.
When I asked Vincent about Mail & Guardian’s social media strategy, he said the following:
The ultimate goal is to offer a comprehensive collection of social media services that all fit into each other and make logical sense to the user when used in conjunction.
Matthew Buckland mentioned to me that in a month or so Amagama is generating around 120 000 page impressions. That is pretty impressive. I thought I would run a comparison for the last month between Amagama and two other similar services in South Africa (MWeb blogs and My Digital Life) and the result was pretty interesting:
Of course the big appeal of sites like Amagama to me is that they help introduce the mainstream to blogging through easy to use blogging tools and that is pretty important. Perhaps more important than which service is the most popular, at least from a new media evangelist’s perspective. That being said, great job to Matt, Vincent and the Mail & Guardian team!
Technorati Tags:
amagama, amatomu, mail & guardian, blogs, blogging, vincent maher, matthew buckland
Posted in Blogging, Infrastructure, People, Sharing | Comments (3)
chilipod 1-10: A conversation with Paul Walsh about a blogger code of conduct June 10th, 2007
In this episode of chilipod I continue my interview with Paul Walsh of Segala. We talk about a blogger code of conduct which became quite a controversial topic recently. This debate is far from over and this conversation raises a few questions about the best approach to what is really a noble effort, albeit sometimes poorly executed.
You may notice a change in the quality of this episode of chilipod. I have published this episode in mono to reduce the file size for download purposes. Let us know what you think?
As always, this episode is available in two formats:
- Enhanced chilipod (AAC/iTunes format); and
- Normal chilipod (mp3 format).
The music we have used in this episode (and which we may use in future episodes) is a track called YFM Late Remix by a crowd known as Deep Fried. The track has been published on the ccMixter:sa site under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
Technorati Tags:
code of conduct, bloggers, blogging, paul walsh, segala
Posted in Blogging, People, chilipod | Comments (0)
Recognition from the top June 5th, 2007
Matt and Vincent both have posts about President Mbeki’s acknowledgement of the blogosphere and the role bloggers play in South Africa today. This is a tremendous boost for bloggers in South Africa and while there is still much debate about the value of much of the content being published on blogs today, it is a mistake to underestimate the value of blogs and blogging. I was chatting to a colleague this morning at the First Tuesday event in Johannesburg and I was telling her about my theory (I am sure someone else came up with it before me though) that social media isn’t a phase which will fade with 1990s style banner advertising. Social media is being entrenched as a permanent layer of the Web and will remain a part of our Web for the forseeable future. The technologies may be new but social media is an expression of an ancient human need to connect and share. Blogging is a part of that process and ignoring it is about as productive as ignoring our humanity.
Technorati Tags:
thabo mbeki, bloggers, recognition, president, social media
Posted in Blogging, People | Comments (0)
chili luvin’ for The Times June 1st, 2007
The Times launched a test issue this last week ahead of the full release to roughly 120 000 Sunday Times subscribers.
The response from people wandering around in Rosebank is pretty good which is great because I was invited to write for The Times as one of their “blogumnists” for the next few months so you will find a chili flavoured column in The Times each week which will probably be republished here on chilibean after publication in The Times. There will be two versions of the paper each week, the printed version and the online version and the columns published by the 5 “blogumnists” will appear both online and in the print edition.
I like the fact that bloggers are part of this (aside from the fact that I am one of those bloggers) because it gives blogging some good exposure to the same readers who may have negative views of bloggers due to recent articles in the press about the darker side of blogging. I would like to see blogging’s public image improve through media such as The Times in the coming weeks and months.
For now, good luck to Ray, Carly and their team ahead of the full release next week.
Technorati Tags:
the times, blogumnist, column, newspaper
Posted in Blogging, Media | Comments (0)
Not so fast May 14th, 2007
I was chatting to two people from Media24 at last week’s First Tuesday event (Aquila has a great post on the event itself) and we were chatting about how many mainstream media sites are built on content management systems that were set up a decade ago (give or take) and while there are many reasons to climb on board the Web 2.0 bandwagon and bring the community into the fold, there are some practical challenges which need to be catered for. One of the things I would love to see implemented on a bigger scale are blogs instead of static pages of text but that poses a dilemma. On the one hand you want to really facilitate community participation and on the other hand you really need to manage potentially hundreds of people commenting on stories. As much as it runs contrary to my “free love” theories about social media, moderation becomes a must when there is a brand to protect and a that mainstream paper enjoys massive readership. That is, unless the mainstream paper itself is a brave one. As the saying goes, fortune favours the bold …
Technorati Tags:
mainstream media, content management system, cms, moderation, challenges, social media
Posted in Blogging, Infrastructure, Sharing | Comments (0)
Guy Kawasaki on blog evangelism May 3rd, 2007
I am just watching/listening to a video podcast interview with Guy Kawasaki on Marketing Voices:
The interview covers Guy’s thoughts on his success as a blogger and what he considers important when it comes to blogging. He is a fantastic guy to watch and listen to and has some great, sensible advice for bloggers and I particularly enjoyed his comments about people who suggest link exchanges with him. He basically tells those people that if they consider his blog worthwhile then they could link and similarly if he considers their blogs worthwhile he may link. He isn’t going to just link because you want to swap links.
When it comes to evangelizing a blog, he said that it is pretty easy to evangelize a blog that is a great blog with great content, a good purpose and high entertainment value. Rather than trying to kick a dead horse, publish good content and keep it coming. There are a couple blogs which seem to thrive on trashy content and they may be great from an entertainment perspective but they are really not going to add any real value to anyone. I guess it is a bit like this whole thing with bad boys and good guys. Girls date bad boys and have a great time doing it but they aren’t going to take the bad boys home to meet mom. When they settle down, they will probably go for the good guy.
I may have mentioned the Marketing Voices podcast before and I would just like to reiterate what a great podcast it is. Jennifer Jones has some really great interviews with a variety of interesting people. It is worthwhile subscribing to and listening to it regularly.
Technorati Tags:
guy kawasaki, jennifer jones, marketing voices, podcast, evangelism, blogging, evangelizing blogs
Posted in Blogging, People, Podcasting | Comments (0)
Microblogging: fast, simple ways to get your thoughts out there May 2nd, 2007
There are a couple tools I see as “microblogging” tools on the Web today. To me microblogs are platforms where you can post small posts or links (I would include link blogs in this category) as opposed to full blog posts with categories and a more developed thought process. There are a couple microblogging tools available at the moment and what I find really interesting is that not all of these tools work the same way and seem to collectively bridge the gap between a simple bookmark posting (a la del.icio.us) and what we have become accustomed to seeing on blogs. So a simple microblog entry would be a del.icio.us post which could look like this on my del.icio.us page:
or, if you see this post on a blog it would look something like this:
That is pretty simple stuff. The link is to a site I found interesting or worth bookmarking and I may even include a note about the link with my thoughts on the link or a description of the item linked to. There is a similar type of microblogging service that answers the question “What are you doing?”. This is a more personal form of microblogging because you are talking about things that interest you or that you are doing in a given moment. The posts are pretty simple and the focus is on keeping it short. There are two good examples of this. The first is Twitter and a typical Twitter post would look something like this:
What Twitter adds is a more immediate form of interaction with other Twitter users because the updates come in so quickly (just about as soon as they are posted if everything is working) and users can respond to each other, making Twitter a form of public chatroom in a way. There is scope for a del.icio.us-type service because you can pretty much post about whatever you want, including links. Now Jaiku takes Twitter a step further (actually Jaiku was launched before Twitter even though Twitter rose to prominence before Jaiku did) and enables users to add external feeds to their Jaiku stream and to comment on each other’s posts:
Neither Twitter or Jaiku can really be seen as true blogging services (although Jaiku is pretty close). They are almost like a del.icio.us for your personal life with each post representing a bookmark in your day. I started using Tumblr the other day (I had heard quite a bit about it and thought I’d give it a try). Tumblr is a tumblelog service which, according to Wikipedia is:
A tumblelog is a variation of a blog, that favors short-form, mixed-media posts over the longer editorial posts frequently associated with blogging. Common post formats found on tumblelogs include links, photos, quotes, dialogues, and video. Unlike blogs, this format is frequently used to share the author’s creations, discoveries, or experiences without providing a commentary.
The term “tumblelog” was coined by Why the lucky stiff in a blog post on April 12th, 2005, while describing Anarchaia.
Jason Kottke described tumblelogs on October 19th, 2005:
A tumblelog is a quick and dirty stream of consciousness, a bit like a remaindered links style linklog but with more than just links. They remind me of an older style of blogging, back when people did sites by hand, before Movable Type made post titles all but mandatory, blog entries turned into short magazine articles, and posts belonged to a conversation distributed throughout the entire blogosphere. Robot Wisdom and Bifurcated Rivets are two older style weblogs that feel very much like these tumblelogs with minimal commentary, little cross-blog chatter, the barest whiff of a finished published work, almost pure editing…really just a way to quickly publish the “stuff” that you run across every day on the web.
Here is a screenshot from my tumblelog on Tumblr:
My Tumblr blog is a pretty simple one and at the moment it works in a similar way to my Jaiku feed in that I had added feeds from some of the sites and services I use to my tumblelog so what you see in this screenshot for the posts that were published on Monday are a Twitter post, two del.icio.us links (in red) and part of a post I published here on chilibean about the 27 Dinner held last Friday. Tumblr users can also post images, video and text posts to their tumblelogs (and I imagine similar services allows a similar set of postings). A tumblelog looks a lot like a conventional blog and yet it works much the same was as other microblogging services (and even aggregates them).
Each of these tools is designed to facilitate sharing in a simpler and faster way than a normal blog. Typically a conventional blog requires a bit of thought and posts tend to be anything from a paragraph or so to a few hundred words. Each of these microblogging tools enable you to publish a thought, a link or a snippet of content to the Web pretty quickly and simply without having to worry too much about dedicating time to a full post. These are the posts you do when you are catching a bus or train, sitting at a coffee shop waiting for a friend or grabbing a quick bite to eat during your lunch hour. Most of these services have a mobile element so you can publish a post from your mobile device. Not only are these microblogging platforms but they also become moblogging (mobile blogging) platforms too.
When you put all this together you start to see all these services come together to provide pretty comprehensive cover for your various publishing needs. You can now blog how you want, when you want and in the format you prefer.
Technorati Tags:
tumblelogs, tumblr, del.icio.us, twitter, jaiku, microblogging, moblogging
Posted in Blogging, Tools, Useful stuff | Comments (2)
Look within … your comments, that is April 28th, 2007
There is a reference to an interview conducted with the CEO of CoComment on Everything is Miscellaneous that includes a discussion about how CoComment enables its corporate clients to delve into the comments posted to their sites to identify the experts and higher profile commentators. They can also identify the more vocal commentators who may already be or could soon become potent evangelists for the business.
Tertia and I were chatting about responding to comments to a blog post and my view is that responding in the comments section is a really good idea for a number of reasons. The main reason is that when you respond you are participating in the conversation that unfolds in your comments section. Responding to comments also tells your commentators that you are listening to them and encourage them to comment again. Another way to respond to comments is by email. This lets that person know you are listening to them but the means of communication is obviously not public so you don’t have the benefit of letting everyone else know. From what I have seen, a large number of bloggers do respond to comments in the comments section. Do you? What are your thoughts?
Technorati Tags:
comments, cocomment, responding to comments, email, listening
Posted in Blogging, Sharing | Comments (0)
The ayes have it April 15th, 2007
Ok, our survey about the frequency of posts on this blog has pretty much come to a close. The question we asked was “Are you content with our content? How are we doing?”. About 136 people viewed the post and 14 people voted. Of those 14 people, 8 said we have been publishing way too many posts. 3 people said there were just enough posts and 3 were easy either way so it looks like you, our readers, want fewer posts each day.
So what we’re going to do is limit our posts to roughly one per day unless something big hits the wires and we may post two that day. Hopefully you will feel a little less inundated with posts with this adjusted schedule. Please feel free to drop us a line with any other suggestions you may have. We love hearing from you! While we’re talking admin, we’d love it if you would register on the site. There are certain features on the site you can’t access if you are not logged in and registration is free.
Thanks for taking the time to vote on this poll. We appreciate the feedback!
Technorati Tags:
poll, posting frequency, feedback, votes, talk to us, registration
Posted in Blogging | Comments (0)