Archive for the ‘People’ Category
Ronaldo Lemos @ Google January 28th, 2008
I came across this video of a talk given by iCommons chair, Ronaldo Lemos, at Google in November last year. The talk is titled titled “Cultural Production and Digital Inclusion in Developing Countries” and I thought I would share it with you.
It is quite a thrill to have the opportunity to work with people like Ronaldo and the other directors of iCommons (including, but certainly not limited to, Larry Lessig, Jimmy Wales, Paul Keller, Tomislav Medak and Catharina Maracke) and I am really looking forward to watching this talk in its entirety (no, I haven’t watched all 52 minutes just yet …).
Technorati Tags:
presentation, ronaldo lemos, ronaldo, lemos, google, cultural production, developing countries
Posted in Media, People, Sharing | Comments (1)
Interview with the shy Mark Zuckerberg January 26th, 2008
In case you don’t subscribe to Scoble’s blog, here is an interesting interview he conducted with a strangely shy Mark Zuckerberg:
Yesterday morning I woke up early. Was sitting in the hotel lobby at 7 a.m. trying to check email when someone tapped me on the shoulder. It was Mark Zuckerberg, founder/CEO of Facebook, which now has 68 million active users (people who’ve signed on in the past 30 days).
He invited me to a breakfast with Pakistani President, Pervez Musharraf. We walked together to the breakfast, which was interesting because of Musharraf’s comments, where he defended his administration. After the breakfast Mark and I spent a bunch of time together, where he gave me permission to quote him.
In the interview Zuckerberg chats to Scoble about upgrades to the Facebook Platform, his desire to facilitate data portability (although not at the expense of Facebook’s users’ privacy), his love of Scrabulous and his hope for a positive resolution of the dispute over Hasbro’s branding and how the 4 999 limit on Facebook friends may be history soon. It is an interesting post to read (these sorts of one on one interviews generally are). I find these sorts of direct interactions are often at odds with popular perceptions and help bring balance to the Force.
Technorati Tags:
facebook, mark zuckerberg, zuckerberg, interview, scoble, davos, switzerland
Posted in People | Comments (0)
Ok, back … again (aka How we migrated from Drupal to WordPress) January 25th, 2008
Ok, we are back in business and thanks to the very talented and helpful Andrew Glanville, we are now running on WordPress. Andrew very kindly contacted me after my tweet yesterday lamenting my recent crippling of our Drupal blog.
Andrew promptly took our database and waved his magic wand over it. He told me that behind the scenes he had to put together “some horrible once-off spaghetti code to handle the migration cleanly” (I am sure that is a technical thing) when he discovered that WordPress has a different database structure to the structure used in other posts describing how to migrate from Drupal to WordPress. The end result is the pretty clean structure you see before you (if you are on the site).
Please visit his blog and throw lots of money his way.
I want to thank Andrew a lot for stepping in and helping out here. I have been looking for a way to migrate and he did it for me. I promise not to dick around with my database for at least 6 months!! Really!
I am just rebuilding the sidebar of the blog so you’ll see a couple changes in the next few days.
Technorati Tags:
blog, chilibean, wordpress, andrew glanville
Posted in Blogs/Sites, People | Comments (4)
Closing up shop November 4th, 2007
(Image:
Closed Store by Ben Demey licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license)
Victoire and I were chatting a couple days ago and we have decided to end our chili partnership and the chilibean initiative. You can get a pretty good idea of what Victoire has been up to the last few months and I am in a similar position. We started chilibean with the intention of becoming one of South Africa’s first new media businesses. We met a lot of amazing people as we built up the chilibean blog and then launched the business and I think I can speak for Victoire when I say we are both thankful for all the amazing connections we have made through chilibean.
Unfortunately we are both left with so little time after our business and personal activities that we simply don’t have the time to invest into chilibean to build it to where we initially wanted to take it and maintain it. The new media space has changed so much in the last year and a half. There are blogs sprouting up all over the place and the number of new media consulting businesses has exploded. That industry has been through quite a few changes starting with Cerebra’s launch at the beginning of the year, a couple spinoffs and a couple consolidations. I think people like Mike Stopforth, Dave Duarte, Angus Robinson, Tyler Reed and many others have really revolutionised this space and done wonders for public awareness of new media in South Africa.
As far as chilibean is concerned, we’re probably going to leave the blog where it is for archive purposes. If you would like to get in touch with us, you can reach Victoire through her blog and you can reach me either through my Plaxo profile (which has my contact details too) or ClaimID (where you can find where I am on the Web).
A big thanks to everyone who has supported us and chilibean. I have enjoyed meeting all of you and look forward to working with you in other capacities going forward.
Technorati Tags:
chilibean, the end
Posted in People | Comments (1)
chilipod 1-15: Merle Dietrich of JoziKids (part 2) September 24th, 2007
In this episode of chilipod I present the final part of a two part interview with Merle Dieterich from JoziKids. The more I think about it the more excited I am that this service exists. I think Merle has done a fantastic job with JoziKids.
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:
jozikids, merle dieterich
Posted in People, Sharing, Tools, chilipod | Comments (0)
chilipod 1-14: Merle Dieterich of JoziKids (part 1) September 2nd, 2007
In this episode of chilipod I present part one of a two part interview with Merle Dieterich from JoziKids. I really enjoyed this interview and I think you will find it pretty interesting.
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:
jozikids, merle dieterich
Posted in People, Sharing, Useful stuff, chilipod | Comments (0)
Thought Leaders … almost all of them! August 25th, 2007
Mail & Guardian’s Thought Leader blog is quite an interesting mashup of traditional media and new media. The site is basically a really big group blog with about 40 contributors so far. The blog is monitored by Mail & Guardian’s online editor, Riaan Wolmarans who pretty much seems to have his hands full making sure the contributions submitted to the blog are safe for publication. The reason for this editorial control makes a lot of sense. According to Matthew Buckland, Mail & Guardian’s General Manager (if I have his title correct?):
Unlike our other blog products, we needed this because Thought Leader appears strongly under the Mail & Guardian brand, therefore the company is liable, responsible and directly associated with the content.
Too many organisations forget the potential liability they incur if their employees go off the reservation with their company blogs or other publications associated with them.
Thought Leader is organised by topic and writer and you can subscribe to the main blog feed or to individual contributors’ feeds. I would like to see an option to subscribe to category feeds as well as topic feeds so readers can really pick and choose what they want to subscribe to. One of the challenges of a multi-contributor blog is that there can be too much content to follow meaningfully so it helps to be able to trim it all down to only what you want and maybe a little extra on the side. There seems to be some Amatomu integration too and it looks like you can also get a sense of how people are responding to contributors’ articles.
Some of the luminaries making contributions include Max Kaizen, Mike Stopforth, Dave Duarte and many more. A simply scan of the top 26 contributors will reveal many familiar faces.
Vincent Maher has described Thought Leader as the culmination of a three step process:
Thought Leader is the 3rd part of our 3-step blogging strategy. The first was was to aggregate and measure the local blogosphere, which we did via Amatomu. The second was to provide a hosting platform for blogs, which we did via Amagama. The final step, and the most challenging, was to create a hybrid between a group blog and a more traditional opinion and editorial site that we could really throw our reputation behind as a quality news source.
This last step puts Mail & Guardian into an interesting position vis-a-vis its main competitor in this space, The Times. The Times launched its blogs and multimedia properties a few months ago and has since expanded them quite a bit although Thought Leader better integrates Mail & Guardian’s journalists and writers with bloggers in one space. On the other hand, Thought Leader is the only property that really ties into Mail & Guardian (the news service) of the three recent developments. Amatomu, while backed by Mail & Guardian, serves a more generic function and Amagama is really aimed at newer bloggers. The Times seems to have focussed its energies expanding its core business of providing news and opinion pieces to its readers. At least that is my sense of both services. (Disclosure: I am one of The Times’ blogumists)
I like the Thought Leader blog and the way it has been put together. If Vincent and Matt add those extra feeds the service will be even more useful. For now, it is early days but I think this one is going to be a goodie going forward. In the meantime, I am going to add one more feed to my list …
Technorati Tags:
thought leader, mail & guardian, the times, editorial blog, news
Posted in People | Comments (2)
chilipod 1-13: Mxit August 17th, 2007
In this episode of chilipod I present my interview with Mxit’s Herman Heunis. There has been quite a bit of talk about how secure/insecure Mxit is for children specifically. In this interview Herman sets the record straight and points out that the challenge isn’t Mxit but rather users’ tendency to give out too much information about themselves and this is what leads to the attacks every parent fears.
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:
herman heunis, mxit, privacy
Posted in Devices, People, Sharing, Telecoms, Tools, Useful stuff, chilipod | Comments (1)
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.
Technorati Tags:
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.
Technorati Tags:
interview, wibble, laurian clemence, laurian
Posted in Blogging, People, Sharing | Comments (0)