matthewbuckland.com

Read this scathing piece by Wired’s Tony Long on the recent activities of the now-notorious Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). They recently embarked on a crusade to sue 26,000 people who are downloading MP3s over the internet to “send a message”. It appears to be a desperate attempt to keep the last vestiges of their big cash cow going. Eventually, they will lose. The internet has changed the model of the music industry, as well as the media industry. But it appears the RIAA will fight to the bitter end to ensure their fat pensions are fatter.

Says Long in Wired:

So when their first victim, Thomas, turns out to be a single American Indian mother of two making a measly $36,000 a year — latte money for the RIAA boys — you have a hard time picturing these guys nailed to a cross. But that’s the image the RIAA has tried hard to foster since some pimply-faced intern first explained to them what file sharing was. All of a sudden it was, oh, boo-hoo. Poor us.

People will buy music online at an affordable price. I’m happy to pay for music downloads at a reasonable price to get a reliable and fast service. I’m sure there are lots of people out there like me. Artists can afford to make the downloads cheap as they don’t have to worry about distributing CDs and packaging them… it’s the disintermediation effects of the internet. It cuts all this middle-men stuff out. In any case, I think the majority of bands will make their money from live performances in the future and we can understandably expect ticket costs to rise (yes even higher than they are now).

Continues Long:

Some artists are beginning to wise up to this. Thanks to technology (and when have you ever heard the Luddite say that?) bands are discovering that they can, in effect, become their own publishers, cut out the middleman and go directly to their audiences…. If there’s an industry where the Marxist exhortation for the workers to control the means of production makes sense, this is it.

Rather than bring out the guns, the recording industry should re-invent themselves, not make sure everyone on planet earth loathe them. If they continue to act like this, they will accelerate their inevitable extinction. They’ll join the dodos.

This is funny. The New Zealand version of the well-known online Rugby Site, “Rugby Heaven” has changed its name to “Rugby Hell”. I guess that is what they are going through at the moment. Like most of the world I couldn’t believe they fluffed it and I was glad it was not us.

It must burn them that it was all because of a forward pass. They are kind of emotional and irrational down there on those islands in the middle of nowhere, so I better be careful what I say. They have a rather over the top piece about Jake White supposedly taking a “dig” at the All Blacks and Aussies. Richie McCaw’s shellshocked, flushed face at the post match presentation was sickening. You felt sorry for the guy. I kind of felt sorry for the All Blacks or the “ABs” as they tend to be known down there. I don’t think they deserved to lose. But it’s academic: They lost.

Next match? Australia meet New Zealand at Charles De Gaulle airport.

Viva Les Boks!

I promised myself I wouldn’t write about Facebook. Everyone’s writing and talking about it. And I just hate being part of a mob.

However part of a mob I am, as I am a Facebook user. And I need help. I must admit I love it and I love burning my company’s bandwidth while using it. I am addicted to the thing and I’m going to need to see someone about it.

But I am not alone: South Africa just happens to be one of the biggest countries on the hit social networking site at the moment. I suppose this is impressive, but we are an early adopter country. I doubt we’ll sustain this position when saturation is reached.

But it appears every Tom, Dick and Bongani is using it. All my friends are using it and all my colleagues are using it. It’s quite disturbing because it’s a place where both my professional and my personal life collide. So this means my colleagues get to see pictures of me — the upstanding media professional — in a pub, wearing a pink feather boa while slowly disintegrating one fine bachelor’s evening. My non-media friends get to see how boring I can be when I waft on about the finer mechanics of the wiki. I guess that’s life.

From a media perspective Facebook has proved to be a useful business tool. I’ve used it to create new contacts. I’ve used it to recruit staff. It works for me because I assume that if you are savvy enough to have a Facebook profile, then you are the kind of person I want working for my organisation.

At the Mail & Guardian Online, we’ve created Facebook groups and applications. Our Mail & Guardian Reader group has attracted quite a few sign-ups. We were one of the first to create a Facebook news application where users are able to add our news headlines and latest Zapiro cartoons to their profiles. We think some users will feel it’s quite handy to have news on their Facebook profiles. From our perspective, we are promoting our brand and getting readers to visit our site. And most crucially, it also allows me to surf Facebook during work hours, and call it “research”.

From a personal perspective I’ve found Facebook useful. I’ve used it to get back in touch with old friends I haven’t seen in ages. I’ve advertised my garden cottage and my second-hand DSTV decoder via the service. I now have a happy tenant and 300 bucks in my pocket.

If the significance of this is lost on you, let me put it another way: I didn’t need to advertise these in the classifieds of a newspaper or website. So it looks like Facebook has the potential to impact on this very important revenue stream of media publications. I also didn’t have to buy job listings, because I did this for free via Facebook.

Another interesting development is that I see some major South African companies advertising on Facebook. This means South African companies advertising to a South African audience by placing advertising spend on a foreign site. Although by no means unique to Facebook, the site appears to be attracting quite a bit of local adspend. It means advertising dollars are flowing out of the country and local publishers are competing with global players for a share of their own market.

Bizarre? No, it’s globalisation. And we can expect more of it. The upside is that as a South African publisher that attracts overseas readers, we should be able to attract overseas advertising revenue in other direction. It means more competition. But competition keeps us on our toes.

So it looks like the internet has produced another spoiler for traditional media models. Hold on, it’s getting choppier out there.

Originally published in Netsavvy

It’s a web 2.0 world these days. I never thought I’d use the term so frequently and freely, but it does encapsulate a new culture and way of doing things on the web. Read/Write Web — now my favourite website — has an excellent analysis of what it considers to be the Top 10 Web Trends of the future. Here is the list:

1. Semantic Web
2. Artificial Intelligence
3. Virtual Worlds
4. Mobile
5. Attention Economy
6. Web Sites as Web Services
7. Online Video / Internet TV
8. Rich Internet Apps
9. International Web
10. Personalization

On the way back from Port Elizabeth to Jo’burg on Wednesday evening, I took this shot with my cellphone of a very disturbing looking wall panel inside the plane, right where I was sitting. A gaping hole in the plane wall is not good, especially at 1 000 feet in the air. My question of course was: How far does this extend through the rest of the fuselage or is it just cosmetic? A good question.

I was already convinced the flight was jinxed (Vincent Maher was supposed to be on the flight but was mistakenly not booked). And it didn’t stop there: As the plane was ascending, an automated announcement barked over the air: “Cabin crew, prepare for refueling”. (In mid air?) And then, as we landed everyone jumped at a sudden announcement: “Pull your masks down!”.

I’m religious now.

This was the presentation that never was at Highway Africa. My session got turned into a panel discussion because it was to be broadcast on SABC.

The digital age is driving the convergence of devices and media. Convergence isn’t just a techie thing, but a fundamental change in the way we (1) create, (2) distribute and (3) consume media. At the M&G Online we have been more active in exploring the third form of convergence: READER POWER.

Essentially “readers” are being elevated from newspaper letters pages to micro-publishers. Bloggers are mini-media owners, even earning online ad revenue. Reading media is no longer an exercise in passive, one way communication .

Says Henry Jenkins, author “Convergence culture”:

“…where old and new media collide, where grassroots and corporate media intersect, where the power of the media producer and the power of the media consumer interact in unpredictable ways.”

On a converged production level: We have a weekly newspaper and a daily website, so we haven’t found that print-online convergence on a production level is that obvious. The same economies of scale and duplication of tasks just do not exist than say with a daily newspaper and a daily website.

At the Digital Citizen’s Indaba, I presented on the business issues of online media and the blogosphere, from my own experiences as a blogger and working as a media professional at the M&G Online.

Banner ads in online media are still relatively unsophisticated. The problem is that most online advertising models on media still resemble traditional media advertising models. For example, the advertising model in newspapers has merely been transplanted to the web, without really adapting the model to suit the web environment.

So it’s no wonder that a “successful” clickthrough rate on a campaign is around 0.3%. In fact, most banner ads are terribly “web 1.0″. There is still so much wastage and hit and miss (much like advertising on traditional media). The question I have is what about the other 99.7% of your users that the ad had no effect on, or at worst irritated them. The web allows us to target advertising to make it relevant and useful to readers, so why aren’t we doing this? The banner of the future will be profile based (on registration data) and have a more sophisticated understanding of who it is serving too.

In many respects Google — the world leader in just about everything online (except social networking :-) ) — has shown us what a web 2.0 advertising model looks like in their Contextual Search Advertising models such as Adsense. So clearly online media has a way to go.

I’m at the Digital Citizen’s Indaba (DCI) and the Highway Africa Conference in Grahamstown. I’ll be presenting thoughts on the “business of the web” — issues of making revenue from blogs and websites. Of course, deriving revenue from your blog and your website is the burning issue, especially if this is your primary income. It’s interesting that a report by Pew last year noted that most bloggers are not interested in making revenue, but blog mainly for leisure reasons. Certainly contextual search network advertising models, like Google adsense allow bloggers to participate in the online advertising game, the best example of longtail around.

I’m going to argue that those bloggers who actually end up making good revenue end up resembling formal media in any case — employing journalists and writers and often employing the same gate-keeping mechanisms that big media employ. So do we call these people bloggers, just because they are using Wordpress?

I’ll also be doing a talk on Convergence (or ‘Integration’ — which is the new vogue word for it) and how it has impacted the quality of content we get on the web. I was talking to Anne Taylor lastnight, who is organising the DCI, and she mentioned that digitisation, the driver of convergence, has lowered photographic standards. And she’s right — when I had my analogue brick of a camera, I would take time and effort over my photographs because I only had one shot to get it right. On my digital camera, I shoot more and take less time over the photographs. I should supposedly revisit my pictures folder and start culling, but the reality is I have lots and lots of pictures and lots and lots of noise…. so does this apply to writing too?

And then there is the perennial issue of the local conference pub, the Rat & Parrot and the convergence of drink and our bodies. Why does the quality of our conversation plummet when this happens?

The country’s leading internet analyst, Arthur Goldstuck of World Wide Worx, has published some interesting statistics on the local blogosphere. If you haven’t seen it already, he published this on his Thought Leader blog. He collated the data from a variety of blog aggregators and blog hosting platforms, including 24.com, Mweb, Amagama, and iblog. Arthur also looked at the two blog aggregators Amatomu and Afrigator to get an indication of local bloggers on independent blogs or who are part of overseas blog platforms such as Blogger.com and Wordpress.com

Here are some of his conclusions:

Number of blogs at end of August: 25 037
Percent of active blogs: 11%
Number of posts in August: 39 938

Goldstuck has calculated the readership for the blogosphere at around 621 204. This figure is unlikely to exclude duplications (a reader would be counted three times if visited three separate blog platforms), but it is never-the-less a good indication. It would also probably put bloggers, if you had to treat them as a single entity, into the top 10 of the local Online Publishers Rankings.

Also on Thought Leader

The existence of Facebook, the smash-hit social-networking site, may unwittingly kill off a host of other Web 2.0 start-ups. This is mainly because of Facebook’s inclusive and all-encompassing nature. The site appears to be blogging (lite), Twittering (short blogging), multiplayer gaming (simple games), dating, social networking, online photo management and even emailing all in one. In fact thanks to its open application system, Facebook can be almost anything you want it to be.

This Wired piece describes how Facebook has effectively killed off the once-pioneering Friendster.com, with the gloomy headline: “Friendster CEO confesses his company has trouble keeping up”:

Now that the pioneering social network [Friendster] has been pummelled into near oblivion by Facebook and MySpace, even the company’s top dog is willing to offer some probably too-candid remarks about the company’s past and future. Lindstrom said: “When you see anything working, follow it as far and as quickly as you can. Uhm, we didn’t even get to that stage because we were having trouble following other technology.”

I doubt Facebook’s inbuilt email system would replace other email clients as default email, but I can certainly see other Web 2.0 projects hurting as a result of Facebook. For example: I hadn’t yet had the time to look at the mini-blogging application called Twitter, but had resolved to do so at a later stage. But now that I am using Facebook’s Twitter-like “status updates”, I’m thinking: what’s the point of looking at Twitter? In Facebook, I now have Twitter and many other things all rolled into one.

I am also sure MySpace will take a knock from Facebook. Most MySpace sites look messy, in stark contrast to the much cleaner, minimalist style of Facebook, which seems to have also attracted an older, more educated market in addition to the youth. Anecdotally, I am also starting to hear musicians talking more about their Facebook groups than their MySpace groups. MySpace was the darling of the Web 2.0 world last year, but now all I hear is Facebook, Facebook, Facebook.

We’ve launched what I call an “editorial blog” platform, called Thought Leader — the third part of our blog strategy, after the amas — amatomu.com and amagama.com.

We’ve been trialling the site for about three weeks, ironing out bugs and getting new writers onboard. It’s a hybrid blog-media product which I think combines the best of both worlds. It aims to be a place where M&G journalists, columnists and other writers, commentators, intellectuals and opinion makers across various industries and political spectrums meet. But it’s not only a platform for some of the country’s established writers and personalities but also home to some of the country’s up-and-coming writers. We have around 40 writers signed up to it so far.

A key aspect that we were insistent on was that this was an “editorial blog” product. We needed the content to pass through an editor… old-fashioned traditional media style. So all blog content goes through our online editor Riaan Wolmarans. 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. We had the debate internally for months while conceptualising Thought Leader, deciding that all content, whether in a newspaper, a website or blog needs to go through a gate-keeping process if under our brand.

We’ve had some interesting posts, including:

• Bat-eared human rodents and the annoyance factor in politics by Ndumiso Ngcobo
• Why atheists are just plain right by Jarred Cinman
• Thabo Mbeki is quite right by Ivo Vegter
• Zim: Quiet diplomacy is the only way!
• What the Guardian’s journalism tells us about the media … and Thabo Mbeki by Robert Brand
• The Oppikoppi A-Z by Tony Lankester

and many more…

So Google is not satisfied with world domination, but wants to rule the universe too. Hey, even space shuttles need search engines. Ok, at a stretch.

So it transpires that the new version of Google Earth now comes with sky imagery or a “virtual telescope”, as Google calls it. As the official Google Earth blog says:

Today, I’m excited to announce we are launching Sky in Google Earth. You can now explore the universe from the comfort of your chair. Zoom in to distant galaxies hundreds of millions of light years away, explore the constellations, see the planets in motion, witness a supernova explosion; it’s like having a giant, virtual telescope at your command — your own personal planetarium!

The New York Times says the images were “stitched together from more than one million photographs from scientific and academic sources”, including the Hubble telescope.

According to the Times, Google says that it developed the project strictly because some of its engineers were interested in it, and that it had no plans to make money from it for now.

But it is probably only a matter of time before Mars Bar contextual search advertising pops up on your screen next to a crater on the red planet. (They wouldn’t do that, would they?)

I was surprised to see 702 morning presenter John Robbie named the week’s “Mampara” by the Sunday Times in their big exclusive Manto edition on Sunday. At first I was amused, then perplexed as I read through it.

We could laugh it off and one could dismiss the Mampara Award as nothing but light humour and satire, but it is taken seriously by many. I can think of a hundred more deserving people who the Mampara award could go to before John Robbie. In fact I don’t think he is Mampara material at all. Previous winners of the award include thieves, murderers, racists and despots. Zimbabwe’s despotic president Robert Mugabe is a regular Mampara. So it’s not hard to see that Robbie seems very out of place here.

In his morning show the next day on Monday, Robbie didn’t take a swipe at the Sunday Times. He admitted the label was “hurtful” and that he was “a bit down” as a result of his new award. While admitting that as a high profile radio presenter he was fair game, he felt this particular Mampara writ had a “personal” edge to it.

I have to agree with Robbie. Also, much of what was said was just simply not accurate, including the descriptions that he is “one of the dullest windbags ever to mug the airwaves” and “tired and unimaginative”. Call Robbie many things, but I doubt anyone — even his detractors — would describe him as “dull” or “unimaginative”. In fact Robbie is often criticised for getting a little too passionate and hot-headed at times.

I had listened to his show the previous week where he had criticised the Sunday Times — and I also disagreed with Robbie’s statements. I felt the Sunday Time’s story was newsworthy because it involved a public official in high office, but agreed with Robbie in that those were good questions to ask and debate. From a Sunday Times point of view, it was worth contesting, but hardly worth branding Robbie a Mampara.

It misses the mark for me.

Navel lint: From Wikipedia:

Navel lint, or more commonly belly button lint or navel fluff, is an accumulation of fluffy fibres in one’s navel.

Many people find that, at the beginning and end of the day, a small lump of fluff has appeared in the navel cavity. The reasons for this have been the subject of idle speculation for many years but in 2001, Dr. Karl Kruszelnicki of the University of Sydney, Australia undertook a systematic survey to determine the ins and outs of navel lint. His primary findings were as follows:

Navel lint consists primarily of stray fibers from one’s clothing, mixed with some dead skin cells and strands of body hair.

Contrary to expectations, navel lint appears to migrate upwards from underwear rather than downwards from shirts or tops. The migration process is the result of the frictional drag of body hair on underwear, which drags stray fibers up into the navel.

Women experience less navel lint because of their finer and shorter body hairs. Conversely, older men experience it more because of their coarser and more numerous hairs.

Navel lint’s characteristic blue-gray tint is likely the averaging of the colors of fibers present in clothing; the same color as clothes dryer lint.[2]

The existence of navel lint is entirely harmless, and requires no corrective action.

Dr. Kruszelnicki was awarded the Ig Nobel Prize for Interdisciplinary Research in 2002.

David Hamilton, a Toronto native, has been an avid belly button lint enthusiast for years. Travelling to many different conferences and conventions worldwide, David has become the world’s foremost expert and now holds the largest private collection of Human Navel Lint. He is currently working on developing his thesis on the nutritional benefits of ingesting navel lint.

Graham Barker of Perth, Western Australia, is in the Guinness Book of Records as the record holder for collecting navel lint. He has been collecting navel lint almost every day for over 20 years since 17th January 1984. He collects about 3.03 mg per day. Contrary to the research of Dr. Kruszelnicki, his lint is in a particular shade of red, even though he rarely wears red clothes.

Chaos broke out on the South African blogosphere recently, and it was all caused by a journalist.

Columnist David Bullard devoted not one, but two Sunday Times columns to hurling insults at bloggers, calling them “scrofulous nerds”, “narcissists”, and “wackos” whose blog sites are the “air guitars” of journalism. The affair was rather melodramatically dubbed “Bullardgate” by the blogosphere which reacted terribly seriously to Bullard’s baiting words by calling for his head.

The ironic result was that Bullard then, himself, started a new blog which rapidly shot up the blog rankings as he continued to spew provocative invective against bloggers, in amongst the odd car review. His blog became an overnight success as his abusive mutterings actually started to grow on bloggers.

Not all journalists chose to launch their blogs on a wave of controversy. Ray Hartley, editor of the new daily The Times, took an unprecedented step for a major newspaper editor by starting a blog describing the behind-the-scenes process of getting his paper up and running. Hartley, too, built up a fair audience in a short amount of time and in fact broke the very first images of the newspaper’s mockups on the blogosphere. The blog certainly played its part in drumming up some free buzz about the new paper.

The blogosphere is not entirely a new place for many South African journalists. Anton Harber, former Mail & Guardian editor who is now a journalism professor, has been blogging about media issues on a quiet, but intelligent, blog called The Harbinger for some time now. Harber was probably the first major media professional to take the plunge. One of the country’s biggest online publishers, IOL, has also been running an editorial blog for a while now looking at editorial issues, called “Inside IOL”.

Even the Financial Mail recently joined the blogosphere. In fact one of the reasons award-winning journalist, Duncan McLeod, started his blog, FM Tech, was that he had grown frustrated watching the dailies and websites scoop his weekly magazine. For McLeod blogging is another important outlet for his opinions on his beat in the IT industry.

McLeod’s new blog is an example of how media can make blogs work for them. In only a couple of months of its existence the blog shortly secured its first advertising contract and built up a growing community, providing plenty of commentary.

Says McLeod: “I am hoping to attract a younger audience than reads the FM print edition. But hopefully the blog will entice people into reading the print edition, too. I want to use the print medium to drive people to the blog and the blog to drive people to print.”

However, for now, he says the bread and butter is with print. McLeod reasons that if he has breaking news that he knows will stay exclusive to him, he would typically publish it in the FM magazine first. But if there’s a good chance that his story would be scooped, he’d then take it to his blog first.

Journalists hitting the blogosphere is a trend that brings together two powerful publishing formats. A weakness of blogging, unlike traditional journalism, is a lack of adherence to recognised codes of conduct or ethics. On the other hand, blogs are perhaps able to deliver stories in a more conversational and informal way than traditional journalism.

So, potentially, what we have here are blogs by journalists that draw on the strengths of both journalism and blogging. That’s a powerful publishing blend.

Originally from Net Savvy

Jimmy Wales, the Wikipedia boss, has now detailed how he plans to take on Google, the search behemoth. Google is so good and so powerful, you get the feeling that competitors are at a bit of a loss on how exactly to take the search giant on.

Even Microsoft, which has never run away from a fight, appears to be at a loss. During the Browser Wars of the 90s, Microsoft famously destroyed Netscape from complete market dominance to utter ruin in a period of about six years, making Internet Explorer the dominant browser of today.

This is confirmation of what Jimmy Wales told me on a trip to Cape Town recently. He told me it would be “fun” to launch a Google and Yahoo rival. He also said it would be a different kind of competition — that he would compete with the online giants “in a radically different, public, transparent way”.

vnunet.com reports that the search project plans to launch by the end of 2007 and will combine human-assisted editing with computer-controlled searches. Earlier this year Wales’ commercial startup company, Wikia, purchased the rights to web crawler platform Grub. Grub users download a program which makes uses of their computer’s processing power while the machine is left idle. If widely adopted, such an arrangement could reduce the need for Wikia to set up a web crawling network of its own.

Wales plans to base his search algorithms on a combination of human input and computer-driven technology. Is the search scene set for a shakeup?

Did this interview with Intelligence Magazine on Wikipedia… If you want to see the full interview buy the magazine…

Intelligence Mag: How valuable do you consider Wikipedia as a reference source?

Me: I think Wikipedia is a valuable reference source, but that readers should be on guard when they use Wikipedia material. I would use Wikipedia as a starting point for gathering information on topics, and then move on to other reference sources. I would always use wikipedia in tandem with more traditional encyclopedias such as Britannica.

- Do you use Wikipedia?

Yes, I use Wikipedia as an occasional reference source.

- What is your take on the quality of the information provided?

For me the idea of wikipedia is utopian, yet it does appear to be working. Or maybe it isn’t working because it has yet to stand the true test, which is the test of time? As more high-profile inaccuracies or acts of vandalism start appearing on wikipedia over the years, like we have seen recently, maybe the tide will turn on the project and public opinion will turn. Maybe it will be innacurate information used from wikipedia that will lead to a high-profile blunder or calamity? Maybe Wikipedia will shut its doors to the public and further retreat behind registration? But maybe none of this will happen and the project will succeed, get stronger and be the seemingly-utopian realisation of collective collaboration? Anecdotally, from my own limited experience, I have not come across a problem with the quality of the information, however I think the model has weaknesses and is open to abuse.

- As an working professional, do you feel Wikipedia is a strong enough reference?

I regularly use wikipedia as a source in my blog or when writing articles on certain subjects. For research and strategy proposals or if I need very technical information, I generally look elsewhere. I find Wikipedia a good starting point for gathering information, but then move onto other reference sources.

- How important is it (academically) for a reference to come from a knowledgeable and professional source, i.e. journals?

It depends on what you use that information for. If its for an academic paper I think it is imperative that the source is from reputable, knowledgable person who is an expert in his or her field. The problem with wikipedia is you don’t really know who is behind those edits.

- In the age of technology, is Encyclopedia Britannica obsolete?

I think Encyclopedia Britannica is far from obselete, but I do think they need to overhaul their online presence. This is where wikipedia is beating Britannica hands down. Wikipedia has a much more sophisticated web presence. But the fact that wikipedia is stronger online is not a statement about the respective content of the encyclopedias.

I think there is value in the traditional publisher model such as Britannica. I think Britannica should embrace citizen media: allow users to comments and write their own entries similar to wikipedia, but they should always keep the original entry written by qualified experts in their field, sacrosanct — and that would be the difference with wikipedia.

I have never believed citizen media will “replace” traditional media models. Organised, corporate structures with incentives (such as salaries) produce quality and get the best out of human beings. It’s worked for centuries. But also in the citizen media sphere: the pressure of social ties, idea of doing good and maintaining a reputation is also powerful in promoting quality. These are not necessarily competing models and I think both could work in tandem. Perhaps the citizen media model still has to stand the test of time however.

- What do you think the benefits of Wikipedia are?

Wikipedia is fast and web friendly and generally more up-to-date than print encyclopedias. It has a large selection of entries. It embraces user participation and community, and is transparent in the way changes are made to entries.

And the cons (when compared to a more formal print dictionary/encyclopedia)

A major difference between Wikipedia and publications like Britannica is that publishers have to ensure that their data is reliable, as their livelihood and reputations depend on it. With Wikipedia’s largely anonymous reader base there doesn’t appear to be that same pressure. I’ve met with Jimmy Wales in person and chatted about this: his counter argument to this is that the pressure of social ties, idea of doing good and maintaining a reputation is also powerful in promoting quality of content. Wales also says that the community is self-regulating. For example if there is false or erroneous information on Wikipedia, it will be corrected by the collective community. But my question is: what happens in between the time Wikipedia carries that false informatin and the time it takes for the community to correct it? Do readers just unwittingly pick up false information from wikipedia?

- Unlike an encyclopedia, online collective references are almost topic dependant – one is more likely to research something in the IT field than a medical issue for example. What does this say about validity?

I think Wikipedia is strong on certain topics and weak on others and this is a reflection of the demographics of its community. For example, it is very strong on technical and computer topics, but weak on topics like child care.

This is killer. CNN.com mentioned Afrigator as a hot web 2.0 startup. Afrigator is the Africa-focused blog aggregator by Justin Hartman and Mike Stopforth. Nice. Very nice guys. Just noticed that my evil twin, who called me about it on the way back from work, also blogged about it here.

This is the second time an SA Web 2.0 project has cracked a mention. Neville Newey’s muti, a local Digg, was also recognised by CNN some time ago. Nice to see these cool, local projects on the world map.

South African blog aggregator Amatomu.com as of today clocked over one-million clickthroughs back to the local blogosphere. We started tracking the clickthroughs around about the beginning of April, so the million clickthroughs have been generated in a period of about four months. Amatomu has been running for about five months since March 2007. Amatomu is now tracking around 120 000 daily combined blog page impressions, which is about the equivalent of a mid-sized traditional online publisher in local terms.

It will be interesting to hear from bloggers where Amatomu features in their blog traffic referrer lists. There is a “nofollow” tag on all the amalinks, so to some extent this should prevent search engines from distorting the clickthrough numbers. (UPDATE: Rob has corrected me on this point below). The clickthrough stat for us is the stat that is paramount. The point of amatomu.com is not to horde traffic ala web 1.0 style but to send traffic out to its community: the blogosphere.

South Africa has a new Google boss.

Stafford Masie, the former head of Novell South Africa and a relative unknown outside IT circles, has been appointed the new South Africa Google head, reports ITWeb and Mail & Guardian Online.

It’s taken them a while to find the person. The job has been advertised for over two years via the Google website. I know quite a few people — mainly in the online media sector — who were interviewed for the job, and the option they went for, someone who works for a software company, is an interesting choice. At first glance it looks like a safe, but good choice. It probably gave Google comfort that they were appointing someone who worked for a local arm of a US-based company and had international experience in the IT sector. I’m also pretty sure I have an inkling of another South African who was offered the job, but didn’t get it, because I believe he was asking too much.

Tectonic reports that Masie has spent time working in the US and has been a key, and outspoken, figure in the open source and Linux movement in the country.

Given that Google’s strategy is all determined in the US — you would expect the local position to primarily be that of implementation with a strong sales function to push the use of Google adsense/adwords. After all Google is mainly an advertising agency these days if you go by where its revenue streams are derived from. And yes, it’s a search engine too.