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	NEW MEDIA, WEB 2.0 & TECHNOLOGY

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It’s probably been the worst kept secret in the industry, but now that it is out on Bizcommunity there is no point in not going public.

I can confirm that after 8 years I am leaving the Mail & Guardian Online to pursue another opportunity. I feel that I’m leaving on a high note, with the business in excellent shape and the new website and CMS developed and launched. It’s been an emotional process for me as I am entertwined with the brand and have quite a bit of loyalty to it and respect for the M&G Exco (Trevor Ncube, Ferial Haffajee, Hoosain Karjieker, Anastacia Martin, Mendo Letlape), who I consider to be some of the leading media minds in the country.

Eight years is a long time for any online person, who are accustomed to job hopping every two years (!) , but the Mail & Guardian has been such a great place to work in that it has been difficult for me to think about going anywhere else. There is an entrepreneurial, innovative flair here that you do not see in many other businesses.

In recent years we have launched 11 new websites and online businesses (including Thought Leader, Tech Leader, Sports Leader, amatomu, jobconnection.co.za, theguide.co.za, newsinphotos), 7 new mobile sites, and redesigned and relaunched the M&G Online with a brand-new CMS. The site’s traffic has grown 9-fold in the last 6 years and online revenues have grown 21-fold. We grew the online department from 2 people to 17 people, keeping it at break even or profitable most of the time, which is no easy task.

It’s been the best 8 years of my life and the online business will continue to grow and thrive, especially with the strong managers in the department which include our online sales manager Bryan Khumalo and online editor Riaan Wolmarans and the new talent we have brought onboard, including the young Nic Haralambous. It also means the company is advertising for a new GM — if you think you have what it takes, then get hold of me.

Coincidentally my partner in crime, Vincent Maher, is also departing for another opportunity — and I can’t begin to express how great is has been to work with a person who I consider to be one of the most brilliant minds in the online industry.

So, this then, is an excuse for a piss up — and if you are up for a party — please join us @ Capitol, in Rosebank on Friday (cnr Keyes ave & Tyrwhitt ave, ph: 011 880 0033) from 5pm onwards. You’re invited.

We’ve added related articles with a twist at the M&G Online. We’re relating articles from external news sites, including our competitors. We are also including related posts from blogs with our articles. The feeds still need a bit of tweaking, but the idea is there.

Just did this interview with a publication. Thought I’d publish it here.

Does a newspaper’s online platform cannabalise the print advertising at all? And what about print readers- will the online platform steal readers away from the print title?

It’s time to move on from using words like “cannabalise” and “steal” with reference to the print-online relationship. We should stop using these words. A media company’s objective is to secure readership and advertising revenue from across a variety of platforms, whether print, online or mobile. It’s really about what the readers want and the format they want it in. Readers will use the platforms they want to use, and it’s rather difficult for any media company to disagree. A media owner needs to ensure his or her content is on a variety of platforms to capture as many readers as possible.

Are you finding that newspaper ad revenues are moving online increasingly?

Personally, I’ve witnessed ad revenue growth in both print and online. If a print publication can offer a certain niched readership that an advertiser wants to access, then the advertiser will look at that print publication. It’s not all doom and gloom for print, as this is happening now. While online advertising is growing rapidly, I don’t see advertisers abandoning magazines and newspapers in any hurry. If I were running a big newspaper with strong online and mobile sister brands, I would be a very happy media owner.

And how does the profile of the online advertiser differ from that of print advertisers? What about the profile of readers, generally speaking?

It’s difficult to generalise as brands vary. At the Mail & Guardian, the online version attracts a bigger, broader readership than the newspaper, which is weekly and niched. Then of course any online brand is not confined by geographic boundaries like many print publication and attracts a world-wide readership. I think online publications should use Google Adsense and other contextual advertising models to monetise their international traffic as well as their archived content. Content never dies online. It keeps being accessed again and again and you can sell advertising revenue off it till the world ends.

Does the online advertisement offer more value, or measurability or better results or more cost saving, compared with traditional newspaper advertising?
Online advertising is both measureable, flexible and — if the online publication knows what they are doing — can be highly targeted. On a broader, philosophical level however I think the online advertising model could be optimised more: to some extent we, as an industry, have taken a traditional advertising model and applied it to an online environment with some tweaks here and there. I think it could work better. Personally I think media owners locally and internationally should come together to create a big online advertising network that works across brands and that is contextually relevant.

Why did M&G decide to launch a new website?

Our old site had become outdated and inflexible. We needed a new site with a contemporary design, better features, optimised advertising and all built on an infrastructure that would allow us to grow. We feel we have that now.

And, has the economic downturn had an impact on your ad revenues, online? Any strategies in place, moving forward, to deal with the economic crunch?

I don’t think the economic downturn will impact significantly on the growth of online advertising. If anything, in times of economic slowdown companies will use the internet to optimise their business and transact even more because doing business online is cheaper and more efficient. This will lead to more online advertising business, not less. I think the online advertising community will be saying: “What economic downturn?”

And what new applications are there on this site? Any new and exciting tools that marketers and advertisers should know about? Any advertising innovations? (Social networking, or cool news tools, for example, where brands and advertisers can get involved)

Some key features include registration of users which allows us to profile users and serve targeted content and advertising. Each user now gets a dashboard which allows them to save article clippings and view their browsing history. We’re also building a “story predictor” which will suggest stories to users that we think they will like, based on their surfing history. There are many other things we can do with the dashboard on a social networking level, which I can speak about closer to when we launch them.

We’re also one of the few websites in the world to introduce semantic tagging of our articles, which allows us to extract data from our articles, including place names, people names and company names. This allows us to do quite a bit of powerful cross-referencing on the site. Simply put — this gives computers the ability to “understand” what the articles are about, which then allows us to do powerful things with them.

When advertisers look to placing ads on newspaper websites, what should they consider, both in terms of format of the ad, and in terms of the measurement (eg pay per click) models? What works and what doesn’t?
There are many sites and models out there that you can choose from. The basics apply equally to online advertising as any other format of advertising. Ensure the campaign is a good fit. If you don’t want a branding campaign and don’t have a big budget then use Google Adsense. If you want a branding campaign as well as the leads, then use an online publisher. I’d recommend you use both.

How do advertisers to the website drive traffic to their ads, and then, to their websites?
Like any other ad — it’s about the message, the design and how targeted the placement is. The message should be compelling and relevant. You can really stand out by looking at new formats such as video and audio.

Firefox is a brilliant browser. It’s also fast. I discarded Internet Explorer (IE) about two years ago. It wasn’t an ideological decision, I wasn’t trying to make a point… it’s just that Firefox is a better browser. I still have IE7 on my laptop, but use it only for testing purposes. I find it slow when it browses and hangs longer when you load it. Compared to Firefox, Internet Explorer is just, well kuk.

I couldn’t wait for the new Firefox, so have been downloading the beta versions. I’m currently on FireFox 3 beta 5, which I’ve found to be even faster. It’s not just about speed, but the functionality. It was Firefox that first introduced tabbed browsing (which Explorer promptly copied), and the latest version has a useful feature which remembers which sites you were last on when it’s shut down. I wonder how long it will take Microsoft to copy this feature for Explorer?

So Firefox should be supported. I noticed via The Grid Blog that the folks at Firefox are trying to set a Guinness World Record for most software downloads in 24 hours for the final release of Firefox 3. All you have to do is download Firefox 3 on June 17, 2008.

To participate, you need to go to the official website and make a pledge to download the browser. Only about 4,000 South Africans (indicated on the map below) have pledged to download the browser so far… surely, we can do better than that?

So if Firefox has worked for you, then make your pledge now!

Lots of pizza and beer. Spot the mascot.

Pics here.

Open Calais is a Thomson Reuters initiative that automatically generates rich semantic metadata from the content you submit to it. For the relaunch of the Mail & Guardian Online, Africa’s oldest news site, my colleague Vincent Maher ran our site’s historic database, dating back to 1994, through the service.

What happened next was amazing.

We were returned a set of tags for each article in our database, identifying people, city, country and company names. It’s allowed us to group stories by country or city, as well as by people or company names, and serve related data — all automatically. We can also use the Calais data to generate tag clouds for each section of the site. Semantically structuring your articles means a computer “understands” your content. We’ve only used it to do the basics for now, but the potential is astounding.

For example, using your content as a starting point, you can utilise Calais to automatically add metadata such as entities (people, places, organizations, etc.), facts (John Doe work for Acme Corporation as the CEO), and events (a natural disaster of type landslide happened on date x).

Calais says it goes well beyond classic entity identification and returns the facts and events hidden within your text as well. This metadata gives you the ability to build maps (or graphs or networks) linking documents to people to companies to places to products to events to geographies to… whatever.Calais says publishers can use those maps to improve site navigation, provide contextual syndication, tag and organize your content, create structured folksonomies, filter and de-duplicate news feeds, or analyse content to see if it contains what you care about.

Calais says on their website: “We want to make all the world’s content more accessible, interoperable and valuable. Some call it Web 2.0, Web 3.0, the Semantic Web or the Giant Global Graph - we call our piece of it Calais.”

Compare a site like Facebook to your average news site. Facebook knows almost everything about its users, because they are registered and profiled. It has a close, sophisticated relationship with its users that many sites can only dream about. Yes, this is the nature of a social networking site, but why should news sites miss out? The average news site does not have this kind of knowledge about their users. Of course there are exceptions, but I’d argue this is the norm.

For example, compare the relationship Facebook has with a user like me, to the relationship that a generalist news site like CNN.com has with me. CNN.com doesn’t know I exist, Facebook knows all about me.

Privacy concerns about profiling users are generally trumped up and overblown, because the point of collecting information is to allow a site to deliver more relevant content, services and advertising to the user, not to invade their privacy. In any case, a user enters into a trust relationship with the news brand, which reputable news brands will not abuse. It’s a non-issue.

For the new M&G Online site, users will now get dashboards which allow us to deliver rich content and functionality. There are no blocks on content — users can access all articles without needing to register, but to take advantage of advanced features on the site, they need to be registered. A news site has to ensure that the features are compelling enough to make most of your users want to register with the site.

Late nights at the office. What weekend? What public holiday? Here’s a snippet of some of the new site features. Registered users are getting dashboards, allowing us to profile users and serve more targeted content, advertising and develop a closer, better relationship with readers.

—- SNIP —-

Register with the Mail & Guardian Online and take advantage of the advanced functionality built for your browsing pleasure:

• Save clippings of your favourite articles and publish on your clippings blog
• StoryPredictor™: Articles suggested according to your interests
• Manage your newsletter subscriptions
• Use advanced article printing functionality
• StoryHistory™: Articles saved while you browse
• NewsFeed: Add blog and news feeds from other sources
• Receive special announcements from the M&G Online
• Comment on all articles
• ReadersChoice™: Vote stories up or down, and add stories from other sites

—- SNIP —-

Ok, one thing we should expect for a while are plenty rumours over local release dates for the iPhone. I don’t think Vodacom actually know when they are getting the phone and I am sure they are at the whim of Apple. And Apple would never ever change the goalposts from time to time, would they?

I’ve been privy to information from a senior birdy at Vodacom that we are apparently in number 3 spot in the queue of countries, presumably in the Vodafone group. I doubt it’s #3 in the grouping of the original 22 countries where it will be released July 11, but it also could be reasonable to assume we could be number 3 out of the 70 other countries.

The senior birdy also actually admitted they are not exactly sure when the group will be getting the iPhone. It could be the case, however, that this senior birdy doesn’t know, himself. There was earlier speculation that it may be July 20, which since the announcement may be looking a little early — but despite a bit of skepticism, you never know and it is entirely plausible… this is Vodacom, part of the powerful Vodafone group, that we are talking about. As they say, time will tell.

Just got word from Elan Lohman, distant cousin of Lindsay Lohan, that Wheels24 has relaunched. I think their design still needs a bit more work and there are still a few gaps here and there, but its a great effort. I like the overall navigation and the site is well structured. More significantly, however, it is the first 24.com site to be launched on the company’s new global content management system (CMS) that they built in-house… no small task for a web publishing company that attracts near 3-million UUs monthly. Congrats guys.

I was listening to the Apple WWDC event’s iPhone announcements live on ustream, following the excellent live blogging on Engadget, and also keeping up with the lively micro blogging commentary. The announcement everyone was waiting for took ages to come, but eventually it came. There was nothing majorly earth shattering, actually. Most of the new iPhone 2.0 features had been speculated by blogs and media ad nauseam months before, including GPS and the cheaper price. Here is a summary of the main iPhone 2.0 features:

• The new iPhone is eventually being rolled out to more than 70 countries this year, as opposed to just the (official) six for the original iPhone. 22 countries will get it very soon.
• It will be 3G and will have GPS… but does this mean it will feature HSDPA? Why was there no mention of HSDPA? Or is 3G a blanket term for HSDPA in this case? Am I missing something here?
• iPhone 3G will sell for only $199 (8GB) up to $399 for the macdaddy version, and this will apply all around the world.
• The iPhone 3G is allegedly 36% faster than the nokia N95 and Treo 750. I’m sure we’ll be seeing some hasty PR from these companies later on tomorrow.
• The phone has thinner edges, a full plastic back, and a flush headphone jack. There appears to be no front-facing camera. The 16GB version is white in colour.

Above is a world map showing country distribution of the iPhone 2.0, including even … Madagascar. Note that South Africa is one of the red countries, confirming earlier speculation about the SA iPhone launch on July 20 (apparently a Sunday?), or thereabouts.

We’ve launched our third Leader site in Sports Leader this week. It’s been toil and trouble for Nic Haralambous and our devs who have put together a fine site. This follows Tech Leader and Thought Leader which we launched a while back. On Sports Leader we’ve already seen traffic which could eventually make it bigger than Thought Leader.

It’s a fairly unique publishing model, which has broken all the traditional media conventions of publishing.

Insights we’ve had

1. The Thought Leader model is a hybrid of the blog and media model, bringing the best of both models to create a powerful publishing blend.

2. The aim was to take the addictive features of blogging and transmute it into a new platform — with rankings, stats, trackbacks, comments, and instant feedback.

3. Early on we decided that it would be edited and that our editor would only select strong content for the homepage — this would be where the media model combines with the blog model. Nothing appears on the site without going through our editors. All content is moderated and subject to traditional editor gatekeeping. (We’ve now relaxed this on Sports Leader and Tech Leader comments as an experiment).

4. Making influential people part of your site attracts networks and builds audience, quickly.

5. User-generated content from a closed, selected network of users works best. It also ensures a high-quality product. This is how media can harness user intelligence, intelligently. I don’t believe media should be complete hands-off blog hosters like Blogger.com for just any content. Media is about quality content, and that is its key differentiator. Media are control freaks about their content. They should be proud of this fact.

6. Having a budget of near zero should not deter you. There are a good many writers out there where writing is a secondary activity and represents more passion than profession. Academics and many commentators have this approach. Not everyone writes for the bucks. But compensation does come in the form of quid pro quo: The writers get an area for their profiles, where they may promote themselves. Some see value in this, some don’t.

7. The model we created allows for niche bloggers to come on board the site. We can accept an unlimited amount of columnists and contributors on a variety of subjects. It’s a vertical model too: Users can bookmark niche columnists, that may not make it to the Thought Leader homepage.

8. Some of our paid columnists write for us for free on Thought Leader. We are still trying to work out why. I guess the Thought Leader model is “Columnists 2.0″.

9. Wordpress is one of the most efficient CMS’s I have ever used. I can’t speak more highly of the platform.

10. We drew inspiration from the Guardian’s Comment is Free, one of my favourite sites, but we followed a different model.

An early design mockup of Thought Leader, then just known as “Blogs”, which went through many toing and froing sessions between Vincent Maher and myself. It’s changed quite a bit now.

Some firsts

1. It was mentioned in Sunday Times’s Hogarth column (Ferial Haffajee vs Ronald Suresh Roberts). It was also featured internationally on Editor & Publisher by online media guru Steve Outing.

2. Thought Leader scooped both SA Blog of the year and best political blog, and was named a “Webby Honoree“, in the same company of brands like NY Times.com; New Yorker and CNN, to name a few.

3. We’ve had both Minister of Education Naledi Pandor and Official opposition DA Leader Helen Zille reply in their personal capacities in the comments on specific blogs. Will Carling, the famous former England Rugby Captain, commented on John Allen’s Sports Leader post.

4. In an “experiment gone horribly wrong” Ndumiso Ncgobo covered the ANC conference as a blogger on Thought Leader. It’s the first such time in the country’s history that a blogger has been accredited to attend a political conference alongside journalists.

5. A Thought Leader blogger was ostensibly fired for blogging information about his company on the platform. By his own choice, he no longer writes on Thought Leader.

6. The site has generated online advertising revenue almost from day one, and it is revenue we hope to plow back into the product. One day we hope to come up with a model to pay contributors a portion of it when it becomes significant. We have created a sponsorship model we are piloting which splits revenue 50/50 with some bloggers.

7. The first real blog statistics about the country were broken by Arthur Goldstuck on the Thought Leader.

8. Our most prolific writer Michael Trapido aka Traps is now a regular BBC commentator based on his Thought Leader posts. It has generated him so much business as a lawyer he now “picks and chooses” what he works on and who he works with.

9. Ndumiso Ncgobo has received so many offers to write since being exposed on Thought Leader, he does not know where to turn, or been able to find the time to pick up the chair he left at my house.

10. Readers weren’t just commentors, but we invited them to submit their own contributions for the successful reader blog

11. The Mandela Rhodes Scholars joined us for a group blog, soon to be joined by another group blog by the Oxford Rhodes Scholars.

The stats

1. The site has generated 4,104,523 Words in Comments and 1,614,256 Words in Posts

2. The site has in total received: 2,679,075 reads (figure not de-deduplicated)

3. Out of 1,871 posts from about 170 bloggers, we’ve only rejected 5 or 6. We aim to sign up 500 more Thought Leaders by this time next year.

4. Out of 30,293 comments, we’ve rejected plenty.

5. The site, not yet a year old, receives more than 80 000 monthly unique browsers/readers and just over 300 000 page impressions. This is now around 1/5 of the total M&G Online readership. (Nielsen//Netratings readership figure).

Convergence

1. We reversed much of the content into the Mail & Guardian newspaper, sometimes the full blog. I believe it’s probably the first time that blog content has featured so prominently on any major SA newspaper. It’s also been a hunting ground for new writing talent.

2. Some of our journalists blog on it. Most of the online staff, the Mail & Guardian CEO and Mail & Guardian newspaper Editor in Chief also got blogging. We need more print journalists to blog…

3. Some of our journalists were helped by the ideas and comments from readers, and managed to adjust their writing around this.

4. Its the second time a major print editor has blogged, the first was Ray hartley

Other points

1. Tony Lankester created the spoof Mbeki Facebook and inbox which went viral.

2. We tried to republish the erstwhile Mbeki ANC Letter on the site under Mbeki’s name, but we were not granted permission.

The people who make it happen
Lastly it’s the people involved who have made it happen, notably Vincent Maher (Strategist), Riaan Wolmarans (Online Editor) and now Nic Haralambous (Business manager) and Kerry Haggard (sub), and our new devs Tumelo Mphafe (dev) and Joseph Msika (dev) who put the new Sports Leader together.

According to tech journalist and Stuff Magazine editor Toby Shapshak, Vodacom will be launching the new 3G iphone, also popularly know as the “iPhone 2.0″, on July 20.

Vodacom’s launch is part of a 10-country deal that Vodafone announced last month, confirming speculation over the iPhone announcement. The phone is purportedly slimmer and sleaker than the first generation iPhone. It also now apparently comes in three new colours. But, most importantly, it is a 3G phone. The first iPhone was hailed for breaking new paradigms with its sexy user interface, but — confusingly — was a mere tractor with only GPRS and Edge speeds. It was one heck of a beautiful tractor, but a tractor none-the-less.

Apple is expected to unveil the new iPhone later today, ending widespread speculation over its features. I’d like to see it come with GPS and slideout keyboard — but it is unlikely to have these features. The only absolute certainty is that it will be a faster, 3G phone. Let’s wait and see.

I think I’m going to gets me one.

It looks like Internet Solutions (IS) may be creating some kind of incubator or venture capital fund to encourage local web innovation and startups. The details are sketchy at this stage, but it in fact looks like the new initiative will launch as soon as this month, possibly middle of the month, with the launch of their website.

I’ve been promised further clarity on the new venture in the coming weeks. I am guessing there is some Ronnie Apteker influence in this, as Ronnie has been travelling the world lately looking at new online ventures to invest in. Apteker was the founder of Internet Solutions and still continues to play a role at the company.

If Internet Solutions are indeed looking at a local incubator, it will be good news for local web industry, which is seeing a raft of new web 2.0 startups from local innovators.

UPDATE: I’ve been told that the new initiative is taking on a role of an “incubator of good ideas” and “getting people to think about the South African internet…” — but with this comes a funding angle, perhaps connecting entrepreneurs with VCs or providing advice, or perhaps funding.

My father, Andrew, is blogging about life at the Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas. Both he and my younger brother, Daniel, joined the outfit about a month ago and are already performing. If you’re interested in an insider perspective of a South African actor at the world-famous Cirque in Las Vegas — you can read about it at abuckland.com

On Sunday night I found myself at the launch party of the new E-news 24-hour satellite channel at the exclusive Melrose arch rooftop venue. The black-tie event was awash with blue, with plasmas, media executives and a few parliamentarians. It was a slick launch and full of the glamour you would expect from a TV business on the up.

And it was an historic moment. It is the country’s very first 24-hour local satellite news channel. There is a need and gap in the market so large for such a service, that it is bound to work. Add to this the strong, feisty, independent news brand that E has built up over the years on terrestrial TV and you have the recipe for a clear winner.

There were speeches by CEO Marcel Golding, Group Editor Deborah Patta and Multichoice CEO Nolo Letele. Marcel delivered a passionate talk saying that this new channel serves to strengthen the country’s democracy, especially during the difficult times we find ourselves in. He noted that people in power may not like what is reported of them, but that the reportage is undertaken with fairness and integrity. He said that E was fully aware of the editorial responsibility that comes with such an undertaking. Marcel was also particularly proud of the fact that the new channel was built up using local people and indigenous talent rather than importing executives from overseas. To howls of laughter he said that the thing with a launch of a 24-hour news service is that “once it starts, it can’t be stopped”.

And start it did. The faces of Redi Direko and Jeremy Maggs beamed down on us after a countdown by the crowd. It sent shivers down my spine and champagne down my gullet. It was great to witness and be a part of.

I spent most of the evening with Hoosain Karjieker, my COO at M&G, who mentioned that if I continue blogging events like these, I could stake a claim to become the “Gwen Gill of blogging”. (Um, thanks, I think). I also spent some quality time with Maverick and Empire Editor Branko Brkic, who proudly admitted he doesn’t own a tie… and never will. I also brushed past the president’s brother Moeletsi Mbeki, Johnny Copelyn (HCI CEO), and Snuki Zikalala, who was in an in-depth and animated conversation with a journalist. I also hung out with a few of the people from Curious Pictures. On my way out I bumped into Sapa (South African Press Association) boss Will Davis who mentioned with a wry smile that it was time for re-negotiation to which I pleaded poverty and then made a mental note to change my cell number.

It was a great launch for a great initiative that has added a major voice to the local media landscape. I wish them success.

For the new Mail & Guardian Online that we are launching later next month we’ve had quite a few discussions and workshops about the navigation. It was a unanimous decision early on that we would opt for a top nav, discarding the left nav we currently have, which we feel is outdated and cluttered. We’ve also consolidated the sections, creating a few “super sections”, as we figure we currently have too many which dilute the offering from a content and advertising perspective.

The navigation meetings we’ve had have been involved… deciding how you structure your content is a decision based on understanding the tradeoffs: how users surf your site, what’s intuitive, what content is core to your business, what content is available to your business, what your general strategic direction is, available space, what’s best practice, which sections follow parent-child relationships and so on. Some decisions are obvious and follow best practice, such as on a news site, the news section is the key and a regional approach is general advised for your subsections.

We also decided early on that we would need to follow a balancing act between innovation, originality, creativity and what we regard as international best practice for website creation in the news genre. For the M&G Online, a big consumer news site, the overall structure, navigation and look & feel has to comply to best practice and be intuitive to a wide audience, but with pockets of innovation here and there. It’s no good creating an extremely innovative site that brings in new navigation and content paradigms that your users may or may not get.

We also have world-class examples to draw from and the sites that have inspired us include the Washingtonpost.com, NYTimes.com, The Guardian Unlimited and www.theage.com.au.

So below is the proposal for the new nav so far… it’s not finalised yet. We still have a few more meetings on it to go. There are three levels of navigation: Top level (eg: news), sub category (eg: national) and third level (eg: courts). The third level isn’t shown below.

PROPOSED NAV BAR FOR M&G ONLINE 2.0

HOME (only on secondary pages)

NEWS
NATIONAL | AFRICA | WORLD | AND IN OTHER NEWS … | ZAPIRO | WEATHER

OPINION
COMMENT & ANALYSIS | COLUMNISTS | LETTERS | BODY LANGUAGE | OBITUARIES | CORRECTIONS

BUSINESS
BUSINESS NEWS | M&G MONEY

SPORT
SPORT NEWS | SOCCER | RUGBY | CRICKET | TENNIS | GOLF | ATHLETICS | MOTOR RACING | OTHER SPORT

LIFESTYLE
ARTS | TRAVEL | MOTORING | TECHNOLOGY

THE GUIDE

SPECIAL REPORTS
….

BLOGS
THOUGHT LEADER | TECH LEADER | SPORTSLEADER | AMAGAMA | AMATOMU

Notes:
- Editorials and Weekly Wrap form part of Comment & Analysis page
- Special Reports can change to feature various reports
- Partner Sites have promos elsewhere (Good News, Teacher, Campus Times)

Below is a screenshot of my Outlook inbox. You will notice a recurring theme. It’s bounce backs from a Thought Leader mailshot that, my colleague and friend, Vincent Maher sent out to around 15 000 people. What did I do to deserve this punishment??

So now I owe him one for this. Any suggestions on how I get him back? Since he’s not on Twitter anymore — please suggest revenge options via my twitter account.

There have been several attempts by media to harness the beast of the wiki. It appears that so far the wiki has eluded mainstream publishers. It’s just proved too unweildy and scary for those that like to call themselves “the gatekeepers”.

Of course, the most famous of all attempts by a publisher to use a wiki was the LA Times wiki-editorial experiment that eventually degenerated into pornography. Publishers just haven’t been able to find the magic ingredient that makes the mother of all wikis, the famous Wikipedia, one of the most successful sites in the world.

So it’s with interest that I stumbled on Wired magazine’s “How to” wiki. I only noticed the wiki now, despite being a regular reader of Wired’s site and magazine — but it’s been around for while. Importantly, it hasn’t degenerated into nonsense. Wired.com have obviously found a way to make it work, but also keep it in line with their editorial principles.

How, I wonder? Maybe it’s because they are a niche player (technology site) or perhaps they have a strong, watchful community behind it, which, of course, is wikipedia’s secret.

Been meaning to write about this for a while now. The ZA Tech show, journalists “indulging in beer and opinion”, is fast turning out to be one of the country’s top podcasts. This week’s podcast, with Simon Dingle, Ben Kelly, Brett Haggard, Jon Tullett and Duncan McLeod, is particularly good. They have the hilarious David Bullard as a guest… love him or hate him, he’s hilarious. Bullard speaks about his firing from the Sunday Times over his controversial column, and his relationship with editor Mondli Makhanya.

They also look at the “future of media” with Stuff Editor and gadget guru Toby Shapshak and discuss the future of print and newspapers. I think newspapers will be around for while, they’ll just become more niched. In many senses, it’s almost non-sensical to talk about the death of newspapers or magazines when they are still cash cows for their organisations. It’s also an irony that most original online quality journalism is derived from newspapers whereas online news sites tend to carry wire reports or be aggregators, yet it is print that is under threat. Yahoo! which has one of the biggest news sites in the world has only a handful of reporters. And let’s be frank, although blogging is a wonderfully democratic expression of online publishing — bloggers just don’t have the resources, co-ordination or training to produce investigative reporting on the same scale of reporters at a corporate media organisation. It’s naive to think any differently. I believe that blogger-big media partnerships produce some of the best results.

The podcast also looks at Grand Theft Auto IV, which is the hottest game release of the year and the reason I am going to be divorced soon. The ZA Podcast is a good listen, although they need to sort out their design and logo, as well their browser icon, which looks a bit rough and lets the overall product down.

It’s a cookin podcast — so, if you haven’t done so already — point your RSS feed there and geddit.