Archive for March, 2007

Bring & Braai for Free Culture in Cape Town

Published
by
Dave
on March 30, 2007
in Events, Marketing and Music & Events
. 8 Comments

CC button1 Some of you may already know that Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia) and Lawrence Lessig (CEO Creative Commons) are on their way to South Africa in April as part of the Free Culture tour organised by iCommons.

This tour will culminate in a live music event on the 20th April entitled “Bring & Braai“. The name refers to the social aspects of burning music and other content on CD’s and sharing it with friends.

It’s being held at the Armchair Theatre in Obs on the 20th April (this venue was chosen because of it’s vociferous support for free artistic culture in SA).

The Muso’s have organised a kickass music lineup of some of SA’s hottest new bands, who will lead the way in freely licencing some tracks on the SA Free Music Database.

Bring & Braai is about more than just entertainment and speeches though, as Heather Ford (Executive Director of iCommons) explained (<< video) at the recent 27dinner. The Free Culture cause is a matter of protecting our rights to create and share content online, which are currently under threat from the old guard who are scared by the emergent online culture of open-access citizen media.

iCommons is looking for some sponsorship of the event, as well as a bit of help with the publicity. Us bloggers can do help by writing about it and linking to the Bring and Braai blog. The buttons I’ve used were created by Shinjuku for this purpose, you can use them too.

Share This

Amplitude 10 is working now

Published
by
Dave
on March 29, 2007
in Podcasting
. 2 Comments

AmplitudeApologies to everyone who had trouble downloading the latest episode of Amplitude podcast.

I fixed the link and it’s available for your listening pleasure now.

Share This

Stormhoek Humanizes Wine

Published
by
Dave
on March 26, 2007
in Conversation, Events, Fun, Stormhoek, communities, geek dinners and social networking
. 14 Comments

Kath with the ChampersOn Friday evening, a small group of bloggers and podcasters met at Stormhoek’s farm in Wellington for a special braai…. And besides having a really (really!) great time, I had some thoughts about Marketing (goodness gracious – does anyone else out there think about marketing while inebriated at 2am??)

Stormhoek wine has become a global marketing sensation, thanks in no small part to their blog strategy – which got them onto Ad Age’s Marketing 50 for 2006 along with huge spenders like Toyota, Fanta and Xbox360. That type of prominence doesn’t happen by mistake… We can learn alot from these guys.

My takeaway thoughts from the braai:

  • Sure they sell wine, but they’re in the entertainment business (why do you think people drink wine?)
  • Extremely popular business phenomena are usually driven by a core group of enthusiasts at the heart of the brand
  • If the product experience is perceived as poor quality, then no amount of promotion is going to make up for that.. There’s got to be authentic passion for the product itself.
  • Most importantly, as a Stormhoek enthusiast, I connect with their people – their personality shines through in what they do….

As Hugh Macleod, blogger in chief at Stormhoek points out: Growth will come, not from yet more efficiency (we’re already very efficient), but by humanification (more). In other words, by forming more personal relationships and allowing a smarter, more personal conversation to happen between you and your customers and evangelists.

And lastly: “If you want to have a cool brand, you have to do cool stuff”.

Share This

M&G launches Amatomu – and the SA blogosphere is officially sorted :)

Published
by
Dave
on March 21, 2007
in Amatomu, Conversation, Media, blogging and communities
. 10 Comments

Amatomu

Amatomu is South Africa’s own Technorati… In other words it’s going to rank, organise and connect the South African blogosphere. For non-bloggers, this will be an EXCELLENT source of the freshest news and hottest topics in SA.

The private Alpha launch was done via an email from Matt Buckland, in which he asked bloggers not to break the story. Eventually though, one of us cracked and Tyler Reed was first to announce it. I somehow suspect that the Mail & Guardian crew knew exactly what they were doing…. and Vincent Maher (who developed the site) even said:

“We asked people not to blog about it and we were surprised to see that no-one actually did“

There’s tremendous buzz around this site, which is testament to the fact that we sorely need something like this… You can see a list of Articles referencing Amatomu here.

This, once again, highlights the need for localized versions of popular global sites. It provides a more targeted way of finding information from home. It will also help provide a clearer understanding of the size and shape of the South African blogosphere. (Stats… Yay!)

As Vinny mentioned though, the ranking algorithm for the site may need some tweaking – Cherryflava, for example, one of South Africa’s most popular blogs is currently ranked below alot of (presumably) less prominent blogs (76 at present). I’m just guessing here though.

Both Vincent and Matt from M&G are actively involved in the blogosphere, which is why they were able to come up with such a spot-on development, whereas companies like 24.com keep missing the boat.

One feature that would make Amatomu extra useful would be the ability to subscribe by RSS to certain tags. I’m sure Vince is on this already, but I mention it just in case he isn’t.

Share This

Close
E-mail It