Social Networking: A Quantative and qualitative research report into attitudes, behaviours and use

I have found a very good tool in the form of a WordPress plugin called WordBook, what it does is to integrate with your self-hosted wordpress.org blog on your own domain and then also your Facebook profile and mini-feed. This updates all your WordPress blog posts to your Facebook profile mini-feed and those of your friends.

The plugin from the wordpress.org plugin directory is over here.

The original author’s site and the latest developments around this plugin is over here.

There is a nice write-up of what it does over here.

Of course the biggest news in the tech space is the unsolicited ‘hostile’ bid from Microsoft to take over Yahoo to the tune of $44,6 billion dollars. The Media has already blown this into one of the most visible stories in headlines and titles of news updates from all over.

I do not claim to know all there is to know about these things, so I will point you to a collection of very insightful and in-depth posts by people more knowledgeable about it.

I found a good post on the current state of mobile, internet and other infrastructure issues in Africa and the implications for entrepeneurs in the Web 2.0 space.

It comes via a newsletter from Russell Southwood over at www.balancingact-africa.com

African countries’ ICT policy– going from the blah, blah, blah cycle to getting something done

In a week in which the heart of South Africa’s ICT industry – Sandton – suffered continuous load-shedding (rolling power cuts for those of you who speak English), no-one doubts that developing a modern ICT-enabled economy in Africa is a challenge. It is easy in these circumstances to respond cynically by asking: Government? What is it good for? But a small number of African Governments have managed to make a difference through facilitating major projects but the majority are in the slow-track when it comes to getting the big things done. Russell Southwood looks at why some countries talk, whilst others do.

Changing an economy through introducing ICT is akin to trying to set up a whole row of spinning plates. Without infrastructure, you can’t get media, services and applications. Without media, services and applications, you can’t get critical mass. Without critical mass, there’s no-one to e-mail or exchange videos with, so why bother? And that’s before you get on to all the “nice things” that might happen if African governments delivered their services better.

The private sector can do many things but even in Africa it does not do very high risk investment and it does not go where tomorrow’s market is today. For example, despite all the heady promises made at the Connect Africa event in Kigali last year, the new vertically integrated mobile companies are unlikely to lay extensive high-capacity microwave or fibre infrastructure quickly. They will follow the market in metro areas and connect up major cities. They have shareholders’ money to look after and it would be unusual if they did otherwise.

But for Africa’s fast track economies where growth is running ahead of the global average, it is important that they get in place the new global ICT infrastructure to support their changing economies today. Access to fibre really is the fuel of the new global economy: the cutting of the Flag cable to North Africa and Asia illustrates this all too vividly in a negative way.

For five years and more, African Presidents and Ministers have been making speeches about how important ICT is and how they wish to use it to attract new jobs. If words were money, Africa would be rich beyond its wildest imaginings. Some of this “blah,blah,blah” has led to new initiatives but in most countries these have simply fizzled out. But recently in East Africa, Kenya and Uganda took decisions that they would build national infrastructures. Kenya decided that it would initiate its own international fibre connection.

Spurred by the World Cup in 2010, South Africa has more international fibre plans for the West Coast of the continent and has set up Infraco to intervene in the broadband connectivity supply market. To meet its growing connectivity needs, Angola is going to buy a Russian satellite. Nigeria has launched Nigcomsat and set up Galaxy Backbone to address the Government’s own connectivity needs.

None of these initiatives are above criticism and indeed some are questionable but it is interesting to see that some countries are taking steps to do something rather than simply talking about what needs to be done. However, these countries are the exception rather than the rule. They are the fast-track countries that either have oil-revenues and/or have burgeoning economies that are not solely reliant on mineral extraction. However, mineral wealth is quite widely spread across the countries of the continent and there are significant numbers who have it that are not “stepping up to the plate”. The remainder of the countries concerned have a range of relatively easy excuses: lack of money, lack of education, corruption and much else besides. But if Nigeria or Uganda can foster these kinds of changes, why is it that Gabon or Ghana do not?

Making change in the ICT space requires a particular chemical mix that involves both Government and others, along with a magic ingredient that consultants call vision, but might better be called imagination. Those that have taken initiatives have had the courage to imagine that their countries might go from being global victims to becoming attractive places to live and work. Rwanda’s President Kagame rarely sets a room alight with a speech but he has understood that if his small country Rwanda is to find a place in the global economy, it’s going to be necessary to work very hard at providing the conditions in which that might happen. He and his country may or may not be successful and they may or may not have the capacity to succeed but you cannot fault them for trying.

Getting a Government that does something requires getting a number of committed people in place. Firstly, there has to be a President who does not just make the speeches but also provides political backing and resources to get things done. Africa still has highly centralised decision-making processes and without Presidential backing, no-one takes you seriously.

Next there has to be Minister who can take that backing and motivate the sometimes indolent and leaderless civil servants in the appropriate Ministry and get into dialogue with the private sector and others about what needs to be done and how to achieve it. The Minister is nothing without a highly articulate and energetic civil servant who can: “carry the message”, respond quickly to all the interested parties and knows how to manage initiatives successfully.

All set and ready to go? No. Government by itself working “top-down” is one hand clapping in an empty room. There needs to be a vocal, critical but supportive private sector that knows how to make demands and shape projects. Alongside them has to be an equally vocal civil society that speaks up for the non-market requirements like education and health. Everyone at every level needs to understand the difference between having a successful meeting and actually getting something to happen. No more self-congratulatory speeches to other Ministers but time to concentrate on a small number of achievable initiatives and work to deliver them.

In a subjective assessment carried by Balancing Act of the sixteen West African countries on the basis of the above criteria, only two countries (Nigeria and Senegal) met these conditions outlined, although the latter does not really have an active private ICT sector because of the dominance of the incumbent Sonatel. Ghana has the scale of economy to succeed but somehow never really manages to convert all the right words into political will and thereafter into action. The majority of the others have strong individual servants and sometimes Ministers but they lack Presidential and/or private sector and civil society support.

Nearly all of these “slow-track” economies lack the imaginative response to change that says if the country gets ICT support in place, we can start building a very different place to live. They may – like Mali – have a small-scale illustrative project (a Government-sponsored call centre) but this project (or even groups of small projects) are not life-changing enough for the countries concerned. And please do not bleat to me about how these types of countries lack money as there are both private and public sources of financing for those who have the ideas and energy to attract it. Open economies with ideas about their future are at a premium in the global economy.

For private sector ICT companies, whether carriers or vendors, the obstacles in the slow track economies make selling services there a complicated business. For the individual small ISP owner, it means that he or she become not just the commercial head of their company but also unpaid policy advocate in the continuous trench war over a favourable ICT policy.

The big companies like Cisco, Google and Microsoft have understood that they are not simply selling “kit” or software but have to create the “weather” that will allow more open markets to flourish. This week Microsoft and the Centre Africain d’Etudes Supérieures en Gestion (CESAG) have entered into a memorandum of understanding (MOU), which aims to deliver high-quality ICT policy training to government employees in West and Central Africa. CESAG is an institution specialising in the delivery of government-related training and leadership capacity building across
French-speaking Africa.

Microsoft’s Regional Technology Officer Nicol Woodward is tasked with influencing Government across 10 policy areas that include: interoperability; identity, privacy; innovation; IPR; accessibility; spectrum allocation; standards, DRM and formats, and GAP. What’s GAP? It’s Microsoft’s way of looking at Government as decision-maker, influencer and customer. G stands for governance. A for Architecture in the sense of how everyone will get networked and P for procurement.

Like other large vendors, it has both to both set up the debate and try to reap the rewards that come from the dialogue. It would not be a business if it did not want to make sales but it can’t simply say “we’re right and all the other guys are wrong”. Creating a successful economy involves complex but vital debates around issues as diverse as IPR and piracy and how you foster innovation. The answers chosen by policy-makers to these many debates are all linked: get one wrong and it becomes harder to get the others right.

As Woodward told us:”We have got to the point in Nigeria where we are having in-depth discussions about IPR and DRM. It’s the same with Angola. These are blossoming economies and they want to get it right. We want to explain things from our viewpoint but whatever they install, they are well informed in making that decision.”

Obviously explaining these issues cannot be left to the Microsofts of this world alone but given the perilously low levels of understanding in many countries, the discussion has to start somewhere. The issue is then how public these debates are for if they are conducted entirely behind closed doors then they will not be subjected to the full force of all viewpoints.

The difficulty is that for some Open Source advocates that choosing it is so blindingly obvious that they forget it is debate with two sides. The more thoughtful Open Source advocates, like Microsoft, believe this is a debate that they can win on the merits of the arguments. But whichever road you choose, you have to have a growing economy to have the expertise and resources to make it a debate worth having.

So if Africa is to have more open, successful economies that can begin to ride the waves of global expansion and contraction, then it will require multinational (and regional) ICT operators to take more interest in the continent. And for its politicians to understand that words do not feed mouths.

But the best is yet to come…

A South African blogger has taken the time and effort to reproduce, for the edification of everyone who cares to read, the PATHETIC, SHAMEFUL speech made to Parliament by the South African Minister of Minerals and Energy Affairs after a disastrous two weeks where industry and the entire country came to a standstill because of power failures and the subsequent CIRCUS of incompetent, corrupt and arrogant imbeciles running the country into the ground with their IDIOCY!!!

Anyways, we remain positive, it is sooo un PC to be cynical and an afropessimist these days, but to all those who care to investigate and have to live under such obvious IDIOTS, at least be truthful and call an IDIOT an IDIOT, whether they be black or white or Indian or Coloured or Green for that matter, just tell these idiots to put people in place who know how things work, and who know how to keep those things to keep on working so we all can start getting this country out of the SHIT that it is in!

A lot has happened this past week that could possibly be construed as newsworthy, so here are a couple of things that caught my attention as it was streaming past my consciousness:
- The Twittersphere ™ has been abuzz with the MacWorld Expo and Steve Jobs’ keynote clogging up the data pipes
- Africa continues to dominate the news headlines with unfortunate socio-political outcomes: Kenya’s disputed elections and the subsequent ethnic violence despite Kofi Anna’s intervention; the continuing saga in Zimbabwe: humanitarian disaster, monopoly money, runaway inflation, refugees streaming to SA
- South Africa’s own very embarrassing situation with the national power grid unable to keep the country and it’s industries running smoothly, today four gold mines shut down and loss of that production output pulled down the market; an economist interviewed for SABC3’s midday news/business program says this roughly translates into more than a billion South African rand loss to country GDP for the day and every day that the power shuts off…

Loic Le Meur, founder of Seesmic.com and Robert Scoble is at Davos in Switzerland at the World Economic Forum debating global issues and getting major scoops on their video streaming websites with notable luminaries concerned about the state of the planet and it’s people.

Techbiz was that WordPress’ parent company, Automattiq, got some nice funding from amongst others, The New York Times which is a good indication of the support there is for this popular blogging platform with the many piowerful capabilities to launch an online media empire. All New York Times blogs and all the GigaOm network blogs, amongst many other promoinent web companies, use WordPress as their web dev platform. Hogsback Media Networks itself runs on WordPress and is one of the value added services we offer clients who register and host their preferred domains with us. With 5GB of storage space and 65GB monthly data transfer quota, we specialize in offering companies and professionals the professional and robust online publishing capabilities that WordPress allows.

Problogger and doshdosh was two very serendipitious stumbles on the Twitter public timeline and I am so chuffed having found them. They both excel at showing others the nuts and bolts practical aspects of blogging, marketing your writing efforts at your blog, and how to optimally use these new information and communications technology tools to create a virtual global working village where the tech savvy early adopters share links to useful resources and little bits of glimpses into their lifestreams with whoever out there in the world care to tune in; you only need my URL baby

It also saddened me tremendously to learn of Heath Ledger’s untimely death. May his spirit rest in peace, a peace he unfortunately could not find on this planet.

As to the rest, there continues to be maiming and death and hunger and disease and poverty and natural and man made disasters and accidents; that seems to be the nature of this twirling little speck of dust on which we have chosen to become manifest at this time…

I want to end with an interesting post I stubmledUpon, the blog is Dutch and is concerned with marketing and the author looks at the cultural implications of iconic marketing gimmicks and how it must adapt to the environment in which it hopes to have a successful business presence.

I roughly translated from the original Dutch, those of you who are Dutch or Afrikaans can head over to molblog.nl and read the original post.
UPDATE: I received an e-mail from the original poster with his permission for me to translate his post, and he included a translation for me as well. How very polite, indeed, so Thank you Jos Birken from marketingscience.com

Here is my translation:

The Year of the Rat is approaching. In contrast to our own Zodiacal constellations with it’s Capricorn, Libra and all the rest, the Chinese zodiac consists entirely of animals. The Rat is the first sign in the cycle, with attributes like leadership, charisma and intelligence.
Chinese born in the Year of The Rat proudly proclaims: “”I am a Rat!” As a marketer in a Chinese environment, at the moment it is not good to ignore the Rat.

For Westerners, things are a little different. Around these parts, rats are, to put it mildly, not seen in a very charming or positive light… Unless you’re in the pest extermination business, mentioning rats as part of your marketing material is generally not a good practice!

But what is a globalized marketing professional to do in these modern times, where every day the communications barriers between cultures are eroded more and more…?

Frasers Centrepoint Malls, owner of a chain of shopping malls in Singapore (“Where Eat Meets West”), has the solution. They rename the Rat to Mouse and close a sponsorship contract with Disney. Two flies with one shot! And no, the fly is not part of the Chinese zodiac.

“What better way to usher in the Year of the Mouse than with the most celebrated mouse of all?” proclaims Frasers in page sized adverts. The biologists among us may cringe, but the marketers of Frasers are unfazed. Rat, Mouse, what’s the difference, right? 2008 becomes the year of Mickey Mouse.

Overall, marketers are increasingly confronted with this kind of cultural clash in communications. In China the Year of the Pig has just concluded, but advertising may have been subdued due to fear of offending Muslim sensibilities.

Trivial detail: in Centrepoint Mall, Fraser’s crown jewel, the festivities are ushered in with a traditional Lion Dance. The Mice won’t be too pleased about that!

And here is the mail from Jos himself for comparison

Hallo Mario,

Geen probleem hoor. Zo lang er sprake is van bronvermelding en het stukje in een niet al te dubieuze publicatie terechtkomt, heb je mijn toestemming. Ik ben altijd iets geruster als ik zelf even met de herverspreider kan communiceren, vandaar mijn verzoek om een email.

Sterker nog, het is een rustige zaterdagochtend en in ben in een goede stemming, dus hier is een vertaling. Service van de zaak. Alleen de oorspronkelijke links moet je zelf even incopieren

Globalisation ain’t always easy: the Year of the Rat

The Year of the Rat is almost upon us. Unlike the Western Zodiac, with constellations like Libra and Sagittarius, the Chinese version is an animal-only affair. The Rat is the first in the cycle, with attributes like leadership, charisma and intelligence. Chinese that were born in Rat Years will tell you proudly: “I am a Rat!” If you’re a marketer in a Chinese environment there’s no way to ignore the Rat these months.

For Westerners things are slightly different. In our parts the rat doesn’t enjoy, how shall I say this, a particularly unblemished reputation. You are well advised to leave the rat completely unmentioned in any of your marketing materials. Unless you’re in pest control, of course.

But what does a globalised marketer do in these modern times, where cross-cultural communication borders become increasingly fuzzy?

Frasers Centrepoint malls, one of the larger shopping mall operators in Singapore (“Where East Meets West”), have found a solution. We pretend the rat’s a mouse and make sure we have a sponsorship contract with Disney. Kills two birds with one stone! (Please note that no flying birds are members of the Chinese Zodiac.)

“What better way to usher in theYear of the Mouse than with the most celebrated mouse of all?” extols Frasers in full page newspaper ads. Biologists among us are now wincing, but Frasers’s marketers are undeterred. Rat, mouse, who cares? 2008’s going to be the Year of Mickey Mouse.

There’s a bit of a trend here. Marketers all over the world increasingly find themselves facing cultural communication conundrums. Exactly a year ago China banned porky imagery in ads celebrating the Year of the Pig, fearing muslim protests.

Small detail: in Centrepoint Mall, Frasers’s jewel in the crown, celebrations will start with a traditional Lion Dance. Not sure the mice will approvee.

(c) 2008 Jos. Birken

PS stuur je nog even een link tegen de tijd dat-ie er staat?

17 Ways You Can Use Twitter: A Guide for Beginners, Marketers and Business Owners

This is a very nice post over at doshdosh.com. I always find it difficult to try and convey to people the benefits of using a certain tool. I think it comes mostly from the fact that there is already thousands of posts on the subject floating around there in the echo-chamber we have come to know and love/hate as the blogosphere.

So there is always a chance that you could be wrong about something, just because of the sheer impossibility of keeping up with millions of blog posts and press releases and product updates all over the world, every day. that has to be monitored and mined for little juicy nuggets to enhance your own content offering.

It is therefore always a pleasure to come upon someone else who has overcome these fears and succeeded in putting up a very nice introductory “manual” of a service or product that makes it easier for others to learn about it and start using it immediately with the minimum amount of obstacles.

It is with these thoughts in mind that I offer the link above, both because I have become totally addicted to Twitterland and the many thought leaders and A-list bloggers I have befriended and from whom I learn an amazing amount just by following their “lifestreams”.

This is an older post from last year November, but still relevant and on-topic, so I will share it here. The post analyzes the qualities of a good programmer, someone who has a real passion for the code and the technology and how it works…

It’s not as easy as it sounds. CV experience is only of limited use here, because great programmers don’t always have the “official” experience to demonstrate that they’re great. In fact, a lot of that CV experience can be misleading. Yet there are a number of subtle cues that you can get, even from the CV, to figure out whether someone’s a great programmer.

I consider myself to be a pretty good programmer. At the same time, I’ve spent a fair amount of time on the business side of the fence, filtering technical CVs for projects, interviewing people, etc. Thanks to this, I think I have a bit of experience in recognising good programmers, and I want to share it in this article, in the hope that it may help other “business guys” to recognise good programmers. And, who knows, perhaps some programmers who have the potential to be good but haven’t really exploited this can also read this and realise what they need to do to become good (although, as I’ll argue, that’s definitely not accessible to all programmers!).

WordPress Bookmarklet Hack is a nifty little WordPress ‘hack’ that involves you going to the Write tab in your WordPress admin panel and dragging the little ‘Press It’ link in the bottom-left corner to your browser bookmarks or quick links toolbar. You must do this from your own blog admin screen – the name of your blog appears in the bookmark toolbar with the Press It label.

Now, whenever you get to any page or article on the web that you want to blog about, this little Javascript code snippet opens up your WordPress Edit window with the link and title of the article already filled in for you in WordPress. All you need to do is add your own little bit of wisdom or insight about whatever it is you blogged about, add any links to pics or whatever, and Voila! You have just created a blog post without the hassle of having to go and log in and navigate down the blog dir structure to get to the Post page.

“Universe puts us in places where we can learn. They are never easy places, but they are right. Wherever we are, it’s the right place .. and the right time. Pain that sometimes comes is part of the process of constantly being born.”

– Delenn to Sheridan in Babylon 5: “A Distant Star”

Update: Just a week ago I did a View Source of my blog webpage and discovered some editURI entries that redirected to a domain i did not know and when I tried to look it up with domaintools.com, my browser bombed out… So far from wanting to appear to be wearing a tinfoil-hat, I embarked on a quest to ‘harden’ my blog and searched around for Wordpress security related sites. The most relevant and in-depth as well as valuable articles, advice, links and plugins are found over at blogsecurity.net

The result of all this lockdown madness was that I went a bit overboard and couldn’t even log in to my blog because of editing .htaccess on the server. DO NOT mess with that unless you know what you’re doing, you can seriously disrupt the flow of your blogging posts with this kind of tweaking and fiddling. As if that was not enough, afterwards posts I edited did not save and the result was a post title of Blog Security!!! for nearly a week with no content being able to be saved. It took over a week of hard graft down in the trenches and we’re happy to report everything is up and running again.

There comes a time in every blogger’s life, actually just right after installation and setup, when issues of security need to be considered. Not just securing your Wordpress installation against spam attacks, but also checking code for editURI entries in page source for example. Then there comes the issue of keeping those with malicious intent at bay and here one sometimes get to deal with some tough cookies, indeed.

A very valuable resource in every Wordpress blogger’s arsenal is blogsecurity.net. They have excellent articles and posts and guest contributions by people at the forefront of blogging security on the Wordpress platform specifically. There is even an interview with Matt Mullenweg, the godfather of all things Wordpress-ey.
The blogger’s quest for security should start with installing the wp-scanner and loginlockdown as well as WPIDS (WordPress Intruder Detection System) plugins.
It’s as easy as right-clicking on the download link at blogsecurity.net and clicking on Save target as… or any variation on that and unzipping the plugin and uploading that folder into the wp-content/plugins directory.
From the WordPress dashboard go to plugins and activate them and click on options to further configure them if you so desire and it is A for away.
You are now secure against most of the most harmful things that can befall a WordPress blog; just bear in mind that we are in a fluid dynamic system with platform upgrades, plugin upgrades and the ingenuity of the bad guys out there constantly evovolving.

So it also just make good horse kind of sense to check your blog every day and view the source and check the plugins and your wordpress installation for updates etc etc

Well, it had to happen sooner or later, but we are proud to announce our very own YouTube channel, specifically for Hogsback Media Networks related content.

In trying to build up features and content for this site, one of the obvious media modalities to consider is videos of things and subjects relevant to New Media 2.0, which is Hogsback Media Networks’ primary business focus. After considering all the options and doing the cost-benefit analysis thing, it was decided to rather go the YouTube route, than hosting videos on our own server infrastructure, which would cripple our servers and chow through the bandwidth, if and when a certain item or items or posts becomes popular.

So, the solution: Registering for a YouTube account, they are owned by Google, so they have the world’s biggest and best and fastest distributed data center architecture serving up streaming videos. And it is all free! Gravy!!!!

If you have a gmail account already or using any of Google’s other services (docs and spreadsheets, calendar, maps, reader, scholar, books, etc.) you can just log in with that and start creating your YouTube custom profile, channel, favourites, tags, etc.

Do a search for videos you’re interested in, say Web 2.0 or wordpress or blogging, and you are presented with an overwhelming selection to choose from. Set up a playlist and channels: playlists are really categories and you can set up how many you need for each subheading of videos you’re interested in, e.g web 2.0, startups, technology, venture capital, photoshop, linux, blogging, wordpress, etc. Click through to go to the video itself and you are presented with a menu to Share, Add to Favourites or add to Channel or Playlist.

In such a way I built up a selection of Web 2.0 and tech startup related videos in one place, created a channel for all of it and then used the Google code generated for this purpose to host on one’s own website or blog. The interface was a bit unsuited for the main blog to integrate with, so i created a subdomain on hogsback.net, appropriately named youtube.hogsback.net. Head over there now and see what I have loaded into the channel so far; videos range from Mike Arrington of TechCrunch interviewing many of the most well-known Silicon Valley startup founders on their understanding of the term Web 2.0 to a board room session where angel investors speak of what they need to see regarding your financial projections when trying to raise startup capital.

All that and more and new videos will be added after I have chosen more that is relevant to Hogsback Media Networks and it’s clients. This is of course also part of the portfolio of value added services we can incorporate into a client’s marketing strategy. Whether you choose videos on YouTube uploaded by others and sharing and commenting on them, or whether you have your own created videos illustrating your message or brand or poduct, this is a very valuable enhancement to any brand or product and it’s marketing and PR strategies in todays New Media world.

So please head over to youtube.hogsback.net and feast your eyes

NB. Fast broadband/ADSL  connection preferable. Click on Menu and each video with a short description underneath appear in the right sidebar, use the right arrow to scroll through the selection and read the captions, then click on which ever video you want to see, and that’s it.