An Empirical Analysis Of The Creation, Use And Adoption Of Social Computing Applications

An Empirical Analysis Of The Creation, Use And Adoption Of Social Computing Applications

Tags: reference, research, social media, social networking

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

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

Tags: internet, report, research, social networking, Web 2.0

South Africa: Telecoms ‘Gold Rush’ Leaves Nothing for Masses - ICASA

This press release was widely distributed online and appeared on Allafrica.com amongst others, from where I reproduce it, with full credits intact. This of course ties in with my previous posts regarding the fragile socio-political dynamics of the South African internet/web 2.0/technology sector and the many challenges faced by all who hope to make a meaningful contribution in this space.

Telecoms ‘Gold Rush’ Leaves Nothing for Masses - ICASA
Business Day (Johannesburg)
NEWS
24 July 2008
Posted to the web 24 July 2008

By Lesley Stones
Johannesburg

THE telecommunications sector is becoming a new gold rush where large white-owned companies pocket the wealth and leave nothing for the masses, says the chairman of the Independent Communications Authority of SA (Icasa).

The lowest rungs of society would be alienated if the regulator did not actively demand a greater role for black people in the industry, said chairman Paris Mashile. That is why Icasa would insist new licences for scarce spectrum went to companies that were 51% black-owned.

Speaking during a conference staged by Internet Solutions this week, Mashile defended Icasa’s decision to make empowerment a more important criterion than skills or cash to build a telecoms network,

Demanding 51% black ownership “isn’t outside the law” and the aim was to empower black people to start their own businesses rather than just take a stake in a successful white operator. White firms that sold equity to black people without relinquishing control were merely performing “empowerment gimmicks”, he said.

The high black profile is a condition for six new licences to use a high-speed wireless technology called WiMax, and each licence will allocate 20MHz of spectrum. That decision has also angered the industry, with many voice and data carriers saying 30MHz is needed to build a cost-effective network.

Telkom’s chief technical officer Thami Msimango said giving licences to one-man shows would not benefit the country. “People who can afford to roll out infrastructure should be given that spectrum,” he said.

Vodacom CEO Alan Knott-Craig said true empowerment would be achieved by giving everyone access to affordable telephony and internet services, not by favouring operators owned by the previously disadvantaged. Vodacom could extend its network for two-thirds of the current cost if it had more spectrum, and it would pass the savings on to consumers by cutting the cost of calls, he said.

Mashile said there were ways of using 20MHz of spectrum efficiently, and operators just wanted as much as they could get simply to deprive other companies of that resource.

The unwelcome licensing criteria were set out after Icasa distilled a wide range of comments from the industry. It has repeatedly said the conditions are final, but has called for another round of comments.

Mashile said he would be happy to see companies build their own network infrastructure, as long as they were aware of the risks. ” We will open up for whoever wants to burn his money in this market - it’s up to them to take on the big guys and live with the consequences.”

Copyright © 2008 Business Day. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com)

Tags: access, africa, BEE, black economic empowerment, competition, culture, empowerment, ICT, infrastructure, internet, politics, resources, south africa, telecommunications

Why Social Media Will Fail in South Africa

I stumbled on a very interesting post which is an elaboration on Tuesday’s theme, entitled The Internet’s Hierarchy Of Needs. The author also superimposes Maslow’s Hierarchy of Basic Needs on the internet.

As we can see, at the very base of the pyramid is

• 1. Existence needs: The most basic need for the internet to play any meaningful role, namely computers connected to the Internet and access to documents and any media necessary for whatever task needs to be accomplished. Right there South Africa fails already, since technology infrastructure, access to computers and the internet is non-existent or few and far between. In 2006, out of a population of nearly 50 million people, only 5 million had internet access. There has been some attempts to outfit black schools with Open Source Tuxlabs from the Shuttleworth Foundation, but unfortunately one never hear of these efforts anymore and if there is any success stories then they surely keep it very quiet.
• 2. Connectivity needs: the ability to connect to and between documents and sites and it’s subsequent implications; this largely flows forth from the first need and is therefore impossible for the majority of the South African population to attain, without access to a fast and modern computer with the appropriate software and connectivity installed and without the necessary education and sophistication to effectively use and utilize these resources, this is somewhat of a moot point
• 3. Organization needs: the ability to sort and search based on title, metatags and document contents - when a large majority of the current web surfers do not understand fully the mechanics of SEO and web development, how long is it gonna take someone who needs to first get access to a computer in the first place, then learn to use it properly, to know to Google around for the appropriate information that he/she needs, which is essentially what this level represents…?
• 4. Semantic needs: the ability to derive meaning from language, content and context - here again we can see that with the foundation of the previous requirements unfulfilled, this level will not be reached; in a country where even many government decision-makers do not have a good grasp of the English language, which is the internationally accepted language of the internet, business and technological studies and learning, the lack of understanding of any web based technology or jargon or techno speak underlying the tools needed to access information will be to the detriment of all involved
• 5. Actualization: the web becomes a frictionless tool for personal growth and fulfillment - this is the apex of the pyramid and unfortunately in the case of South Africa, a level that will only really be reached by a small minority of privileged individuals. The foundations are lacking, this level can never be reached; when the average black child lives in poverty with his parents, cannot afford a computer themselves, do not have the money to send the child to a school where he will get a decent education and maybe exposure to these modalities, a vicious circle continues to perpetuate itself; a circle of poverty, hopelessness, desperation and inevitably all the social ills that we see manifested each day by taking note of news headlines…!

On Tuesday I wrote about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and used it to speculatively analyze the Web 2.0 scene in South Africa and also to make a pronouncement as to the viability of a Social Media effort online in South Africa. Given the highly unequal distribution of resources and technology infrastructure, the majority of the country’s population do not have access to computing technology and internet access.

Any kind of Social Media Strategy is therefore little more than inside baseball amongst an incestuous clique of privileged practitioners who retain and guard the old money and benefits of the old apartheid regime. Whatever Social Media campaign is launched online will necessarily only be seen by a handful of regular old faces who continually regurgitate each other’s utterings and bounce around any newsworthy items or movements within the local South African Web 2.0 zoo.

For the majority of the population who struggle to figure out where the next meal or roof over their head or warm blanket is gonna come from, these issues may as well have taken place on the moon. Social Media Press Releases and Social Media Newsrooms and shiny new websites with all the bells and whistles added on for people to comment and share and save and bookmark and all the widgets etc etc. Many a social media consultant and expert have “emerged” and are peddling their virtual wares, many websites are erected (!) in the hope of being THE must-go-to destination for anyone fortunate enough to learn of it’s existence.

Unfortunately it is a project doomed to failure:

• There is not a critical mass of internet users to visit these sites,
• those that do have internet access do so mostly from public terminals at school, university or from their work machines. (where in some cases internet access are severely restricted and most social networking activity has to take place “undercover” e.g Facebook being blocked and only corporate e-mail from behind a firewall is allowed
• Their priorities are not to whip out their credit cards to support online businesses.
• Mostly kids at school and students at university use their internet access time to check e-mail and catch up with their friends on Facebook and MySpace.
• Only a small handful of geekily inclined web surfers really spend a significant enough amount of time online to Save, Bookmark and Share stuff or leave comments on each other’s blogs.
• And those Saves and Shares and Bookmarks do not necessarily turn into sales, the only really lucrative businesses online in South Africa seem to be the Mobile Service Providers who sell prepaid airtime and the myriad of ringtone and mobile games vendors.
• Most of the online campaigns that are successful target only a small niche, privileged market anyways, which reinforces my earlier points: it remains a case of incestuous inside baseball with no intention of ever including the majority of the population in any sort of “social networking” endeavour
• For entrepreneurs who may want to do business online, it is virtually an impossibility since PayPal does not operate in South Africa and credit card purchases are limited to the handful of high net worth individuals who can afford to qualify for these facilities in the first place
• most of the online merchants are the old media companies and established big businesses who leverage their existing resources to establish a web presence.
• For the average Joe entrepreneur who do not have a rich uncle or a corrupt relative high up in government with access to BEE (Black Economic Empowerment) deals it is a pipe dream which will remain only that, a dream.

It is a terrible indictment on local Web 2.0 efforts, but these issues need to be aired out in the open if we are gonna make any headway in this country. The way things are going now it seems every man and community for themselves and we see a perpetuation of the old divisions among racial and class lines, a situation which can only lead to a Zimbabwean tragedy in the long term when the poor majority start taking matters into their own hands as we recently saw with the xenophobic attacks in the country!

Last, but not least, already reports are coming in about the failure of many corporate social media community attempts. This article on ReadWriteWeb cites reports by the Wall Street Journal and other research done about failed attempts and “abandoned towns” on the internet social networking scene. It comes back to the earlier assertion; communities are built around shared or common interests and characteristics. Why would anyone go and register and upload their profile photos and share anecdotes on a social networking site dedicated to kitty litter products and devices…? The more workable and sensible strategy seems to be to utilize already existing popular social networks where people are already congregating and try and get their attention and engage with them there instead of trying to build a dedicated site and try herding everyone over there. It just will not do, unless you’re someone very famous or interesting or has a very compelling value proposition like being an expert in your niche and sharing scarce specialist information or advice. For the rest of us, it would be well advised to stick to the Facebook pages, YouTube channels, Flickr accounts and ning social networks where we can tap into an already existing network without having to reinvent the wheel again all over at great cost.

Tags: access to scarce resources, business, communications, hierarchy of needs, ICT, marketing, maslow, politics, social media strategy, social networking, socio-political, south africa, strategy

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and Social Media Strategy in South Africa

I came across a very insightful post over at Experience: The Blog where the author uses Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to tease out some of the reasons for online behaviour, in this case why people join online communities. It is a very good analysis of the motivations behind people’s behaviour and set me thinking about the online social media scene in South Africa and why companies who engage in online social media campaigns may be jumping the gun a bit.

South Africa is still in a very fragile state of uneasy equilibrium socio-politically, nearly fifteen years after the end of apartheid the overall majority of the black population is not very much better off than before the end of apartheid in 1994. Economically, the majority of the country’s wealth still are controlled by a small minority of predominantly white people, the reasons and dynamics for such a state of affairs which falls outside the scope of our present conversation. The result is that when it comes to information technology and the ecosystem around ICT tools, we still have a very unequal distribution of access to these modalities. In other words, the average black student or child still does not have access to computing resources and their parents still are not in a position to afford a computer; most of the time they are still struggling to just provide in the basic needs like proper housing and enough food on the table in the face of a struggling economy and rising fuel and food prices.

When one speaks of social media, you are thus speaking, in a South African context, of a small minority of predominantly white geeks and geekettes with an odd sprinkling of Coloured, Black and Indians thrown in who are leading the conversation and an incestuous in-clique parrotting and echoing each other’s blogs and blog posts. Recently a furore broke out when one freelance journalist made a list of the prominent figures in the South African blogosphere and almost all of them turned out to be white. One coloured blogger quickly reacted with a counter-list of non-white South African “Web 2.0″ personalities and his post was severely criticized by many on the “white list” as being divisive and hurting those he mentioned on the list. How exactly it would hurt them I could not imagine, I suppose all the white boys would fort up and keep the business and the action within the in-clique and ignore completely anything that any of these “troublesome” coloureds have to say…?

The point is, social media and social media marketing and social media strategy is an almost pointless pursuit for businesses in South Africa when the same small group of people who are also the same group who got the contracts to develop these sites, now have to go around and stir up their small, limited circle of friends to go and see what Company A or B has put up and comment there or add a digg, or del.icio.us bookmark or in South Africa’s case Muti or Laaik.it or Amatomu or Afrigator. Once anyone has put anything up and he goes: “hey guys go look at my post” a small number of his/her buddies will rush over and throw two cents worth of “nice post, keep at it” into the comments collection-box and be on their merry way to look at the next shiny little pebble on the internet highway.

When it comes to companies releasing press releases about new products/programs or initiatives they are launching, we are stuck in the old top-down hierarchical mentality of wanting to control the message and releasing stiff, formal templated media releases that does not contain anything with a potential of going viral or being worthy of being shared with your friends on Facebook. The Vodacom animated meerkat is a much despised brand property on Facebook where there is actually a group called “I fucking hate the animated meerkat from Vodacom” with 15,642 (South African) members.

Some of the bigger media companies have in-house “social media experts”, mostly web development geeks who saw potential in this new frontier opening up and all sorts of “consultants” offering “New Media and Social Media Strategy” services for exorbitant fees. Most of these consultants are based in closed in-clique centres like Johannesburg and Cape Town where most of the action is happening and the market is so small that there is usually stiff competition from the same group of individuals for the available social media gigs. This then inevitably leads to some behind-the-scenes intrigue and gossip mongering and trying to keep it “within the family”.

This means that in a South African context where an incompetent and corrupt government alliance are failing all it’s people, every community is closing in on itself and protecting it’s own and being very protective of the available small pieces of pie going around. The hierarchy of needs that Maslow talks about thus comes into play with people who have access to technology and the education enabling them to wield that technology adequately and competently, keeping it to themselves in order to remain ahead of the pack in the African bush. You then find a situation like you have at present in the online Web 2.0 South African zoo, those who have been benefitting from apartheid through privileged education and upbringing and access to good education and resources banding together only with those from similar privileged backgrounds.

Everyone else is not “worthy” and it is not their problem or their concern why “these people” aren’t educated or sophisticated enough, it’s been fifteen years of Affirmitive Action and BEE after all! We thus see a very vicious racism rearing it’s head where the Australian passports and emigration visas are being dusted off and old Afrikaner Boer generals are nostalgically praised in popular culture to signal a return to the “good old days” if only in spirit and not in the everyday reality.

My point in waffling on like this? People form communities around common and shared interests. Many of the small minority of active participants in the South African blogosphere or Web 2.0 scene share only one thing: being white and their parents having benefitted from the previous apartheid regime. They are thus the custodians of the old wealth and the old ways and are doing everything to protect their position of privilege from being usurped by pretentious nouveau-riche blacks who wants to overrun and nationalize everything in sight. Recent political developments like the ANC youth league president threatening with killing for the very unsuitable presidential candidate does not exactly help in easing their fears.

So social media strategy and social media marketing online in South Africa is only existent for a small minority of privileged white geeks and their equally small potential white and privileged audience who might be enticed into visiting a site and leaving a comment or sharing it on a social bookmarking site. The rest of the population do not have computers, many access these sites from work or school or university and then only to check the odd e-mail and zombie bite their friends on Facebook. Most of the teenagers are clogging up the GPRS networks with Mxit from their mobile phones and those (mostly white kids) that have access to 3G use it to play XBOX or World of WarCraft online.

DISCLAIMER: This is my personal blog, the opinions expressed here belongs to me alone. You are free to differ from me in the comments, but please keep it civil and on point, I tolerate no monkey business

Tags: hierarchy, maslow, opinion, philosophy, politics, psychological needs, social media, social networking, south africa

Video - Almost 9 Distros in Almost 6 Minutes

Linux Journal has a nice little video of nine eight Linux distros, giving a bit of variety to the always-focusing-on-Ubuntu habit. Linux Journal Associate Editor Shaun Powers runs through them for us on his laptop…! He struggles a bit to get Gentoo going, but hey, can’t have everything perfect now can we?

Personally I dual-boot Kubuntu/Win XP SP2 on a Pentium 4, 3.2GHz machine with 2GB RAM, but have tried and installed many of the flavours reviewed here for people who wanted to try Linux out and also who wanted to breath fresh new life in old hardware they didn’t want to throw away when they got new computers.

So far the star performers have been PCLinuxOS and Mint Linux, I think it has something to do with the out-of-the-box multimedia support although PCLinuxOS has stopped that with their latest versions. Another star performer that was well received was Damn Small Linux. Anyways here’s the video, enjoy

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Tags: damnsmalllinux, distros, gentoo, journal, linux, mint, pclinuxos, puppylinux, review, video

Consolidation of scattered web identities - Friendfeed

After a long break from blogging because of project and client commitments (I was Twittering and Facebooking and Friendfeeding and posting to del.icio.us all the time; does that count…?), I have now decided to get a name domain and do a bit of the personal branding type stuff that everyone is talking about

The first step of course was to register my own name as a top level domain (TLD). This starts your journey on the way to projecting a serious, professional image to prospective clients and business partners or just friends on the internet who now can see you’re not just goofing around on the internet the whole time, but that it can actually be used for more serious business and professional networking purposes

So this is the start of my attempt to bring all my different blogs and profiles together under one roof and namespace. The obvious benefit is that it will go a long way towards focusing my attention on only the one major repository of stuff that is scattered all over the web at the moment.

All the different blogs hosted elsewhere and all the different profiles on the different social networks are becoming a bit unwieldy and the trend is nowadays towards aggregated lifestreaming and building your personal brand online.

Doing that will be much easier if there is one place to rule them all, one place to consolidate them, one place to aggregate them all and in lifestreamlining bind them. (Apologies to JRR Tolkien). Hey, did I just make up a new word: lifestreamlining…? Hmmm… So, what exactly is it that I do online that it now deserves a dedicated namespace and aggregation effort…? Web development, mainly on the WordPress content management system platform and everything related to that: registering domain names, hosting those accounts on CentOS Linux servers, setting up and configuring the WordPress CMS, maintaining it and augmenting it with the multitude of plugins and themes available. Of course it’s never that simple, and I shall dedicate a future post to a detailed outline of what all goes into setting up and maintaining blogs for clients. Especially with the advent of Social Media and the myriad services out there, it has become a regular cottage industry. Consultant services to marketing and PR professionals who want to enter the Social Media phenomenon but who do not necessarily have access to a geeky nephew or brother who can set it up and maintain it for them.

Also with the creation of new roles of Social Media Strategists, more and more businesses and big corporations are committing budget to individual who can set up, configure and maintain social media profiles and services for them in the new media landscape where they have to necessarily go where the conversation is happening and the cool kids hang out, otherwise they will just become irrelevant and fall out of everyone’s attention sphere and lose clients and thus business and profit. So, without rambling on too much, that is what I do all the time, getting paid to goof off on the internet all day and put up Facebook and del.icio.us and Friendfeed accounts and profiles for paying clients. Geez, I’ve done it for myself and I’m having a fabulous time, if someone else also want in on the action, they can bloody well pay me for my time and trouble, can’t they…?

Some bright sparks (software engineers) who worked at Google before, came up with a brilliant new lifestream aggregating service called Friendfeed. I am testing the brand spanking new WordPress Friendfeed widget in the sidebar of my blog. What it does is integrate into one service all the disparate profiles and accounts and pull them together, and now with the WordPress widget you can plug it in to your blog sidebar. People who are interested in seeing what you’re up to need only go to one place to see where you’ve done what. For example if you’ve watched videos over at YouTube and marked it as a favourite, if you’ve posted a new blog post at another domain, uploaded Flickr photos, shared Google Reader items from your RSS collection of feeds, listened to favourite last.fm tracks, scheduled an event at upcoming.org or updated your Twitter status with a Tweet or ten, whether you dugg stories on digg or saved del.icio.us bookmarks, it will all show up in one place: your Friendfeed profile.

The main Friendfeed site and web interface also has the ability to let you like things and comment on your stream of events and those of friends whom you have subscribed to. This has led to Friendfeed becoming the destination of choice for many of the more prominent Twitter personalities when Twitter experiences one of it’s notorious hiccups, which is frequent and unexpected and many times it’s a case of guess which functional aspect is gonna be crippled this week while they (hopefully) are hard at work in the background getting things up and running smoothly.

Tags: aggregation, del.icio.us, digg, facebook, flickr, friendfeed, Google Reader, last.fm, lifestream, widget, wordpress

aggregation

the whole issue of getting all the different social networking/bookmarking sites’ profiles into one page has now become a sort of personal mission for me, both because it makes it easier to manage and also because of the potential it has of becoming a personal publishing platform.

like your own personal media network, where you decide what content from which sources you want to share and how and when and where and why such sharing should be taking place in the first place

i have been trying to do this for a while now with facebook and stumbleupon and del.icio.us and wordpress and basically just testing out all the different capabilities and functions and special features of each service

then of course comes the part where all of this has to be linked and connected up together and i find that facebook works best for that purpose, in fact i am typing this post from within the wordpress app on my facebook profile

for all of this of course you need a good web browser and here, without any hesitation or dispute, i will recommend firefox, and the stumbleupon, del.icio.us and facebook add-ons (toolbars)
it is easy to, from within google reader, click on a link of a news article you like or find interesting, photoblog it with stumbleUpon, bookmark it with del.icio.us, and all of it is updated and cross-updated on your facebook, stumbleUpon, del.icio.us and wordPress blogs all at the same time or however you have configured or set it up

gmail of course is every web worker’s number one ally, then there is google docs and spreadsheets, google reader, calendar and maps etc to collaborate on projects with those that share your interests or guest posters/contributors etc etc

with google reader you keep track of the most important feeds from around the ‘blogosphere’, specifically those in your own field or sphere of interests and tastes

what you highlight or bookmark or share depends entirely on your ability to pick newsworthy or interesting items that other people would be interested in seeing or if you have a certain story or project or slant, this can form the basis for the theme of ‘your own personal publishing empire’