Matt Mullenweg announced the early release of WordPress 2.6 on the WordPress blog one month ahead of schedule. Here is a video that runs us through the most noteable new features and improvements.

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?

I found this awesome site called Nodalities, and what it does is compile a list of the best links to articles and posts about the Semantic Web for any given week.

Intelligent software agents and intelligent data structures? Bring ‘em on!

After many weeks of Christmas and New Years and clients’ deadlines and WordPress installations being compromised, I now am fired up to blog with more passion and focus. After struggling with SQL database & blog directory backups, .htaccess files and server permissions and locking myself out of the blog and nearly messing it up completely, the tech guys at support really came through on a Friday afternoon and now it is all on track again! w00t! w00t!

So here’s to 2008, may it be a fabulous year for bloggers, publishers, journalists and all creative technology-loving geeks out there!

Babylon 5 was one of my all-time favourite sci-fi series on TV, here is a quote for inspiration:

“What does the candle represent?”
“Life.”
“Whose life?”
“All life, every life. We’re all born as molecules in the hearts of a billion stars, molecules that do not understand politics, policies and differences. In a billion years we, foolish molecules forget who we are and where we came from. Desperate acts of ego. We give ourselves names, fight over lines on maps. And pretend our light is better than everyone else’s. The flame reminds us of the piece of those stars that live inside us. A spark that tells us: you should know better. The flame also reminds us that life is precious, as each flame is unique. When it goes out, it’s gone forever. And there will never be another quite like it. So many candles will go out tonight. I wonder some days if we
can see anything at all.”

– Sheridan and Delenn in Babylon 5: “And All My Dreams, Torn Asunder”

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.

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 at all.

I have been trying to do this for a while now with Facebook, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, digg and basically just testing out all the different capabilities and functions and special features of each service. I will post more detailed uses of each site after a bit more testing and using and research.

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. There are of course whole tech startups devoted to exactly this, but I find the idea of yet another social networking service to aggregate all the other social networking services on one page a bit silly. I have received my Beta Registration acknowledgment for Twine though, and if all the reviews and write-ups about it so far are true, it should be exactly the kind of thing that is needed to make sense of all the disparate and scattered SNP’s (social networking profiles) into one profile to bind them, one profile to rule them all and in an intelligent manner binding them into One profile to rule them all. (apologies to JRR Tolkien)

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). Unfortunately Firefox has become a bit bloated of late and freezes regularly and uses too much processing power, so I switched to Seamonkey, which is more lightweight and very fast.

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 digg blogs all at the same time or however you have configured or set it up. Our company of course specializes in exactly this as a service to our clients.

Gmail 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. And if you log into secure encrypted SSL Google mail (https://mail.google.com), your Docs and Calendar and Maps are also automatically through encrypted SSL tunnel. And it is all free!!!

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’. With regular, quality content you build up regular and loyal visitors and with more and more regular visitors comes the ability to charge premium rates for ads (custom designed animated ad banners of advertising partners).

For more info on any of these strategies for your company or brand, feel free to mail mario [at] hogsback [dot] net

www.balancingact-africa.com is a very valuable resource for anyone in the mobile and ICT (Information and Communications Technology) fields in Africa, and this article deals with the mobile service providers in the South African market specifically. Especially for young tech startup companies who is dependent on reliable infrastructure to base their services on, since it mostly runs online.

And then of course the product offerings and pricing structure from these players will determine the nature and extent of the tech industry ecosystem that will grow up in South Africa in this space.

MTN takes on Vodacom ISP in South Africa

MTN must reposition itself as an Internet service provider (ISP) in order to remain competitive, says Brian Seligmann, MTN’s data and messaging executive.

Speaking at the ITWeb Technology Roadmaps 2007 conference, in Bryanston yesterday, Seligmann said: “MTN has 4.5 million active data subscribers, and yet we still think of ourselves as a mobile provider and not an ISP. We need to start playing the game.”

Mobile services are evolving within the context of Internet services and these will be more important than the company’s traditional mobile voice offerings, he explained.

He said with the high levels of mobile penetration, MTN has the potential to dominate in the IP arena. “Mobile Internet will become more valuable than mobile voice services, and if we don’t get involved, we will fail.”

The availability of free Internet services, such as instant messaging and VOIP applications, are driving the company to look more directly at Internet services, he noted. “IP [Internet Protocol] services have the possibility to wipe out most mobile revenue.”

MTN is not the first cellular operator to elevate the importance of ISP services within its strategy. Earlier this year, its competitor Vodacom established an ISP business.