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Showing posts from December, 2006

All the Zeitgeist (including an explanation and South African results)

What is Zeitgeist? It's Google's search trends by month / by year. What's hot, what's not kind of thing, split by country.

(Just a side note here - I'm putting these definitions in, because I have this funny feeling that the "blogosphere" can be fairly intimidating to new users. 2 years ago - I wouldn't have had a CLUE what Zeitgeist was. And I've seen a lot of blogs just slapping theses results down as if it's common knowledge and needs no explanation. There we go. Humanitarian blogging!)

As for the South African results - obviously November is the latest they've released... Shows interesting cultural trends though. We're a lot less concerned, at the moment, with things like celebrities and social media - and more concerned with banking and cellphones. A developing economy indeed! Kudos to us.

From the press release:
Zeitgeist Explained: zeit·geist Pronunciation: 'tsIt-"gIst, 'zIt Function: noun Etymology: German, from Zeit (…
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Happy Christmas!

To all our readers...

And a great New Year!
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The Blogger BETA Saga: Like a damp squib.

No fireworks. No broken blogs. Just no ability to migrate. And they've doubled up on All Scrubbed Up - it seems to exist in both worlds. Stuck.

Ah well, another message to the friendly Blogger Employee and we'll see what happens. In the mean time - more posting! There will be a slight break over the new year period - so we'll get all the interesting stuff in now - as I'm getting a second here and there to clear out my rather full RSS Reader.
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A South African Tech Podcast. About time.

Nice one to Mike Stopforth and Dave Duarte for coining what looks like the first techie podcast in SA. Smashing idea chaps. After all, even if I'm still umm'ing and ahh'ing about the measurable effectiveness of blogging and social media, it's definitely proved itself as a channel and a platform.

Heard a rumour one times Cowboys / All Scrubbed blogger may be interviewed. Now it's in print. :)

Read the post here. Subscribe here. Or add the PodFeed to iTunes.
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Migrations and Musings... Death by BETA.

After two weeks of pleading, begging and emailing Blogger Support, Cowboys has come back up - albeit on the OLD version of Blogger. After I've stopped leaping around the office in feigned glee, I thought I should take a moment to reflect on what just happened... and perhaps why.

The Scene:
We're looking to start a blog, about 6 months ago. We're looking for a free platform, no traffic worries, no hosting worries (we're a .NET development firm anyway, even Ubuntu is proving quite a learning curve), easy indexing and a fairly stable GUI posting interface. Who better to turn to than Google - the behemoth of fantastic free services.

The Story:
It went like clockwork. Signup, team blogging, posting, indexing and starting to grow an audience. Until the tantalising hint of a "shiny new upgrade". Blogger Beta. Showdown at High Noon - to speak metaphorically.

Foolishly (I seem to remember Brett saying: "Do it! We're on the cutting edge aren't we?") I clic…
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Back from the Dead!

Oh. My. Greatness.

Cowboys has been absolutely dead for the last two weeks. Our humble apologies - but we've had first experience that software development, hosted apps, web apps, code, developers and BETA versions are not as easy as they look. And they don't look easy.


Google killed us. After a migration to the new "shiny" version of blogger. More info soon.
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Pan African 2.0 stuff...

Spotted a post on AfricanSocialNetwork just now that raises an interesting point. The Nigerian Blogging site was trying to put together a list of leading African Web 2.0 / Social Media sites. There were one or two slightly negative comments posted almost immediately, mostly about the list not being Pan-African, and thus not representative.

What AfricanSocialNetwork were trying to do was not wrong at all - it's just that there doesn't seem to be a pan-african platform to showcase African Web talent.

That's a shame.

So I've started one. Pop over to Africa 2.0 and take a look... The site will be taking submissions from any African site that contributes to our presence/heritage on the web. Our friends at AfricanSocialNetwork are already proudly displayed.

Their list includes:

- African YouTube / Video publishing site - Mooziko
- African Digg - Afribian
- African Facebook / MySpace - Afriville
- African Page Creator - Synthasite
- African online dating, 2.0 style - YesNoMayB
- Africa…
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The Marketing Heroes of YouTube

COMMUNITY: YouTube
MEDIA TYPE: Video
MEDIA CATEGORY: General Entertainment


Lonelygirl15. Done to death, I know. The story of a doe-eyed teenager vlogging from the confines of her bedroom and moping about restrictive parents, purple monkeys and a silly boyfriend. Found out to be a fake - destroyed the hearts of millions. But still going. We know.

MARKETING IMPLICATIONS: 60+ 3 minute videos (that I could find) and over 300,000 views per video. 3 videos per week = 1 million views per week. That’s a medium sized cable channel! TV still means advertising unless I missed something?

In fact, their .com has been reported to generate over $10,000 a month in advertising already. Where to from here? I’m not sure - but it’s proved the Social Web has got eyeball power - and quick video publishing may just be the next mass entertainment media.



LisaNova. A lady with more feet on the ground and less teasing cleavage. A couple of fancy Hollywood friends could be acting as a catalyst for her popularity, but …
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Think your password is secure?

Found this post on Modern Life is Rubbish - thought it worth repeating and commending! I was under the misguided impression that the most common passwords were: Sex, God and Password. Been watching too much Hackers in my youth, obviously.

Read the rest of the blog for the intro and conclusions. I've included the summary findings below. Food for thought eh?

Obviously this is UK data - but I suspect South Africa is worse in terms of password security. See our previous article on Cracking Wireless Networks for a glimpse on just what can be accomplished with a cracked password or two! And remember, this is the digital age. Your calendar, your spreadsheets, your mail - it's all going online! Read on...

10. 'thomas' (0.99‰) - First off, at number 10, is the most common format of passwords - the name. Thomas is a perennially popular name in the UK (2nd most popular in 2000), so it is perhaps no surprise that it makes the top 10, with nearly 1 in 1,000 people opting for this ubiq…
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4/12/2006 - What COWBOYS are reading...

Not So Lonely - The new Wired has a great feature about the lonelygirl15 story. Lonelygirl15, you will remember, was a hit YouTube vlog about a teenage girl, her family and her ambiguous relationship with her friend Daniel. You’ll also recall that the central character, Bree, turned out to be an actress called Jessica Rose, working with a guy [...]

How to Optimize Your Blog for Search Engines - So you’re looking to increase the profitability of your blog for the Christmas period (and beyond). You’ve optimized your AdSense, Chitika and Affiliate programs, you’ve even written a little seasonal content…. but there’s one missing element…. Traffic.

Blogging Quick Tips - A massive thank you to all those readers who submitted reader ‘quick tips’ which I used as guest posts while traveling over the last couple of weeks. Over 50 tips were submitted (in fact more have been submitted in the last few days) - unfortunately I wasn’t able to use all of them (although [...]

Where Does the Web Fit? - An …
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Customer Evangelism buggered up...

Interesting. Talking about the merits of Social Media being used for marketing campaigns and strategies - enter iBurst and their now infamous blog. Spotted on Friday on MyBroadband - how's this for an example of the speed of the blogging world blowing up in the proverbial brand face:

iBurst recently boldly announced that it has launched an integrated blogging system in “an effort to put a human face to customer care” to enable them to directly interact with customers. It has proven to be a dismal failure.

Currently the blog , written by iBurst’s head of customer care Ed Hall, consists of one article and 127 comments. Browsing through the comments page is enough to send shivers down any customer care manager’s spine.

Now, here's the kicker. This article shouldn't be viewed in a negative light at all! You've opened up to a channel that has presented you with 120 odd pieces of customer feedback. What an awesome platform to do some serious customer RELATIONSHIP marketing. The…
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Does Social Media make Marketing sense?

Ah, the musings of a blogger. After more internal debate (being new to the world of blogs and their application has its intellectual benefits after all), we’re getting stuck into questions like:

What is social media?
Has anything really changed from a media point of view?
How do you quantify this from a marketing perspective?




As marketers, we should always be asking ourselves these questions internally. No airy-fairy thoughts about evangelism whatnot. Can we create something for R1 and sell it for R2?

Let's not get confused here... Blogging IS fun, great fun, but if there’s no tangible or measurable benefit – then we must accept it as an ego-stroking past time and a lightning fast way to distribute personal opinions to the world... and that’s that.

Is the blogosphere any different from community meetings of the middle ages? People shouting out their views in front of the gallows where the last voiced opinion that didn't have merit was about to be silenced (undugg? buried?). It’s jus…
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