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I was just watching a CNN special report about British heavy metal band Iron Maiden and, being an old fan, I took a look at their web site.

I am not a metalhead anymore, I was from 13 - 17 years old and I still love the music so I got pretty excited when I saw that the band have released their entire new album, called Somewhere Back In Time, as a free download.

The album has 13 tracks recorded from 198o to 1989 including some of the greats like Number of the Beast, Aces High and Can I Play With Madness, which are DRM protected so you can listen to them 3 times and then buy the album as MP3s, on CD or on vinyl. With all the debate around how recording artists are going to make their money, this is a shining example of a multi-medium approach that ultimately promotes one thing - live performances. I am a fan again.

As Nic just announced on his blog, he will be joining our team as the business manager for mobile and recruitment in two weeks time.

We are all very excited to bring someone with Nic’s insight into the online media industry onto our team and are looking forward to his energy and enthusiasm. Nic and I worked together on our ill-fated Flamebait podcast last year and, if that’s anything to go by, crazy fun times are in store for us.

It also means that the M&G Online will be investing more time in developing its mobile properties and readership. As it is, we develop a mobile version of every site we launch and they have proven relatively successful, especially for people who want to get their dose of Thought Leader during traffic jams.

Nic is also influential in the social media space in South Africa, was a founder of the technology blog Nudjit and SA Rocks, and has a keen sense for trends in our space. Nic will be blogging about his work and his time at the M&G Online so watch his blog for updates and impressions.

The Thought Leader concept is expanding over the next few months and the first incarnation is Tech Leader. Tech Leader is an edited group blog aimed at thinkers in the South African technology industry. It will have the same editorial values as Thought Leader and offer insightful analysis on issues ranging from consumer technology to e-governance, open-source and industry best-practices.

The goal of the site is to aggregate quality comment about technology and to create a hub for ideas and critique that will become a valuable resource. Because it is be a communal platform, we expect that the level of discussion will make it an invaluable knowledge resource for readers trying to make sense of the disruptive chaos that technologists have to deal with every day.

The site already has more than thirty contributors and will be launched officially early next week. If you are, or know of, someone who would like to contribute, please send an email to vincent at mg.co.za

This morning I did the opening presentation for final day of the Digital Africa Summit, a gathering of about 150 CEOs and CTOs from around the continent. My presentation was short and sweet and my argument was the following:

1. Social Media is a space that is wide-open for innovation in Africa
2. There are many more mobile users in Africa than fixed-line Internet users
3. Mobile users will become Internet users
4. Therefore mobile is going to eclipse all other media, including television and radio
5. Location-aware mobile social media will change the way society interacts with itself and with the physical environment. I gave the example of flashmobs.
6. Because Africa is only 3.4% of the global Internet usage we have luckily been ignored by players in the bigger markets
7. This, in turn creates a massive opportunity for innovation in our local markets
8. Those who innovate make the rules

It wasn’t a tough sell, it didn’t take very long and I enjoyed delivering a positive message. If Slideshare wasn’t broken I’d upload my presentation, I’ll try again later.

There have been some questions and comments about my position on this so here goes. Two weeks ago when Mark skyped me to ask if I thought they were doing the right thing, I was quite skeptical. Luckily he listened to me when I suggested he re-arrange the chat windows horizontally rather than vertically. As I explained to him, the side has more pixels than the top.

Anyway, I’m glad they did it and here’s why:

1. Not having chat on Facebook is stupid, people obviously use the platform to communicate
2. My Facebook contacts and my Gtalk contacts are different and often I want to chat with Facebook friends. This is a major pain when you have to send messages back and forth to agree on what chat platform, what invitation process etc etc
3. Time on site is going to be one of the biggest metrics for advertising in the future and with Ajax and other RIA technologies the frequency of advertising displays is no longer tied to the page impression. This chat platform will increase the attention paid to any given FB page as well as the average time on site
4. People I know use FB as an email replacement. Personally I think this is a bad thing but extending chat into it means that for many, FB will become their primary communication channel with people online.
5. The chat app is well-executed and will be adjusted over time as privacy and usability issues become more apparent.
6. Over the next month is probably going to be the best time in FB’s history to sell

I mostly agree with what Stii has said about it though my initial reaction was more instinctive and less analytical. I liked it from the minute I saw it and it made complete sense.

I find it hard to believe, but if you look at twitter messages sent by Matthew - documented by Simone and Kerry-Anne - it looks like HE is Bolton Deventer.  In a nutshell it looks like he posted a tweet from Bolton using his own account by accident, then deleted it.

This also makes sense that around the time when Matt got into Twitter, Bolton magically re-appeared on Twitter too and has been engaging in banter for the past few weeks. Co-incidence?

In the past few months the one person who keeps bringing up Bolton, normally in the form of an accusation that I am Bolton, is Matt. My personal theory for a long time has that Bolton’s creator is a woman, though I can’t pinpoint why I thought that.  It was the turn of phrase, I suppose.

I will be reporting on Matt’s response when I call him in a  few minutes, because he is going to get a grilling from me muaah haaa

After last night’s drive home, which involved power cuts all the way from the office to my house, a broken down car in a single lane road and a dead person lying in the road wrapped in tin foil and obstructing traffic, I am relieved to find myself about to board a plane.  It feels safer.

I’m on my way to speak at Technomadic Markets, a course run by the UCT Graduate School of Business in Cape Town and looking forward to it a lot.  This will be my third time I speak at this event and each time I get more out of it.  The presentation format is two 45-minute lectures that are very interactive and the audience is generally very savvy when it comes to online media.

I’ll update later with some comments about the presentations during the day.

I have been waiting for this day and it has finally come.  This morning I got an email from Google Analytics describing their new benchmarking service:

Benchmarking is an optional Google Analytics service that shows how your website’s statistics compare against other industry verticals. In the beta version of this service, you are able to compare your site’s Visits, Pageviews, Pages per Visit, Bounce Rate, Average Time on Site, and New Visits data against benchmark data from categories of other participating websites. You can use this data to gain broader context for your site so you can identify additional opportunities to improve your site’s metrics.

Although the announcement is quite low-key, the possibilities are profound. Firstly, it paves the way for Google to create a global web traffic ranking system based on any number of criteria ranging from page impressions, unique visitors, time on site, bounce rate or a combination of all of them. Secondly, it might mean that an API could appear that would enable aggregators like Amatomu to access the relevant statistics which we currently have to gather ourselves. The reason I think this might happen is because there are effectively 4 ways you can choose to share your Google Analytics data:

1. Not at all
2. Only with other Google services
3. With other Google services and anonymously - this is for industry verticals OR
4. Share data without the restrictions of the previous 2 points and, by implication, enable 3rd party access

This final point may be a misinterpretation of the wording but I doubt it and I think a massive centralised system that uses permission-based access to enable site comparisons based on identical criteria is something that is highly necessary.  The pseudo-authority of panel-based systems like Alexa and Compete.com irritate me on a daily basis.  Naturally some site owners would like to keep their performance secret, but take the example of South African publishers:  the Online Publishers Association publishes their members’ page impressions and unique reader figures on a quarterly basis by month.  There is a sense that among the top publishers in the country these analytics are not worth keep a secret and what it means is that we can all compete directly based on real numbers and a single and consistent counting mechanism.

Once benchmarking is enabled, you can immediately see comparisons based on other similar sites for the following metrics:

• Visits
• Bounce Rate
• Page Views
• Avg Time on Site
• Pages/Visit
• Time on Site

This immediately means I can compare, in relation to advertising conversaion and performance, why a site I am tracking might be under-performing and so on, and most of this relates to the bounce rate.  The bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits.  A high bounce rate is generally caused by either search traffic on individual articles or having once big site referring traffic  - in both cases the page the user ends up may be interesting to them but the rest of the site isn’t, or is not presented in a way that makes subsequent navigation easy.  If the bounce rate is high then the avg time on site is low and so is the pages/visit. So one can see the value of being able to compare your site to other similar ones to see where your winning or losing.

It will probably be another year before Google feel comfortable offering a 3rd party API for this data but the possibilities are profound and I hope they do it.

Hot on the heels of winning Blog of the Year at the SA Blog Awards, Thought Leader has been named an official honoree by the Webby Awards, alongside blogs by CNN, CBS News, The New Yorker, CNBC, The New York Times, TIME and the Observer Media Group.  This puts Thought Leader in the top 15 political blogs in the world and the only blog in its category from Africa.

News In Photos, the M&G Online photo portal was named official honoree in both the Newspaper category and the Best Use of Photography categories, alongside The Globe and Mail, The New York Observer, LA Times, Las Vegas Sun, Ogilvy Singapore, 360 Cities, Rolex and more.

“”We are honoured to have received recognition for the hard work that has gone into creating Thought Leader and News in Photos. It is gratifying to be listed in the same company as some of the world’s great brands like New York Times, Washingtonpost.com, CNBC and CBS and others,” said Matthew Buckland, M&G Online GM.

Hailed as the “Oscars of the Internet” by the New York Times, The Webby Awards is the leading international award honoring excellence on the Internet, including Websites, Interactive Advertising, Online Film & Video, and Mobile Websites. The awards are judged by the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences, a global organization that includes David Bowie, Harvey Weinstein, Arianna Huffington, AKQA Global Creative Director Rei Inamoto, Matt Groening, Jamie Oliver, Internet inventor Vinton Cerf, and RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser.

The 12th Annual Webby Awards received nearly 10,000 entries from over 60 countries and all 50 states. Out more than 10,000 entries submitted, fewer than 15% received this honor and were deemed Official Honorees.

The M&G Online team have put a lot of effort and work into these projects, as have all our Thought Leader contributors, and this kind of recognition makes it all seem worth it but, further than that, it helps put South Africa on the map as a producer of quality web applications.  Special thanks, from my side, go to Matthew Buckland and Riaan Wolmarans for endless energy, ideas and support.  This has been a great team effort and it just goes to show what can be done when you don’t mind taking some risks.

A few weeks ago I built a gadget for iGoogle, which is Google’s equivalent of a personalised home page and I have a few things to say about this experience in no special order:

1. Development is ugly.  Google suggest you use an iGoogle gadget to create your gadget - that’s right, you create a gadget using a gadget, and it’s not a particularly good gadget. The hardcore out there will use the gadget editor to create a blank XML file and then paste in code they created in their IDE, but I can just imagine the poor non-techie who beleived the hype about how easy it is.
2. iGoogle is Ugly.  It’s great that iGoogle has an API and a lot of example code, the only problem is you end up with thousands of the same crappy-looking RSS gadgets.  I really wanted to believe iGoogle is cool but after puking on my keyboard for 3 days I turned it off because I just couldn’t take aesthetic punishment anymore.
3. Deployment is messy. Great and all when you finally get your XML file ready and it seems to work well enought to submit into the Google catalog.  In my experience, once you submit an XML file and someone installs it, whatever changes you make don’t seem to take affect.  As a result I have 3 XML files with different names and 3 submissions to iGoogle.  If there is documentation about this it’s not easy to find.
4. Finding anything on iGoogle is LAME. Explain to me why the top search company in the world has such poor search functionality when you’re trying to find gadgets.  Why is it that when I enter Mail & Guardian as a search string, GMail comes up top?  Why is it that when I wrap the phrase in quotes I get the same lame results? Why is it that when I enter the EXACT name of the gadget into the search field I still see GMail? Not even the pager system on the bottom of the search works properly, sometimes it shows more pages than there are results, then tells you there are no results even though you were looking at them a minute ago.
5. Communication is non-existant. After submitting my gadget to the catalog and being told that Google screens the submissions, the least they could have done is emailed me when my gadget was listed.  Though, based on the search, it would’t surprise me if their own mail ends up in the Gmail spam folder.

All in all this is one of the poorest systems Google has deployed to day and should be perceived, internally, as an embarrasment to all involved.  Maybe someone forgot to show them the memo saying that now that Google is big, people expect the appropriate attention to detail.

I have one goof thing to say about iGoogle, which is that you can easily integrate it with Google Analytics to see how many people are using your gadget.  This is the rose among the weeds.

Get the Mail & Guardian Online iGoogle widget here.