Mail & Guardian Online wins some SA blog awards

Don’t I feel like an idiot – at the last minute Matt and I had to cancel our plans to go to Cape Town tonight for the SA Blog Awards and we won 4 awards – Matthew Buckland won best business blog, Amatomu won best site promoting blogs and Thought Leader won best political blog and blog of the year. I feel pretty foul about missing the party and the celebrations but very happy for the recognition.

The person who probably deserves the most thanks in all of this is Riaan Wolmarans, the Thought Leader editor who is the most over-worked person I know right now [except for the hamster powering my laptop during power outages].

Introducing Thought Leader, the M&G Online’s new opinion platform

Today the Mail & Guardian Online linked to our new blogging platform called Thought Leader so I may as well post about it here and shed some light on our strategy and thinking. If you want Matthew Buckland, our GM’s post read that here.

Thought Leader is the 3rd part of our 3-step blogging strategy. The first was was to aggregate and measure the local blogosphere, which we did via Amatomu. The second was to provide a hosting platform for blogs, which we did via Amagama. The final step, and the most challenging, was to create a hybrid between a group blog and a more traditional opinion and editorial site that we could really throw our reputation behind as a quality news source.

A few people have asked me if there is any method to the madness as we rolled out the previous two products but, as you can see, 1+1+1 > 3 in this case and the 3 sites form a comprehensive approach that not many other SA media have adopted.

Each blog is edited by our editorial team and so are the comments and the intention is for it to become the source for quality blogging in the spheres of politics, economics, society, religion and technology – this will no doubt also spur some robust debate ahead of the elections.

Another thing you may notice is that it features a lot of local blogging talent mixed in with the Mail & Guardian journalists and experts. There can be no doubt that blogging in South Africa has caused an explosion of writing and from this has emerged some real talent [along with some real untalent] and we wanted to help these newcomers get some public exposure and be part of the great debate.

Al in all I am happy with it, the development process has been painless and the signs are all there for a community that is going to grow a strong voice.