Some SA blogging memories, told by graphs

This has been an incredibly interesting year on the local blogosphere and I have been racking my brains on how to write about some of the seminal events. When in doubt, use pictures.

This post is based on 6-month data from Amatomu, showing blog audience reach as a percentage. Some of them compare blogs, others show single blogs and each illustrates something I think has been fairly important.

The birth of the media blogs

This year saw the launch of The Times Planet Blog and the M&G’s Thought Leader. Both are group blogs but are significantly different. As you can see from the graph below, they both benefited greatly from the ANC conference this year and both started tracking their traffic on Amatomu at the same time.

Independent online media strategists

Mike Stopforth and Tyler Reed both had a good year, though Tyler seems to have had a dead spot in the middle which, I assume, is because he changed his blog template and forgot to move the Amatomu tracking code over. Mike is a co-founder of Afrigator and Tyler was the one who broke the news when Amatomu went into alpha. Tyler also recently launched twaction.com, a clever aggregator of Facebook-style actions but using Twitter.

The VC/Entrepeneurs

Vinny Lingham had a strong opening to the year, as did Eric Edelstein but both dropped off a little towards the end. Vinny has been focussing on spending some of that R35 mil venture capital he landed for Synthasite and Eric has been doing all sorts of things, from starting up a 3rd blog aggregator to the Open Coffee Club. Vinny was recently named “The man to watch in 2008” by Matthew Buckland, the GM of the Mail & Guardian Online and Matthew doesn’t give away accolades for nothing.

The Vinny and Matt show continues

This year Matthew Buckland and I fought over blogebrity and, I must admit, Matt out-did me when he broke the Jimmy Wales story and was linked to by TechCrunch and Mashable. You can see his spike clearly. On the whole I won though HA HA.

Rugby blogs tackle each other hard

Keo.co.za has been suffering a steady decline in audience reach over the past 2 months, but the peak at fourty percent of the total local blog audience says it all – the blog is a powerhouse. More recently Rugbydump has entered the fray and has risen to the top during Keo’s down-time over the December holidays. January will be a telling month for both as this equation rights itself or continues along its current path.

Moms and dads fight tooth and nail

Steve Hofmeyr, Afrikaans celebrity, and Tertia Albertyn, mother of two have been fighting it out near the top of the charts the whole year. I don’t know if they are even aware of this but it’s been happening anyway and Tertia’s blogging over XMas seems to have given her a leg up.

Nic Haralambous, the patriot

Nic Haralambous has been in the shadow of his other project, SA Rocks, for most of the year. Nic’s peak traffic was when he almost got sued for dissing Guy Mclaren and various other moralisations that I advised him to quit for the sake of peace on the sphere. As the graph shows, baiting people is a good driver of traffic but Nic has renounced all of that now.

Traffic Insanity

Sean Hederman posted a blog entry that described how he upgraded from Vista to Windows XP and the post became popular – very popular. Believe it or not, that line before the peak is not flat, he was actually blogging, just not as successfully.

Climbing fast

Local WordPress theme designer Adii has had astronomical success as a result of his popular WP themes and has risen into the top 5 on Amatomu relatively quickly. How does he do it, you may ask: WP themes are popular.

Net sites and Bolton Deventer RIP

Bolton Deventer arrived on the scene and made a big noise very quickly. He was funny, anachronistic and completely fake. I spent a good day of my M&G salary calling up background references, consulting maps, calling the Mpumalanga scouts office and almost drove to Ermelo. To this day we still don’t know who he is.

Babies kill blogging

Paul and Gina Jacobson had a baby recently – can you spot which day that was? Paul has been providing some provocative criticism of social media for the past year and provides legal advice to several copyleft organisations.

Peas is Toast

At one stage the blog was infamous for being so popular and parochial at the same time, but Mushy Peas On Toast is reaching less and less people every day. How do we get Laurien, which rightfully shouldn’t be pissed off for me mentioning this, out of her slump? Maybe Apfelstrudel can give her some more Kirchwasser, we’re holding thumbs.

Tech rumbling

My Digital Life and Techtonic have been battling it out in the Amatomu top ten tech blogs for a while now. MDL shared a spot with Amatomu in Maverick Magazine, which was pretty cool. I am not sure what that spike in traffic was all about so Louis-Marc, if you read this I’d love to know.

Chumpstyle abandons Amatomu

One of the first blogs on Amatomu, Chumpstyle has been a mainstay of mens’ blog content, whatever that is and I was very unhappy to see them go. I suspect that there is a case study buried away there about the risks in monetising blogs.

And finally, Bullard lays the Smack-Down

I’ve had a few days when I beat David Bullard for traffic, but those days are few and far between and particularly embarrassing when you’re getting beaten by someone who doesn’t blog even anymore. Maybe one day when I grow up I’ll get myself a column in a newspaper to up my traffic LOL. Well done David, we must do lunch sometime and bring our knives.

If you like these graphs and want to make your own, use the Amatomu blog comparison tool.

More on the Blogger Vs Columnist debate

Candice Jones from ITWeb has portrayed the “debate” between Fred Khumalo and I in a slightly more detailed fashion in an article titled Blogger takes on the ‘dinosaur’. I had a suspicion Candice wasn’t on holiday this week but I do think this report makes the entire incident sound like strong opinions were expressed. Fred says, in a comment on my previous post,

I decide to put it in inverted commas because I was laughing to myself as I started writing… ‘cos everything that we said was supportive of each other… to think I had to fly all the way from Jo’burg to make that salient contribution!

But I think the real angle here is that at least one blogger and one columnist agreed both forms of writing have a place and don’t necessarily threaten each other. I’m sure Bulltard would disagree though, it’s just a pity he’s lost his nerve.

Alleged SA Male Prostitute blogger arrested in Kroonstad

The person suspected of authoring the SA Male Prostitute blog was arrested yesterday in Kroonstad and will be transferred to Cape Town where the case against him was opened, according to stories in the Mail & Guardian and Sunday Times today.

Juan Duval Uys (39) was arrested at the home he shared with his mother in Kroonstad on Saturday after a months-long investigation reportedly involving eBlockwatch, private investigators and the public.

The arrest was made on a warrant issued on a charge relating to fraud registered at Table Bay Harbour police station in Cape Town, said Superintendent Eugene Opperman.

I am glad that this is coming to a head and I hope it send out a clear message to bloggers and the public that bloggers are not above the law in South Africa. There has been increasingly negative attention paid to the blogosphere lately, most based on the false assumption that the normal rule of law does not apply in this space. As we have seen during this investigation and the events leading up to it, there are legitimate channels for prosecution and those have been followed.

There are times when legitimate causes can and should be fought through anonymous blogging, for instance political causes in countries where freedom of expression is not protected and the media have been shut down. This, on the other hand, was a malicious and apolitical attack on individuals and should be dealt with accordingly.

I wonder, however, if the same action would have been taken if the attacks were not leveled at prominent people in the political, sporting and entertainment industry, or whether it would have been done with the same level of urgency.

My comments on the Independent Democrats’ call to censor the local blogosphere

Read the ID press release here, calling for the government regulation of blogging.

These are my thoughts on the matter, in no particular order:

• It is always a knee-jerk reaction to call for increased regulation of any type of media when there is slander involved. The practicalities of this have to be weighed up, however, when we exist in an environment where regulating the traditional media is hard enough.
  • Firstly, I’m guessing that only about 40% of the “local” blogoshere actually exists locally. Many bloggers are hosted offshore by companies like Google. This means that regulation would have to take into account the international nature of the medium and the issues involved with preventing or removing posts from sites like Blogger.com
  • Secondly, most if not all of the local blog hosts will comply with a court order or a legitimate complaint against a blogger but there is a conflict between the need to provide a personal publishing platform and the need to remain within the boundaries of the law. In the case of illegal activity such as child pornography, I am sure all the service providers will comply. In the case of slander I suspect that there would be a tendency to let the person complaining take legal action directly against the blogger. We have these cases with Blogmark all the time and the decision is never simple.
  • Not all blogs exist on platforms where the platform owners are contactable or care about a legal dispute in South Africa.
• Media regulation must balance what it is trying to achieve with the requirements to enforce the regultion, otherwise it becomes meaningless.  Requesting a regulatory framework for something that cannot possibly be regulated without violating several other rights is going to prove fruitless when someone askes the ID exactly how they propose to do this.
• Insinuating that the platform owners are legally liable for the content published by bloggers is not a bad strategy.  However, there is no legal precedent that I know of that makes it 100% certain that a company like Media24 or the Mail & Guardian can be held liable for what bloggers say on its platform.  The fact that blogs are not moderated by the platform owners makes it less likely that the owners will be liable.  If I am wrong then this will be a great way to create a self-regulating industry for fear of legal recourse.  In most cases however, it should be legally acceptable for a company to comply with a take-down request lodged after the fact.
• If the platform owners fall directly into the line of fire, what we will see is an immediate cease in innovation.  The local Web 2.0 space will die an immediate death.
• I agree fully that the blogosphere has the kind of atmosphere you find in bars in Pretoria West- highly volatile and a certain amount of kudos attached to traditionally masculine activities like skull-cracking and intimidation.  There is also the sense that what happens in the bar stays in the bar, unless it requires surgery in which case having lots of cousins comes in handy.  That being said, issues between people on the blogosphere are no different to issues in the real world – it is the real world. So when I slander someone I accept that there might be legal repurcussions.
• Some, but not that many, bloggers are truly anonymous.  The Web is the least likely place for anonymity but what you often find is that people can be quite difficult to contact or track down.  The NIA is probably a good solution for that but I suspect they have better things to do than resolve civil disputes between individuals.
• Culturally a little slander has become socially acceptable.  Look at the heat David Bullard took over his column – some of the things that were said about him personally were much worse than anything he said about bloggers.  Politicians must lighten up.
• Combining MXIT with blogging is also dangerous because the two applications are very different.  Where MXIT relies on direct personal communication which can be used for good or bad, blogging is different and should not be lumped in the same category.
• Putting blogs, chat, child pornography and broken marriages in the same sentence is a publicity stunt that, I hope, won’t survive a parliamentary committee hearing.  If such a thing ever happens, I will be sure to be there to correct the ID and anyone else who doesn’t understand the technology or its social uses.

My final thoughts on this are that there is no real threat here, and the ID’s call is not worth taking seriously.  What is becoming aparent, however, is that these kind of noises are doing a lot of good for the blogosphere itself – anyone noticed the almost continuous media coverage over the past few months?

@large at the Technews

In the board room at Technews talking about blogging….

What have we done?

There is something rough and grassroots about the blogosphere that makes me really proud to be a blogger.  I also write columns for two media magazines so I get to compare the experience and, honestly, being part of the blogosphere is much more exciting.

Today was the first time so many South African bloggers rallied around one particular issue.  I don’t think we achived much today, other than show a level of agression that matches Bullard’s.

However, what we have demonstrated to ourselves is that we can form a powerful digital lobby – keep in mind that the blogs tracked on Amatomu have a collective traffic the same size or possibly bigger than the Sunday Times.

In the bigger scheme of things though, what emerged today was the beginning of a model for cyber-activism using the two aggregators as a platform for spreading the message fast and effectively.  We could track the progress as we amplified the message using the Buzzgraphs and we could, potentially, use social networking tools like Facebook to become better organised.

Without meaning to sound melodramatic, I think a small bit of history fell into place today and I hope its a sign that consumer power is on the rise.

David Bullard owes South African bloggers an apology

[Update 13 May: David Bullard has published a follow-up column in the Sunday Times and my response is here]

I hereby dub this Bullardgate. David Bullard launched an attack on bloggers in the Sunday Times today that cannot be allowed to stand. His invective is simply not acceptable from a journalist of the calibre he claims to be. Here’s why:

1. In a dazzling display of arrogance, he says he and Fred Khumalo should be flattered because 70 million bloggers “desperately want to be columnists“, like him and Fred – he actually says “if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery then Fred Khumalo and I should feel very flattered indeed”. Pathetic, and worse to drag Fred’s name into this.
2. Generalisations part 1: He says “most blog sites are the air guitars of journalism” – most, really? Based on what evidence is he saying bloggers see any relation between what they do and writing a column for a newspaper? There is no such evidence – maybe he’s confusing blogging with citizen journalism, in which case he should chat to the other people in his building who actually know what they are talking about. After all, reporter.co.za is a Johncom project is it not.
3. Generalisations part 2 (and still in the same paragraph): “They’re [blogs, but he calls them 'blog sites'] cobbled together by people who wouldn’t stand a hope in hell of getting a job in journalism, mainly because they have very little to say.” According to David Bullard, everyone who starts a blog wishes they could be a crusty old journalist. Here’s the reality check: bloggers have jobs and write because they want to, not because its the only thing they can get paid to do.
4. Patronising and inaccurate: David Bullard says “It’s rather sad how many people think the tedious minutiae of their lives will be of any interest to anyone else.” It’s a real pity that less than a third of the South African bloggers classify themselves in the Life category on Amatomu, otherwise this statement might actually stand up to some scrutiny.
5. Innacurate: David Bullard says “Many bloggers prefer to remain anonymous.” Really? Based on what research is he saying this or is he just making it up? He must be engaging in an act of fiction here because the overwhelming majority of South African bloggers are explicit about their identity.
   
6. Just plain insulting: David Bullard says “The content of their sites is so moronic that even their best friends would disown them if they knew they were the authors.”
7. Myopic: David Bullard says: “As with most things in life, something that costs nothing is usually worth nothing and that puzzles me.” Brilliant, coming from a columnist at a paper about to launch a free daily newspaper.
8. Even more insulting, with a lot of generalisation: David Bullard says “I … object to some anonymous, scrofulous nerd pumping meaningless drivel into cyberspace at all hours of the day and night simply because he can’t find a girl to sleep with him.” So now Matthew Buckland, Anton Harber, Mark Keohane, Steve Hofmeyr, the Chumstylers and all the rest of us are blogging because we can’t get laid? Pathetic beyond comprehension.
9. The real clincher: David Bullard says of bloggers: “These are the sort of wackos who gun down their fellow students at university.” This sentence really blew me away – what an incredible level of hatred and malice towards people he has never met.

I want to make two points about this column. Firstly, I think it is shameful that the Sunday Times, a relatively forward-thinking publication would let something as shameful as this go to press. Unless, of course, Bullard gets the same freedom as a columnist that he says the bloggers have – to be able to publish bullshit without moderation. I think that must be it – however, how much more irresponsible is it to do this in a publcation that has de facto authority? At least blogs do not pretend to be authoritative.

The second point is that I think we need to demand an apology or a justifcation for what Bullard has said in his column, and what the Sunday Times has endorsed by publishing it – that we are the type of people who will gun down our fellows at university. If you feel the same way I do, join me in the comments section of this post or join the Facebook group.

Ironic Updates: This was published on the same day the Sunday Times published Business missing out on blogging.

Bloggers who have responded so far: David Bullard on Amatomu.com

Blogger draft code of conduct by Tim O’Reilly following the Kathy Sierra death threats

There has been talk about setting up a bloggers’ code of conduct for ages. I myself tried unsuccessfully to do exactly this at the Digital Citizens Indaba last year, for African bloggers and citizen journalists. I was shouted down on the blogosphere and accused of being a white person trying to yolk Africans, so I decided it wasn’t worth the hassle.

Last week Tim O’Reilly called for a code of conduct in response to the death threats against Kathy Sierra on her blog. This week O’Reilly published a draft of the code on his blog.

While I applaude this effort I think it’s futile on some levels. If a code of conduct is voluntary and there are no punitive measures for violation then what is the point really? Some may argue that the point of it is reputation and trust, and this may well be important to a large portion of the blog readership out there.

However, what makes the blogosphere such a vibrant place is its openness and lack of controls. Maybe I’m just cynical because I live in country a little more violent than the United States (well, not counting their foreign policy) but I do think that talk is talk and action falls within the domain of the police, not bloggers filtering comments.

I guess where I have changed my thinking about a code of conduct is that I have come to the conclusion that the explosion of blogging will demostrate without a doubt just how viscious society really is. Blogging undoes the final, final thread in the rubric of middle-class hypocrisy and reveals the wide-spread depravity, and also beauty, of our cultures. It is the material previously reserved for the couch or the psychiatric institution, but now it is out in the open and we can no longer deny its existance so we may as well celebrate it because it makes us what we are – the most dangerous and bloodthirsty species on the planet.

In this context it seems a little poncy to put a badge on my blog saying I abide by a singular set of moral standards; I prefer to rely on a personal ethic that represents me in my multiplicity.

Scan of the Sunday Times article about the SA Blog Awards

I have a scan of the article as it appeared in the Sunday Times this weekend. It’s pretty balanced in my opinion, but read for yourself.

Question: Is UK English dead on the local blogosphere?

It occurred to me today that when I write columns I use my UK dictionary to spell-check and the US dictionary for blog entries.  Is there anyone else out there who does the same?