Mail & Guardian Online scoops 3 Webby Award Honours

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.

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.