Comments(1) If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
I’m in Cape Town on Tuesday night so lets have a bloggers party! Same venue as always: Long Street Cafe from 7:30PM, everyone is invited, looking forward to seeing everyone again, it’s been too long. Arm your livers.
Comments(0) I thought this was pretty obvious but obviously I was pretty wrong. Since I left the Mail & Guardian last month I have not been involved in the Amatomu.com site. I do still take support queries but I forward them on to the M&G team and they should be getting back to people.
Right now there are two major bugs: user nicks are called Please Update and the proper embed code is not being show to users who register new blogs. Both of these things are being fixed by Jason Norwood-Young, my very competent replacement. The problem is he started today, so solutions may require a bit of patience.
Comments(0) Yesterday I spoke to a group of communications specialists within the Department of Defence about social media and how they can leverage it across their different operations. What I said was necessarily a high-level overview of military uses of social media and some of the problems currently faced by the US army stemming from blogging and vlogging. These issues are fairly well-documented and very interesting.
On the one hand there is a security risk posed by bloggers exposing troop locations etc, but on the other hand there are great recruitment and PR opportuinities presented by the technologies. The digitisation of communications also offers the possiblitities for new types of intelligence work because the opposite side may experience the same issues regarding the control of information flow. The key issue is who can control the information better and monitor enemy communications/leaks. In the case of the US vs Al-Queda the cultural heritage of the US regarding freedom of expression may put them at a slight disadvantage because their troops are more likely to want to express themselves publically and outside the chain of command. On the other hand they have access to better technology to control and monitor information.
Aty the end of the session I was asked a few questions pertaining to control and I really think there needs to be a balance - outlawing something does not make it go away, it simply gives you a mechanism to punish after the fact and makes people more careful about covering their tracks.
The real opportunity though, is in communication and PR, especially in times of crisis when the traditional media are not fast enough to get a message out.
Comments(1) Last night I did a presentation at the Gordon Institute for Business Science as part of forum titled The Business of Social Networking, along with Matthew Buckland, Mark Buwalda, Andy Hadfield and Kate Elphick.
You can download my presentation in two forms:
Once you have downloaded it, unzip the file and run it. In fullscreen mode you need to use the arrow keys to move forward, there are only 4 slides and on the main slide, click the tabs and drag them into the main window. Sounds comlicated but it isn’t.
Here are my notes for the presentation:
Intro (drag down the tab called “the shape” at the top right)
The spiral shape represents the exponential expansion of social networks known as the Viral Expansion Loop. Read the Fast Company article for analysis of the concept using Ning as a case study.
The same pattern occurs in nature, in art (the Divine Proportion), etc and is somehow connected to the structure of material reality. If you stretch it out and invert it, it will look like a Pareto graph (the Long Tail).
CONTENT
Content, either in the form of commercial, professional or user-generated, is the core building block for community. It is the lifeblood of the system and must be nurtured and cared for. It must not be allowed to become diseased by spam, abuse or neglect.
Curatorship is very important, especially in mature social networks, to avoid decay.
In these systems identity is compressed into a two-dimensional presentation of content, strategically selected, to communicate the effect of the self. The I in social networks is reduced to a content element.
CONTEXT
Rich meta-data is the primary means of providing contextually relevant content to users. This data may come in the form of location, keywords, semantic tagging and folksonomies or hierarchical categorisation.
COMMUNITY
The relationships between users are fundamental in terms of establishing circles of trust and generating the viral expansion loop. Users must be able to establish their own communities based on common interest, family or friendship within a system and feel safe that their community is not vulnerable to negative external influence.
COLLABORATION
Users must be able to work on or around content in a collaborative manner and the history of the collaboration must be sensibly recorded and displayed. This could take the form of conversations that start with a piece of content and then expand into the creation of other types of content like comments or real-time chat.
Content, context and community are required to enable collaboration and when the conditions are correct for collaboration then the system is ripe for a series of sustained viral expansion loops. This will probably take place as the curve of the reverse Pareto graph starts to steepen.
COMMERCE
As communities of interest develop and content consumption becomes frequent there will be the need to generate revenue from the content through advertising or sales and the users will gradually want to generate their own income by using the system as a marketplace for their own content.
Comments(20) This is my last week at the Mail & Guardian Online, as of next week I will be managing the social media portfolio at Vodacom, the biggest South African mobile communications network.
During my 18-month stay at the M&G we have done some exciting work in the social media space - Amatomu.com, Amagama.com, News In Photos, The Guide, JobConnection, Thought Leader, Tech Leader, Sports Leader and the new M&G news site that went live to the public this week, as well as seven mobile sites and several internal projects like campus Times and the Teacher. I will be leaving something behind that I am very proud of and a platform I know will grow with the company for years to come. I was glad to be able to contribute to the innovative spirit of the company and I feel I have grown, personally and professionally as a result.
The M&G is currently looking for a replacement for me, so if you’re interested let me know by emailing me vincent [at] vincentmaher.com
Looking forward, my primary motivation for joining Vodacom is that I believe that mobile media is at a point the Web was in 1994, ready to explode. I want to continue being innovative and I think the birth of the 7th mass medium is a place I want to be. It will also mean that I will get exposure to some of the newest technologies, publishing formats and user trends.
At the same time, my colleague Matthew Buckland is also leaving and will be taking up a new position at 24.com. Working with Matthew has been incredibly rewarding, he is a great guy and one of the best business and strategic people in the online industry. I will miss working with him, as will everyone else in the company, but such is life and the M&G Online will continue to thrive because it is based on solid business principles - ultimately all of us are replaceable.
Matt and I would like to invite all our friends and colleagues to join us at Capital in Rosebank [cnr 7th and Keyes] at 5PM on Friday to celebrate our time at the M&G and to say farewell. No need to RSVP, just show up.
Comments(1) Since the first day of planning, there was no doubt in any of our minds that we would be rebuilding the site from the ground up on a completely new set of technologies intended to do something quite different to our old site. The old site and CMS was a patch-work of code written by various developers at MWeb over the past 5 years, and the database was similarly messy, so there was no intention of trying to make it work with the new site.
The project scope and order of production was roughly this:
Aside from the web site UI design and project planning, which took 3 months of revisiting, the rest of the items on this list were done between 17 May and 22 June. Obviously because of the tight timeframe there were a lot of lessons learned on the fly and, to some extent, the story of this redevelopment is a great success story for the open-source community but also for close relationships between our business, editorial and technical teams.
The process we underwent to plan what we wanted and how it would be implemented was done primarily using the site look and feel process. I designed the front template, section template and article template based on a series of meetings with Matthew Buckland, the GM. In these meetings the primary concern was integration of news and Web 2 features into a news structure. Once the first set of designs were ready, Riaan Wolmarans, the editor joined the team and worked with me to get the layout and structure of the content right.
At the end of the process, the three templates were designed precisely as they would look on the screen, down to the line spacing in blurbs and the placement of the widgets, using real content. These templates acted as a blueprint when we started site construction. Take note, not a single line of text was written into a technical spec, the front-end was the spec and the CMS and site were built backwards from there.
Now that we’re over usual paranoias about going live, I’ll have some time to discuss some of the more interesting decisions/experiences, so keep coming back.
Comments(5) Firstly I must apologise for tweeting the Amatomu server migration rather than blogging it [twitter]. Secondly, it was a poor judgment call on my part to try doing the migration on a long weekend while trying to make the M&G redevelopment deadline.
What happened was this - for a long time Amatomu has been working our servers at rackspace too hard. Over the past month we have had all manner of problems with our Leader blogs because Amatomu just doesn’t let up on the database. It does 175 m million transactions a month, roughly.
Two weeks ago Afrihost offered to help us isolate Amatomu from our other products by supplying us servers for the site hosted locally. Gian and his team did the deal very fast and they did a good job of setting things up for us. So late last week I disabled the Amatomu logging for a few hours and then asked my developers to move the site off Rackspace. This happened painfully slowly because of the size of the database file and a few stupid things like me accidentally restarting Apache on the Rackspace machine just as the download got to 85% and so on. We were tired from the M&G stuff going on and not entirely focussed on what we were doing.
Then, once things were set up on the server, we were messing around with the cron processes and did something that crashed the server or, at least, dropped it off the network. That was late Friday night and we didn’t have the energy to try fix it before the M&G site was done. By that stage though, the DNS change request had gone through.
All in all the downtime was caused by bad planning and I apologise for that. The site is back up, it is logging and things should look normal again by the end of the week. A special thanks must go out to Afrihost for helping us out with this problem and we’re looking forward to a good partnership with them.
We also have a big Amatomu-related announcement coming next week so keep your eyes open for that on Bizcommunity.
Comments(6) Okay so let’s be honest, no-one in their right mind will believe that we rebuilt the Mail & Guardian Online web site in 4 weeks, so I may as well tow the company line and say it was years in the planning. Of course it was but, on the other hand, 4 weeks ago all we had was 2 page designs as JPGs so make of that what you will.
During the last two weeks I calculated that I worked 156 hours, which is close to double the average working week of 8 hours a day and as I write this I feel more than just exhausted. We overshot our deadline by 26 minutes today when we put the first public release of our new web site live at http://ww2.mg.co.za, but the extra 26 minutes were well spent.
The site exists by sheer force of will on the part of our entire development and editorial teams and here’s how I survived:
So now that the pressure is slightly diminished I have slightly more time to think about what we did and why and I’ll be taking the time to write it all up in a series of blog posts. Some of the topics I’ll be discussing are: agenda setting and typography, tagging and post-modern news structure, citizen journalism, semantics and the structure of news knowledge, PHP frameworks and RAD, AJAX frameworks and RAD, mapping, CMS development and the workflow patterns in a newsroom, big vs small in terms of operational scale and attitude and the asceticisism of unrealistic deadlines achieved through self-sacrifice.
Expect the first post tomorrow and, in the mean time, check out the new site and its news swarm.
Comments(16) A few weeks ago I got tired of listening in on people engaging in random public chatter so I set a target of twenty people to follow. It’s not that I have anything against using Twitter as IRC, its just that trying to keep track of what was happening became too frustrating. To add to that, on the odd occasion when I really feel like tweeting, the service is either having technical problems or my clients can’t connect.
So I ended up with twenty people I follow and then I got to see half of an IRC channel because I wasn’t following the other people involved in these conversations.
Then the breakthrough happened - Nic Haralambous took up the desk next to me and he started feeding me the daily highlights, so I could finally stop following everyone and go back to basics - Twitter became just a presence announcement system.
But then Matthew Buckland decided to play a game of chicken with me by telling me he didn’t think I had the guts to leave Twitter completely, so I did, today at 16:11 SAST. It feels great.
Comments(5) Colin Daniels, Justin Hartman and Gregor Rohrig, the crack team called Avusa iLab have produced the goods. There were a few of us waiting for their first release and it happened today in the form of a brand new and slick multimedia aggregator/portal for video, podcasts and photos produced by the team at The Times.
For those unaware, iLab is Avusa’s new incubator and development shop created to spearhead social media innovation in the company.
Check out some of the great content and marvel at their ability to make Wordpress bend to their will. Very impressive, congrats guys!
Vincent Maher is the portfolio manager for social media at Vodacom, South Africa's largest mobile telecommunications company. Previously he was the strategist at the Mail & Guardian Online and co-founder of Amatomu.com, the South African blog aggregator and analytics system. Before that he was Director of the New Media Lab at the Rhodes University School of Journalism & Media Studies, the managing director of Digital Commerce and a multimedia director at VWV Interactive. He has worked in the online media industry since 1996, has presented papers at many international conferences and specializes in profitable innovation in emerging markets.
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