blogs

In June, blogging platform Posterous launched an all-out assault on other services, hoping to convince bloggers from WordPress, Blogger, and Tumblr to switch over. At the time, the move was considered by some to be overly aggressive, even “preposterous,” but the move appears to be paying off. Rich Pearson, VP of Marketing at Posterous, said the service has seen a 50 percent jump in new signups since launching the campaign. Although defecting bloggers account for a large piece of the ...

Many South African blogs in 2010 have moved from a fun sideline project to a lucrative form of business. Keeping in line with this trend, the SA Blog Awards have also matured and bloggers will see statistics from their site forming part of the evaluation criteria for the judges in each of this year's categories. Now in its fifth year, the awards will take place on 25 September, and will feature more judges per category than in the past. The judges ...

If you’re using multiple social media platforms to promote your business, it makes sense to cross promote the media you generate through the various channels available, and try to play to the inherent strengths of each of the platforms. Doing this increases your content's exposure to a larger audience, which means you have more people engaging with your brand. For example, if you’ve already built up a healthy fan base on Facebook, but have only just started  to engage on Twitter or ...

The heated debate that has swirled around the WordPress community over the last few days appears to have been settled amicably with the news that the famous Wordpress theme or "search engine optimised framework" Thesis has agreed to a "split licence". By licensing their PHP code under the General Public License (GPL), Thesis can now more directly contribute to the growth of the WordPress code-base as a whole. It can also directly benefit from the many developers working with the framework ...

A blog is usually a place where individuals or groups publish thoughts and ideas on niche topics, current affairs or daily occurrences. But how do you make a WordPress blog more social and attractive to people wanting to interact and bring it to life? Can you turn your shy, introverted blog into a bubbling, web socialite? WordPress, the popular blogging platform, has a number of solutions that you can use. Here are six ideas that really work: 1. Enhance user commenting Start off by allowing ...

Visiting social networks and blogs now account for every four and a half minutes spent online, according to the authoritative Nielsen Company, a leading online analytics and trending company. Publishing on their official blog, nielsenwire, they report that the popularity of social media has now become "undeniable". According to the analytics company three of the world’s most popular brands online are now social-media related: Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia. Nielsen says that the world now spends more than 110-billion minutes on social ...

Sipho Hlongwane is one of the more popular contributors on the Mail & Guardian Online’s Thought Leader blog. At the end of March, he organised an online, blog-based protest against ANC Youth League (ANCYL) Spokesperson Nyiko Floyd Shivambu’s attempts to leak a dossier of City Press journalist Dumisani Lubisi’s alleged finances, and the Youth League's subsequent intimidation of journalists who objected to Shivambu’s antics. Hlongwane named his campaign #SpeakZA, after the Twitter hashtag convention. Bloggers who agreed to participate in ...

A world-wide survey conducted by global public relations (PR) company, Text 100, indicates a "mainstreaming" of blogging in most markets, with many bloggers reporting increased contact from PR professionals or corporate communicators. The survey looked at 465 bloggers from 22 countries, which included questions put to South African bloggers. The survey also noted that some of the worst practices of PR have been exported to the blogosphere too. Importantly for companies wanting to engage with bloggers, the survey indicated that there ...

Just been informed that bloggers are eligible for the prestigious Webber Wentzel Legal Journalist of the Year award. They're opening entries to bloggers "in recognition of just how important the blogspace has become in shaping opinion and providing analysis on matters legal..." Off the top of my head I can think of one candidate in particular, Gill Moodie of Grubstreet, for her coverage of the Mpshe-Zuma judgement. Moodie tenaciously tracked down the Hong Kong judge in question (Justice Conrad Seagroatt) for an ...

The idea was to show some key US bloggers what our country is made of: the good, the bad and the complex. I decided to tag along for the Cape Town leg of the tour, which is an exhaustive/exhausting nine-day trek around the country by plane, bus, helicopter and boat. (See 360 degree pic of bloggers) Asoka blogger meetup The night before we organised a meetup of local bloggers and digerati with the US tour at Asoka bar. People seemed to enjoy ...