South African fast food chicken outlet, Nando's, has come out yet again with a viral ad attempting to cash in on the latest big news topic. This latest one, cottoning onto the Black Tuesday campaign against the Protection of State Information Bill (referred to as the "secrecy bill"), may leave a bad taste in some people's mouths -- or at least the metallic hint of mercenary opportunism. This ad, like the many others preceding it -- the last one Memeburn reported ...

South Africans took to social media en-masse as they looked to express their anger at the Protection of State Information Bill, commonly referred to as the "secrecy bill". Facebook and Twitter were not, however, the only online avenues used to protest the bill. A number of public institutions, news organisations and bloggers adapted their websites to include some variation on the "Black Tuesday" motif. The University of Cape Town (UCT), blacked out its entire front page, splashing the word "Censored" across ...

In the face of the imminent passing of the Protection of State Information Bill in parliament this afternoon, South Africans took to social networks to voice their frustration at the potential law, which opponents have promised will be the start of the end of a free media in South Africa. The bill, commonly referred to as the “Secrecy Bill,” is sponsored by the ANC majority parliament and thus expected to easily be passed, the first step to it becoming law. Should ...

Everyone enjoys writing and reading good content but in the world of online, it carries extra benefits. After all, every SEO specialist worth their salt insists that copy is king and that every site needs great copy and fresh content. The almighty Google itself has proclaimed that fresh, relevant copy is like catnip for the king of the search jungle. But how long does copy remain fresh? In scientific circles, there is a concept known as a "half-life". The half-life of ...

The world of mobile has come a long way. Mobile devices are constantly evolving and delivering refined operating systems (OS), better apps, user-friendly features and faster connectivity. What this means is that websites have had to up the ante too; by optimising their sites for mobile (or developing mobile) apps. In the midst of this, (mobile) email marketing has also had to keep up with the global smartphone explosion. Although it has established its place as the original workhorse of ...

This week I take a look at Touchbase, the calendar app for people who are constantly out on the road in meetings with clients and new prospects. Calendar app? Seriously? How awesome could that be? Actually, pretty amazing. Stay with me. In my position at the company I work for, I am constantly on the scout for new business. You’ve probably picked up from my app reviews that I am away from the office often, spending a lot of time in ...

After compiling a dataset of more than 200 000 link-containing tweets to generate a Click Through Rate (CTR) heatmap, I decided to dig into what words, phrases and characters correlate with higher (or lower) CTR. Below are my findings. And yes, I know correlation isn’t causation, but to quote Edward Tufte: "It sure is a hint." The first "word" I analysed was the hashtag. I found that there is very little difference in the CTR of a link whether it ...

When does copycatting become a meme? A new craze has kicked up in the US in the wake of an "occupy" protest at the University of California in Davis where police lieutenant John Pike strolled down a line of students sitting with arms linked, and casually pepper sprayed the lot of them. And then the photoshopping started. This picture has now become the germ of a new meme: Inserting Lt Pike into the Christ with Little Children, Trumbull’s Declaration of Independence ...

Months after revealing that its online adult population had gone past the 500-million mark, Chinese state authorities announced that more than 300-million people in the country have microblogging accounts. The microblogs, known as weibos (pronounced wei-bohr), emerged and went from strength to strength after Chinese censors blocked Twitter in 2009. Two of the country’s internet powers, Tencent Holdings and Sina Corporation are the largest weibo providers in the country. Their products integrate a number of the services from their chat ...

File this under, “Oh my word that’s cool.” A previously unknown Norwegian company called FXI Technologies has demonstrated a working prototype of it’s "computer on a stick". It looks like a standard flash drive with an extra HDMI port opposite the USB plug. Stick it into a TV via HDMI, or into the USB port of a Linux box, PC or Mac, and it takes over the environment and lets you get on with your cloud computing via its own ...