How exactly did Clay Shirky, the best selling author of “Here Comes Everybody”, connect Lolcats and Ushahidi to come up with the concept of “Cognitive Surplus”?The epiphany came after Shirky got pissed off by a television producer who famously asked him “Where do people find the time?”. The off-handed question was elicited by Shirky’s explanation of Wikipedia and issues raised by collaborative crowdsourcing."No one who works in TV gets to ask that question,” Shirky shouted at the producer, ...

In last week’s article, I gave a background to using Flickr, Yahoo!'s photography-sharing site, as a place to increase exposure for your brand and business online. Once you’ve set up your Flickr profile and begun uploading photos to your account, you're ready to begin extracting real value from the site.The best way to do this is to add value to the Flickr community, rather than just seeing Flickr as a traffic driver to your blog or website.  Although this shift ...

Agosta Liko, CEO of PesaPal, relocated to Kenya from the US to start Verviant, a software development company in Nairobi. Three years later, the team at Verviant launched PesaPal with a vision of enabling Kenyans to make online payments.PesaPal is making great strides in bridging the mobile and electronic payment divide in Kenya, and is set to expand to more African countries next year. Mark Kaigwa sat down with the CEO to discuss his perspective on doing business in ...

Editing has begun on over 4 600 hours of footage for Life in a Day, the crowdsourced documentary that is the brainchild of Executive Producer Ridley Scott.Life in a Day is a historic global film experiment that enlisted the global community to capture a moment of their lives on Saturday, July 24 and to upload that footage to www.youtube.com/lifeinaday. Individuals whose footage makes it into the finished film will be credited as co-directors and 20 of these contributors will ...

I ♥ Cape Town, the official Facebook fan page of Cape Town Tourism, is celebrating a milestone after hitting the 100 000 fans mark in just one year. The page proved to be a powerful tool to convert visitors here for the World Cup into "Cape Town Fans" during the 2010 FIFA World Cup™.Almost half of the fan page’s new followers signed on in the last three months; the page grew by 40 000 fans between May ...

When it comes to connecting and communicating with women an old-fashioned, bog-standard website may be a better bet than the in-vogue world of social networking. These are the surprising findings of a new US study by authoritative brand development and marketing insight consultancy Added Value in partnership with Yahoo!.The newly-released research, called Connectonomics, details women's needs and how they relate to the online channels they use on a daily basis. The findings are both interesting and surprising. The independent research ...

I'm a big fan of Bernardo Huberman, director of HP Labs' Social Computing Lab, and the work of his team. HP has been applying rigorous scientific practices to the study of social media and it has a gold mine of research open to the public.It is worth emphasising that HP's studies are designed to the highest scientific standards; they are not isolated case studies or the musings of a "social media expert". They typically involve the study of very large ...

On the day the earthquake hit, well-known Haitian radio personality Carel Pedre was driving his car along the streets of the capital when the ground started shaking violently. Houses were tossed into the air and walls came tumbling down.As a trained journalist, Pedre’s intuitive reaction was to jump out of his car, take photos with his iPhone and try to post them on the web. He took six photographs of houses that had collapsed and streets that had been ripped ...

Kenya is quickly gaining a competitive advantage in the mobile payments space. Led by mobile operator giant Safaricom with their Mpesa product, the market locally sees huge value in mobile money transactions. Add to that a regulatory system that is relaxed enough for innovation to be encouraged, and you have a great space for interesting things to happen.Pay.ZungukaThe team at Symbiotic always have more than one iron in the fire. I was surprised by their most recent release of a ...

What happens when a government moves to clamp down on media freedom? It might simply force journalists in that country to adopt the WikiLeaks model when it comes to publishing sensitive information. Here's an example: The South African government recently announced a triple play to clamp down on media freedom in that country, a move which may force journalists to a model akin to WikiLeaks. Concern is mounting over the country's proposed apartheid-inspired Protection of Information Bill, which will give government ...