Received a press release from Nielsen//Netratings, who run the statistics and compiles readership of the major websites in the local Online Publisher's Association. Whichever way you look at it, this is good news for the South African online industry as a whole, and is no doubt spurred on by the arrival of so many broadband options and the cutting of broadband costs. It's about time. We have been lagging behind other countries,...
Eamonn Byrne from the World Association of newspapers asked the panel at the last session of this congress: Is partnering with a search engine a good idea? The media industry have two main issues with Google. (1) They believe that Google is unfairly using and profiting off publisher's content. Hence the arrival of the Automated Content Access Protocol (ACAP), which I personally think will eventually be a mechanism for publishers to extract revenue...
According to a World Association of Newspapers poll online news will supplant television network news as the leading news source over the next five years. The Harris Poll also says but newspapers will remain a vital source on their own, and can become dominant if they successfully integrate online delivery as a part of what they offer the public. The poll results suggest that newspapers can significantly upgrade their traditional print product by providing...
Our local News24.com has launched a new citizen journalism portal called MyNews24. Elan Lohmann who is sitting next to me at this conference tells me that it's doing exceedingly well attracting "100 000 unique users". He isn't happy with the design which is limited by the constraints of their site template and CMS, so they'll be launching another version some time in the future. I went over to the site and it...
Don't know how official it is yet, but the new (South African) Times website is now live. I meandered over to the Sunday Times website, just before the clock struck twelve, which to my surprise, had become the new Times website. The design is similar to the old Sunday Times site. We're eagerly anticipating the new (South African) Times newspaper at the WAN conference here in Cape Town tomorrow. It was mentioned by...
South African President Thabo Mbeki, in a speech about ten minutes ago this morning, referred to the citizen media revolution acknowledging the role of bloggers in South Africa and the world. He referred to bloggers almost interchangeably with journalists in his speech at the WAN conference in Cape Town. This is a newspaper conference mainly for the media, yet the president hinted at the influence and growth of blogging. I think its...
What is this? Can someone tell me.var vglnk={key:"cc324b6567a9637aa0ff15bc9564b2a5"};!function(e,a){var t=e.createElement(a);t.type="text/javascript",t.async=!0,t.src="//cdn.viglink.com/api/vglnk.js";var n=e.getElementsByTagName(a);n.parentNode.insertBefore(t,n)}(document,"script");
One of the world's biggest news websites, The Guardian Unlimited, has just relaunched with a new look and feel. The new design seems to be limited mostly to the homepage and not to the articles which continue to look pretty much the way they did before. I find that strange. Maybe they are planning to roll out the new design across the site in a gradual process? The new frontpage design is in...
Jovan Regaseck the founder of IT Web and a man who I very much admire and respect, is quoted by Tectonic as saying: "In a state of madness (perhaps), I decided that we needed a world first. Something never done before." It Web says it is going to pay bloggers a generous 10c per page impression for their articles, pictures or video clips for a new site they have launched called My Digital...
One of my favourite websites, Moneyweb, has relaunched, featuring a wide-format design. Their site used to be run by iafrica.com, who lost the contract to do it. I like the wide-format look and the generous use of whitespace... kind of like NY Times and Washingtonpost.com. It's the direction that most news sites are going. The indicators on the left look great and are really compact. The shaded blue menu bar that dominates...
Sunday Times has relaunch their site. The redesign looks great. Following the latest trend in creating wide-format sites, their website really hits the spot for me and raises the bar for local online publishers from a design point of view. The old site was in bad need of a redesign, but this makes it all worth it. I like the use of multimedia, the big square ads which I think are the...
from my column in the media, called net savvy If a survey by search engine Google is to be believed, the British apparently now spend more time on the Internet than watching television. The report, carried by news agency AFP in March this year, showed that British Internet users spend an average of 164 minutes online daily -- the equivalent of 41 days a year -- compared to 148 minutes watching television. According to...
It's time to wake up, Telkom. Here are the top ranking internet countries in Africa by internet hosts. I got this from Arthur Goldstuck's comprehensive report, which you can get on his website. Shows that, as a continent, we have a lot to catch up still. Thankfully the consensus is that South Africa is now set for more expansion, although expensive telecoms are still holding us back. A new challenger to the fixed...
It's always been cheap and easy to publish on the web. Big professional, online publishers share the same medium as small-time, personal homepages. Online publishers typically publish at a lower cost than newspapers or magazines, making it an affordable option for shoestring publishers and budding entrepreneurs. It's why they are in the web business in the first place. (more…)
Something pretty revolutionary is going down in a dusty patch of Limpopo province. It involves billionaire and Africa’s first Astronaut Mark Shuttleworth, a multi-national technology company and the government. Shuttleworth is so passionate about it, he says it could rocket South Africa into the future: “We are on the cusp of a new era. This is the future of IT.” (more…)
Elon Musk laughs at a dead deer and becomes a new reaction meme
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Facebook removed 1.5 million videos of the Christchurch shooting in 24 hours
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The internet believes PewDiePie inspired the Christchurch mosque shooting
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