Friday, January 30, 2009

Win R3000 for yourself and a charity of your choice!

A competition run by Afrigator and Ukash is offering R3k to the winner and R3k to the winner's chosen charity. All you have to do is write a small blog about the chosen charity and send the link to ukash@expandsa.com.

Here is my chosen charity: The Tomorrow Trust

Reason: Education is the building blocks of everything, without education we can't progress very far and for kids who are orphaned or in vulnerable positions this is really really important.

The Tomorrow Trust's mission is to make a sustainable impact on these kids and to empower these kids. When everyone else has turned a blind eye to these poor kids this charity is coming through for them and for this competition they could receive a further R3k to help them in their efforts.

Take a look here for more details on the trust.

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

To tweat or not to tweat?


So, after slightly manipulating Shakespeare's famous words into a Twitter like feel I can start my article on the pro's and cons of Twitter.

For those of you who don't know and really there seem to be so many lines like this (everyone should know by now) - Twitter is a blogging/social service that limits your blogs to 140characters and only people who 'follow' you on Twitter will receive your 140 characters.

You can have thousands of follows or none and follow thousands yourself, you can even follow me but if you don't say anything useful no one will follow you! So why use it when you can just use Facebook updates and let all your friends know whats going on, for me this is what kept me off Twitter for ages. I signed up towards the end of last year and only really started posting my 'tweats' this year, think I just reached my 100th tweat!

I've come to realise that Facebook is nice to keep track of my friends and see whats going on in their lives but with Twitter for me its more business like in a sense that all the people I follow are people I find interesting and who I think have interesting things to say. If you just had your mates on there there would be just random crap going to and fro.

Now I can get updates of John Battelle or Guy Kawasaki which I find pretty interesting except that post tweats at an incredible rate. Its a great way to network with all your relevant peeps and keep track of what they are up to, its also a great way to market yourself, your website or anything basically.

Now what I have against it is the potential spam one could receive from it - you can setup an outside/external program to twitter to run through all twitter profiles and add them as your feed. All these people will receive an email saying that 'YOU' are now following them and generally they will click through to see who you are and if they want to follow you back.

Now if you do this with 20,000 peeps thats not bad marketing, whether its good PR is another thing. I don't think it is, I'd rather have 20,000 people re-tweeting away about a new blog I just posted or website I just launched.

Twitter was recently rumoured to have been valued at $250million which isn't too much but this is the first rumour... the next one could be way higher considering the press its starting to receive and the increase in traffic.

Either way I find Twitter very useful and urge you all to sign up and to start tweating away!

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Tweetmanager.com - good or bad?

So, over the last couple of days I've been getting quite a few more people following me on twitter. I was wondering how they found me as they had around 20k followers and they themselves were following around the same number.

Now, I've only been on Twitter for a short period of time and still only have a small following and don't follow too many people yet. So how did they find me?

JonIn60Seconds tweeted about it and I replied and then he wrote an article on it.

In his article he managed to find out what was causing this to occur, Tweetmanager.com. Jon was quite upset with this website and looked to get more people to spread the word about it. He even had Bill McIntosh the founder of Tweetmanger.com comment on his story trying to justify it.

I think the arguments they both make have their merits:
  • Jon states that its a spam tool and that its harmful to Twitter
  • Bill states that its not a spam tool but rather a tool to make things work better and that he likes Twitter.

    I haven't logged in or used Tweetmanager yet so I don't want to state too many things, I will how ever sit on the fence and agree with both of the chaps.

    1) Its spammy in a way when you get lots of people following you (normal etiquette for some people would be to follow them back) hence a way to increase your follows based on certain key words
    2) For Tweetmanager for the guys who have lots or follow lots of peeps its hard to keep track and sometimes an automated reply system or search engine to follow people talking about certain events helps.

    Think the one thing that is irritating is automated @ replies to tweets...
  • Sunday, January 18, 2009

    YouTube as/is a search engine

    Recently on the NY Times there was an article on how a 9year old kid was using YouTube to do research on an Australian animal.

    Is this the real reason why Google bought YouTube?

    To control all areas and methods of searching? The 9 year old said that he uses YouTube if needs help in some of his video games or on his card collection, if he can't find what he's looking for on YouTube he'll use one of the other search engines.

    Now according to comScore in November last year people in American did nearly 200million more searches on YouTube than on Yahoo, this moved Yahoo into third spot for search engines.

    Surely Microsoft and Yahoo must be wondering how this has happened, how another website (one that is owned by Google) has surpassed them in the number of searches run.

    Currently YouTube is busy setting up deals with Sony and Nintendo to be able to allow their users to search and view YouTube videos via the game consoles on the TV, notably not on the Xbox.

    I give it another 5 years before we don't even need a satellite/cable service for our TV's but simply connect our TV to the internet and watch everything through that. And why not, currently we just PVR/TiVo everything and fast forward the ads, why not just select what you want to watch and download it or stream it to your TV.

    Goodbye to the big TV satellite companies...

    Hudson crash landing shown on YouTube

    Amazing footage of the crash landing into the Hudson river, the plane comes into site just after 2min into the video from YouTube. Amazing how social media is bringing the news quicker to the people.

    This video was posted by the Cost Guard and National Transportation Safety Board.

    Tuesday, January 6, 2009

    What a Jack Russel...

    Now I've known one or two brave Jack Russels with amazing personalities but as for as tricks go or bravery this video click is amazing, just take a look...

    Monday, January 5, 2009

    2009 is going to be a good year

    Well it has to be after an awesome holiday in the Eastern Cape, wow - what a place!
    Weather wasn't the best, think Cape Town here had better weather but I definitely want to start kite surfing now.

    On my way back wow I was driving 40km/hour on the national highway due to road works I saw some sneaky traffic officers hiding in bushes and catching guys speeding. The limit was 60km/hour and they must have caught everyone that went by...

    I thought to myself that a little website people could use to put up the sneaky officers would be quite useful and also where the regular cameras are...
    I get back to Cape Town and see that there is something similar starting up here in SA - www.getroadsmart.net

    But this site is more targeted at city centers for now and more for drunk driving checks and speed checks it is also quite costly - R50 a month subscription and R2 per sms... this could quite easily be just done on a website that they check now and again. But we'll see how it takes off.

    Will it encourage drunken driving? Will the website be in someway liable? I'd be bleak if a drunken driver crashes into me cause they are taking a detour trying to avoid the road block...
     
    Afrigator