Grant Haskin, ACDP member and the brand new Deputy Mayor of Cape Town, has gone where many politicians have feared to tread: online! He recently opened a Zoopy profile and has been pretty busy filling it up.

Nice one, Grant - enjoy

Ever make water balloons when you were a kid? I did. I remember how each balloon I filled up was slightly more filled and more swollen than the one before. I wanted to see just how far I could fill it before it burst. Today, my head feels like that.

The more we try keep things lean and simple, the more there seems to be to think of. Build a feature here and it has ramifications there. Build a requirement there and you have to include extra fields somewhere else. Thank goodness for trees - without them we wouldn’t have paper and without paper, my head would probably have become water balloon history with the endless diagrams, reminders and layouts all over the place!

Been reading some very interesting white papers on social networking and penetration across US and Europe. Feedback later.

Flying into Cape Town this morning on the 7.25am flight, we caught a glimpse of the estranged Nationwide aircraft engine in the middle of a patch of grass next to the runway. Not a pretty site from where we were sitting (still airborne) but I’m sure our view was a million times more delightful than the poor Nationwide passengers, who saw the entire engine (there are/were only two, remember) tear free from one of the wings and hurtle towards the ground they’d just lifted off from.

Anyway, we’re back in CT, back at Zoopy HQ and back to our real day-to-day desk work that’s so important (even though remote laptop access is pretty efficient) if you need to make giant strides quickly.

For those who know what we’re talking about, we’re neeeearly there

Back in Joburg today and tomorrow for a brilliant couple of days run by MPASA. First up, a conference called The Business of Magazines - an overview, examination and futurisation of the magazine industry in South Africa, both in print and (the part we’re looking forward to most) online.

Tomorrow night, the best of the industry will be recognised and rewarded at the annual PICA awards. We’re joining the whole shebang as media partners, with video and photo coverage going up on Zoopy throughout the conference and after the awards tomorrow night. Not to mention glimpses of the super-exclusive Cosmo after party

As I’m typing, we have a rather esteemed panel on stage, including representatives from Weg magazine, 8 Ink Media and youth forecasting consultancy Instant Grass.

The Weg guy is punting the value of niche publications in South Africa. According to him, there’s loads of space for niches to share generous portions of the readership pie. Those niche Afrikaans magazines that are struggling need to focus on quality translation - or face impending closure. He also believes in ‘being’ the Joneses, rather than trying to keep up with them.

Ivan is from TNS Research Surveys and is looking at the much-hyped ‘Black Diamond’. He asks who in the room has been to a ‘presentation dealing with Black Diamonds’ and hands shoot up from over three quarters of the room. The phenomenon of job-hopping by black executives is rife and the ‘emerged’ (rather than just ‘emerging’) black middle class is larger and more diverse than most people think. LSM, occupation, personal income, education, aspirations and ambitions, roots and world view are all variables that come into play. And though the Black Diamond group encompasses over 2.6 million people, marketing to them as a single group is a mistake that will not pay off for mislead advertisers. The various groups identified are: Mzansi Youth (18%), Start Me Ups (18%), Young Family (27%) and Established (37%). His overarching point: ‘the future is looking rather black’. The room laughs. Nervously. Because they know he’s right and suddenly notes are being scribbed furiously en masse.

Greg from Instant Grass is next behind the microphone and immediately makes a strong statement: ‘these blacks again … we have to continuously talk about them’. The nervous laugh ripples through the room again. Greg says that the black market is misunderstood and, surprise: Black Diamonds do NOT equal the black market. Life is more complicated. Greg’s company tracks ‘tribes’ of people (not traditional ones, cultural ones). The Facebook generation, the BEE brother, the hustler, 100% Kasie, Jozi Queen and more. The problem, according to Greg, is that the Black Diamond is a convenient marketing solution. Black people now apparently go horseriding, quad biking and live in our neighbourhoods - making it easy for the lazy marketer to send messages much closer to home. Greg believes in walking in the market’s shoes, which doesn’t mean taking taxi tours to Soweto and looking at people through glass. It’s about talking to them, putting things in context and understanding the complexities by developing your brand through a small group of people, which can then lead to larger groups. Consumer engagement is the first step in the right direction.

Natalie from 8 Ink Media steps up. Their group runs National Geographic Kids, Seventeen and Real Simple magazines. She’s talking youth market. The fact that 45% of the country falls into this bracket and are collectively responsible for R75 Billion spend per year. That’s pretty big. Facebook surfaces again, just to prove the point of the power of youth. More stats: 67% of tweens own a mobile phone (89% of teens and 93% of young adults own phones too). And 5.8 million registered Mxit users. The iPod also comes up as evidence of youth gravitational force. Seventeen and National Geogaphic Kids mags have apparently had huge growth spurts, with a highlight being the Seventeen urbanScouts - 13,000 readers who feed trends back to the magazine, which in turn help the editorial team to focus on what’s hot and happening. The Seventeen website and mobizone are doing superbly, apparently. According to Natalie, their mobizone is the biggest (in terms of users) in the country. From their NG Kids survey, with 400,000 tween respondents, 70% of the kids said they had their own bank account and spent their money on: computer games, DVDs, clothes, movies and cellphones. The biggest spend went to toys and entertainment. The smallest being airtime and travel. Food came second - thank goodness!

Fashion guru Dion Chang introduces his Flux Tred Report for 2007. He believes the pendulum has swung from the one extreme (pre-apartheid) to the other (post-apartheid) and is now starting to settle in the middle. Chang’s new catchphrase throws a very interesting curve ball into the marketing mix: cultural commuting. He’s a third generation Chinese man, having gone to a private school and completed post-grad studies in France. In fact, he speaks better French than Cantonese. So although he looks Chinese, he can’t really be marketed to as a purely Chinese individual. There’s a duality for a lot of South Africans, coming from a completely different home/family environment to live/work in an entirely separate arena. Commuting from township ‘mentality and connection’ (culture of ubuntu) to suburbs (high walls and electric fences). Your neighbour might call the SPCA when you try to slaughter a cow for traditional purposes. So there is a very real physical and psychological commute that takes place on a daily basis for a large portion of our society. Gender and class divisions make the situation even more complex.

Lots more to come today. Next up: Mike Stopforth from Cerebra representing all of us in the online boat and hopefully helping these ink-and-paper guys catch up.

Mike is dressed in a Carling Black Labour t-shirt. Nice one. His first slide is about 2007 being a tipping point for the SA Web. His point: Web 2.0 and social media are here. Even Mike points out how obvious this statement is - but it’s an important one to reiterate nonetheless.

Mike believes that Facebook democratises the web by making applications really easy to run, install and distribute for users who aren’t necessarily early adopters and innovators, but who find the utility simple and fun to use. But even so, there are obviously broadband considerations in South Africa that affect any social media experience from our shores. Times and costs are changing though, with Telkom pricing dropping fast. We now have more options like Neotel, Vodacom, MTN, Sentech and more. So the good news is that landline and mobile connectivity costs are becoming a lot more affordable, which makes the internet and social media a lot more accessible to even more people.

Social networking is NOT a trend, shouts Mike. The technologies are. We’ve been connecting with each other since the dark ages but how we do it is what’s moving on a daily basis. The web allows a long tail of content for us to tap into - from main news portals right through to the hundreds of smaller blogs. But that said, average users are starting to suffer from ‘message immunity’. Thanks to email overload, permission marketing and Google searchability, users are becoming more selective in what they listen to, watch and read. Interruption marketing like TV ads, radio ads that break up music and magazine ads that you just page past is dead. We need to think about and achieve a new level of interactive, engaging messages that have context and relevance.

Neal Farrell from Ramsay, Son and Parker was one of the key minds behind CarToday.com. He quickly states that we’re in a state of flux. The rate of innovation has created a state of excitement which has resulted in clutter and daunting amounts of confusion. We need to zoom out, focus and get things back to a realistic state of normalcy.

He’s a firm believer that the brand is king. When you go beyond the magazine and go digital, you’re adding value. You’re adding content for your readers and creating a tool to drive users to subscribe to your print title. And then back online again. Your online strategy can never work without the backing of your print brand. Why call your online entity carsarethrilling.com, when you can leverage 50 years of brand equity in a domain like cartoday.com?

Stop the Them vs Us mentality. Converge, converge, converge. Digital and print teams should be one team, that focuses on the same quality content, whether it appears on a print page or web page.

Extend your brand online. Finish a three page article with 7 more pages online. Feature more photos, more videos. If you’re at a conference, start publishing feedback online immediately and then run a full feature in the next print edition. Involve readers in a community around your niche content, ask them to vote and share their opinions.

Neal believes that one person should have a realtionship with the client. Not someone from Car magazine and another from CarToday.com. This is the answer to the question of print vs digital sales, and will remove the needless competition between the two … when they really should be one.

When it comes to online design, don’t forget your brand. How it looks on the shelf at CNA should look identical on your site. The biggest challenge: forget the tech, forget the money, forget everything else. If you can’t get the magazine industry to embrace digital, you’re going nowhere. Change management is the biggest obstacle. But once you get past this, the opportunities are endless: user-generated content, syndicate content, profile your reader/user base (get to know them intimiately), publish once and give access forever.

Video content allows three monetization techniques: pre/post-roll advertising (before or after video play), ’sponsored by’ advertising and branded content. Neil believes the last has the most value and the most opportunity for profit. Generally, Neil is disappointed at the current state of online advertising - taking just 1% of ad revenue in South Africa.

Now for some out the box stuff. Neal suggests that as content producers (rather than just magazine publishers) you could even be including IPTV, satellite TV and mobile TV in their strategies. The future is web, mobile, TV and whatever comes next - with the print publication as the anchor.

Jetted back into Cape Town last night. Spent four hours in Joburg airport, after being shuffled off our plane because of the runway incident in CT. What was at first a slight inconvenience soon turned into a fiasco of note.

Apparently one of SAA’s budding female (not that there’s anything wrong with that!) trainee pilots took a wrong turn and managed to put the plane into some sand off the runway with the tail blocking both the incoming and outgoing runways. This managed to close the entire airport down for some four hours. Affecting three SAA flights alone, not counting the other airlines.

Meanwhile, back in the O R Tambo airport in Johannesburg, chaos reigned! No visible SAA staff to guide or reassure passengers, just some vague announcement that passengers should get off the plane, enter through domestic arrivals and then re-enter through domestic departures, before reporting to the SAA booth at gate E? An old man and an elderly lady (who were quite clearly struggling to get up and down the stairs and were being assisted by other people) should have been offered wheelchair assistance by SAA at the very least.

While Nationwide and Mango were giving their passengers refreshment vouchers and communicating with them, SAA advised that they were three times as big as all the other airlines and therefore could not possibly hand out refreshment vouchers. Staff on the ground were phoning management for assistance as (in their own words) “it is chaos down here” but were quickly told that they should simply wait for an announcement to be made in due course.

Further announcements advised that flights had been delayed indefinitely due to technical problems in Cape Town.

Reactions from stranded passengers ranged from placid sitting and waiting, to screaming tantrums with bad language being thrown at all and sundry. Some people were missing major parties, some wedding rehearsals and others were having their pets hauled back to the kennels for another day. Most were busy trying to make alternate pick-up arrangements with no idea of any ETA.

Whilst we all agree that this was an accident, the general consensus was that SAA management had absolutely no consideration for their passengers whatsoever.

With all the time on our hands, we couldn’t help but imagine what could happen in a real disaster - airport closed for a week perhaps?

2010. Ahem. SAA needs to pull up their socks. Or we all need to buckle up for a bumpy ride ahead.

Podcampers from over 60 companies / walks of life / backgrounds have converged under one roof at The Wild Fig for Podcamp Cape Town 2007, an un.conference that’s attracted the majority of the new media community in Cape Town.

Looking around the room, some of the people mixing and imagining are Apple, Bang and Olufsen, Jeremy Nell (Ditwits and Urban Trash cartoonist), Derek the Bandit (yes, THAT one), Glen Verran, Infectious Agent, Die Burger, Dave Duarte, Henk and Stelio from Skyrove, Max Kaizen and many more.

Speakers are hitting the microphone with great speed, and I want to carry on listening. And socialising. And lunching. And …

Photos and videos coming later!

Still live blogging from PodCamp Cape Town 2007 - and it’s going brilliantly. It’s like an extra-long, super-concentrated 27 Dinner, with a room filled with some of the sharpest, most creative and most excited minds in the industry.

Brad Shrimpton from Apple IMC gave us a peak at the wonderful white (as in colour, not in race) world of iPods and all things Apple. His hands-on demo of Apple’s Garage Band application made for a fascinating 15 minutes. The simplicity with which this application manages recording and uploading of podcasts is remarkable. The educational possibilities being made possible via podcasting are staggering. He also mentioned the launch of the new Leopard platform - coming this week, so watch the press.

De Waal Steyn from Die Burger’s multimedia newsroom aired some home truths about the development of online media serving in South Africa and the challenges behind producing, editing, uploading, marketing, managing and monetizing online video content. He believes that we live in a 2meg economy, where users prefer snippets of info to long-loading epic video productions. Many good questions raised. But more importantly, De Waal mentioned his enthusiasm at the industry coming together at events like PodCamp to examine our common challenges and together create a stronger industry in the future. Bravo.

Speaking of the need to monetize, Rowan Polovin from MyVideo looked at the current state of the online video environment in South Africa and outlined a few revenue models and advertising options. He listed MyVideo, Zoopy, Die Burger and The Times as some of the major channels of local video delivery and suggested that the future of video in this country looks brighter than ever.

Dave’s grabbed the microphone and is shooting around the room, all fired up to share his thoughts on the Attention Economy.

What’s that? Basically it’s about attaching value to eyeballs. It’s about idea snacking and chipping away at a huge piece of marble to find the David!

Generally, Dave is proposing that people don’t care anymore. They want value in the moment right now. Gone are the days of leaving work early to watch Dallas. Ideas need to stick - and for them to stick, they need to be simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional stories.

Value in products has moved from the 20th century concept of ‘unique selling proposition (USP)’ to ‘by interacting with’. Essentially, Dave’s talking about social currency. His example of how social currency works is a great one: if someone shares a joke with you, IF it adds value to you by making you laugh, you pass it on. The more it gets passed on, the more the value grows incrementally at each pass-along, eventually resulting in that joke (or product) having substantially more social currency.

The future acccording to Dave? Creating an environment where people choose to care. Selling more, for less. The long tail and all that. Nice one, Dave.

Also part of Mr D’s talk: Creative Commons. Read more on their site, but in a nutshell: a license that you apply to work that defines what rights you’re reserving and how you’d like people to use your content. Madonna has just scared the record label industry by completely buying into the concept of free sharing. She’s happy for fans anywhere to download and distrute any of her material as often as they like, and chosen instead to focus her profitability on the resulting increased interest in her work, and thereby greater attendance at her performances (where she begins to make money on ticket sales) and merchandise. Smart lady.

Elvira van Noort, from Holland originally, showed great enthusiasm for technology in Africa. She’s was a co-ordinator at the Digital Citizen Indaba this year and will be giving a new media angle to next year’s Grahamstown Arts Festival. She also took us through Africa News, an African-specific news portal with great breadth and reach, and will soon be starting her own business.

She’s looking for video editors to help grow that side of the business, so if you’re keen don’t hold back. Give her a shout!

Jeremy Nell, of Urban Trash and Ditwits fame, took hold of the microphone gangster-style and tried to come up with a definition for blogging in South Africa. He doesn’t have one, but guesses that it’s something about ‘complaining about using your own nick to submit on Muti’ or ‘talk about spending R30 000 on a boob job’. He’s not far wrong

Jeremy’s a straight-shooting kinda guy and makes for a fresh new style at PodCamp. Instead of trying to impress and get 500 links to his blog in a day, he just gets on with it. He calls himself a cartoonist and only writes blogs to fill the rest of the space on the page underneath his cartoons. But from reading any of his posts, he’s clearly got a lot to say (with brilliant wit) and, like any good cartoonist, he’s utterly and unashamedly self-deprecating.

But he gets serious for a second and talks about the benefits of combining blog posts with his comments. RSS feeds take his comics to users who subscribe and allow fans (or critics) to have their say. The more interaction, the better. And by the way, he’s unofficially trademarked ‘comic blog’ and ‘comic blogging’ - so no stealing! By this stage in his presentation, I’m having to stop to laugh inbetween typing. Jeremy could easily do stand-up. Something like a 21st century deadpan Basily Fawlty mixed with Conan O’Brien. Cooler, younger, smarter. But who else could end a presentation by telling his one offended reader that ‘their mother is kak in bed’?!

Last but not least, he mentioned a brand new Urban Trash character that he’ll be bringing to life soon, with a related competition being announced on Tuesday. We’re getting involved to some extent too, so watch this space next week.

Llew Claasen from KeyJam.net (a web training academy) had some theories upfront. And some serious theories later on.

Between balancing loops, reinforcing loops and limits-to-growth-systems, not to mention Metcalfe’s Law. A little above my head to be honest, but he had an example of these theories. He compared Facebook and SAReunited. Facebook is free. SAReunited needed you to pay to send messages - so no one sent messages. When Facebook came along, it allowed the same functionality and apparently ‘wiped out’ SAReunited in the space of a year. SAReunited’s mistake was to charge for ’subsidy-side’ costs on the ‘money-side’ for the user.

Facebook’s attempt at a winning formula has been to run a ‘marketplace’ and offer ‘gifts’ for purchase. But Llew says that the value of the network is not greater than other online classfieds destinations, so it’s missing the point. The intent of the user going to Facebook is to socialise with friends, not to sell their car. Not yet, anywhere.

But when the network’s value increases to match ebay, Craigslist or Bid or Buy, then at that point, Facebook’s revenue can clearly grow off the base of the ‘money side of the platform’.

His last slide was brilliant. It was called ‘Go Boks’ and included a ‘Facebok’ logo … I thought that was clever

Glen took us through a live podcasting session, using Audacity - an open source audio editor. Seated with a microphone/headset combo, it was clear that this is where Glen’s in full control. His knowledge on podcasting, from audio comments to music to intros/outros, oozes out of every tip he shares.

And more than this, it’s pretty fun to watch. Glen gets into DJ mode, which he takes pretty seriously (he has the rich kind of voice that gives him the right to do so). He then takes us through the process of creating an entire podcast on Audacity, step-by-step. Glen comments that it shouldn’t take longer than 30-40 minutes to create a perfectly listenable cast, instead of ‘needing to take days to do it’.

Derek ‘The Bandit’ Richardson, who’s sitting at our table, laughs and says ‘that would be ME’. The Bandit is a really nice guy in person and produces an extremely professional series of podcasts at Sound Republic.

Ten minutes later and Glen’s playing a fully-produced podcast, all done in front of our eyes and sounding like a totally competent mainstream piece of media.

Great session!

This is probably the single most inspiring Saturday night we’ve spent in years!

The place: Deer Park Cafe in Cape Town

The time: from 5.30 this afternoon until who-knows-what-time tonight

The people: some of South Africa’s (and the world’s) nicest and most capable digerati, including Jimmy Wales, Heather Ford, Dave, Max, Jacques, Joe, Neil and loads more faces that let loose tonight in the name of free culture.

Some interviews with Mr Wales and Miss Ford will follow over the weekend, along with some shots of the vibe and a few soundbites from some people buzzing around here. Included is a sensational announcement: the world’s very first Free Culture House will be built in Cape Town. More details in the videos coming soon.

We have to get back to the interesting conversations … and the great music in the background!

We made it to Grahamstown. Though I’m not sure where Graham is. No sign yet of Cecil John anywhere on Rhodes University campus either.

For those of you who don’t know, Grahamstown is known as ‘Frontier Country’. We spotted the 1820 Settlers Monument on the way in and will definitely visit to bring you the very latest in 19th Century Boer memorabilia.

One thing that Grahamstown’s got going for it is the beautiful scenery.

Simone from Bizcommunity is here and, as always, feels like she’s part of the team. Or we’re part of hers. Either way, she gave us a fantastic guided tour of the Rhodes campus yesterday. She has an unhealthy fascination with walking everywhere, though. Must be an Eastern Cape thing…

Renee Moodie, interactive head at IOL, revealed a remarkable fact at this afternoon’s Challenges of Content: A South Africa Perspective session. Their most popular story over the last seven years - more than 9/11, more than Najwa, more than Dina Rodrigues or other world-changing affairs, has been an article entitled: Woman ‘miraculously’ grows a penis.

To give you some idea of how staggeringly popular this is, their second-most popular article has had just over 600,000 views. The ‘miracle’ article is currently sitting on 937,766 views.

The question on Renee’s mind is: where’s the dividing line between news and entertainment? How has it shifted over the last few years? How does online news popularity differ to offline. And is there a line between the two? And does there need to be?

I have no doubt that article in question will have garnered another couple of thousand reads by this evening, so to save you the trouble of searching for it, here’s the link:

http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=29&art_id=vn20050714080208315C857453

Weeeiirrrd.

On a serious note, this is a thought-provoking topic.

Riaan Wolmarans from Mail and Guardian Online introduced their live projects and explained some of their internet-specific editorial limitations when compared to larger newsrooms with dedicated techno-ready journalists.

DeWaal Steyn from Die Burger Online tackled some key technical and operational issues behind what it really takes to power an online editorial team, including equipment and training hurdles that have to be looked at carefully.

Carly Ritz, multimedia ed at The Times, took us through their growth phase, ultimately resulting in a pod system in their newsroom. A news reporter, sits with a news photographer who sits with a multimedia producer. As news happens, it gets written for the paper and produced for online use at the same time. But though they’ve grown quickly, Carly realises the pros and cons of a young team, including limited journalistic and technical expertise. Equipment, software and production problems (noisy background sound and weather can affect a story) are also there but being tackled day to day. Most importantly, The Times focuses on ensuring that the multimedia material offers an additional experience to the copy in the article.

Overall, an encouraging encounter in the life of online multimedia in South Africa and Africa. Nice guys.