Thought Leader publishes the occasional brain fart

Matthew Buckland, who co-founded Mail & Guardian Online’s blog aggregator, Amatomu, and group blog, Thought Leader (but who recently left the M&G to take up the position of General Manager for Publishing and Social Media at 24.com), wrote recently that the best model for citizen journalism was “user-generated content (UGC) with controls from a closed or select group of writers”.

“The key to harnessing user-generated content is combining it with a traditional media editorial model. It’s a way media can delve into the world of citizen media but still retain quality assurance. The creation of the Mail & Guardian Online’s Thought Leader blog platform (www.thoughtleader.co.za) has been an example of this very theory in practice.”

He also said that media “should not be ashamed at being ruthless about only publishing quality content”.

“For example, racist, sexist content in the form of articles or comments, or even comments considered “stupid” should be deleted with extreme prejudice.” [my emphasis]

However, it appears that the Editors at Thought Leader aren’t always ruthless and, occasionally, they publish a brain fart. My colleague, Gareth van Onselen, discusses an extreme example in the guest post that follows:

What happened to Thought Leader’s Quality Control?

By: Gareth van Onselen

How do you identify a poor piece of writing?

You’re never too old to start blogging

So I set up a blog for my dad a while back, and he got a bit of a crash course on navigating his WordPress dashboard last weekend. He “retired” to Swellendam a couple of years ago, but promptly started another veterinary practice there, and is as hard at work as ever. He also runs a small business on the side – propagating bromeliads. It’s the perfect business to market with a blog. It’s a very defined niche.

However, ‘bromeliads’ is still a highly competitive term on Google, with 328 000 results in organic search (69 200 if you add ‘South Africa’). My dad has some great pics, and there’s loads of information he can share about the different species, tips for looking after them, etc.

It’ll take a bit of time to climb the rankings, though. There are 145 000 results on blogs alone. But that’s a lot of bloggers with which to interact and share link love.

It will be interesting to see how well it does in attracting bromeliad enthusiasts, and gardeners more generally, and whether it leads to increased sales. I think it will.

Next project: my mom’s B&B in Simon’s Town

Cue Stork ad now

Mobile and Internet tools make it difficult for Mugabe to steal election in Zimbabwe

One of the key differences between this year’s general election in Zimbabwe and the widely-believed-to-be-rigged presidential race in 2005 is the practice – agreed to in the Mbeki-mediated pre-election talks – of starting the count immediately after polls closed and displaying the results of the count to public view outside each polling station as soon as it is completed. Add to this the greater penetration of mobile phones and internet access, and it becomes much more difficult for President Robert Mugabe to cling to power by manipulating the election results.

Thanks to a newsletter from an NGO called Sokwanele, I discovered an Independent Results Centre for the Zimbabwe Elections 2008, which is doing a tabulation of votes parallel to the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC – incidently, I got a “Forbidden” error when trying to visit this page).

The site’s parallel tabulation gives Morgan Tsvangirai 50.3% of the presidential vote (based on the votes of 209 out of 210 constituencies), Robert Mugabe 42.9%, and Simba Makoni 6.8%. It gives Tsvangirai’s MDC 99 seats, Zanu-PF 95 seats, and Mutambara’s MDC and Independents 12 seats. Three constituencies have to be contested in by-elections due to candidates having passed away.

So many blogs, so little time – research or procrastination?

I have to apologise to Dave Duarte for my rather trite comment on an excellent post he wrote this week, entitled “Symptoms of Organisational Attention Deficit Disorder.” It might have seemed dismissive of the post, but certainly wasn’t intended to be. I started to add a further comment expanding on my previous one-line contribution, but then thought perhaps it needed a post of its own.

Dave opened with the question, “Do you ever get so overwhelmed with information that you end up procrastinating on all the things you should be doing to be productive?”

What also came up in subsequent comments was the distinction between “important” and “urgent”. I found myself wondering (aloud, because I recorded it in Dave’s Comments) where reading that post and subsequent comments fitted on my importance/urgency matrix.

Back from a break

Compliments of the season to anyone who’s paying attention. I just returned to work, and the more regular internet access and activity that accompanies it.

I managed to go two weeks with only two visits to Facebook (to upload some holiday photos), and nothing else. I must say, it takes a while to re-immerse oneself. I did spend some time promoting blogging as a marketing tool to my parents (to be followed up, definitely).

My Google Reader was somewhat overloaded when I logged on this morning (mostly with unread news, thankfully – after a brief scan of the last 24 hours or so, cue “Mark all as read”). Then Seth Godin is prolific, and I find it difficult to simply skim the titles of his posts. Online Marketing Blog is not quite so frequent, and I read fewer full posts, but they tend to be longer, so it also takes some time. I read a good review of an e-Book called “Getting to first base: A Social Media Marketing Playbook”, by Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo. It’s $29, so I didn’t download it immediately, but the review certainly piqued my interest. I’m just wondering whether it will expand what I know, or merely confirm what I’ve already learned.

Anyway, I may be “listening” for a while longer before contributing something more productive to the conversation (but you never know when inspiration might strike )