Wordcamp SA 2008
Just a quick note,
Wordcamp SA 2008 is wrapped up, thanks for those organising, it was a great event packed with some awesome people.
Great to see all of you again (some of which I haven't seen in years!) and hi to all the new friends, now I can put some faces to the tweets! 
Perhaps Matt Mullenweg's little slip, "It's good to be here in San Frans... whoops", was more than just a little brain fade and an interesting reference at the growing community of Innovators within our own little "valley"? Pretty inspiring!
Who needs emails anyway, rise of Egommunication
It was with much amusement that I read the post by SaulK on "the outlet" on 6 things you did not know of rafiq.
Two interesting things stand out for me, 1) This post is less malicious then tickling a puddycat and is clearly a clever ploy to attract some attention, which is by no means a bad thing (or are their some thinly veiled frustrations hidden Saul? 
) , 2) It presents a very interesting experiment as to whether the one provoked will respond quickly.
And yes .. he did. In fact he muti'd it himself within a couple hours.
This had me thinking .. let's say you wanted to get hold of some lofty techy type celeb, fairly ensconced in the web, can this be a more effective means of communication than email? Email is so nasty nowadays, what with spam and the amount of it, that it has become a fairly ineffective medium through witch to get hold of the cognoscenti (eliciting that *damned spammer* response is easier than one might think) whereas a post on a blog or twitter referencing one name seems to not carry that same problem (perhaps the cognitive filters are differently applied, reading a blog post at ones one accord is different from having an email shoved upon oneself afterall).
As I'm writing this though I release that I have read these exact same thoughts somewhere else before, and I have found it. In July Doc Searls responded on a similar call via a blog by Rohit Bhargava.
Rohit has also seen and acknowledged this trend and his even coined it, "Egommunication".
Ego Searches, also called Vanity Searches. Shallow or Human Nature? We like to know what people are saying, good or bad (we hope more good). We don't like to feel people are talking behind our backs, but we don't like getting sold to. Is this an opportunity for gold diggers and spammers employing clever tricks to have us view their wares? Perhaps.
To tack onto this idea I would like to add another observation, take a look at the number of comments at the end of Saul's piece, normally he garners somewhere between null and two comments on a piece, this one had 9 comments at the time of writing this. What does this tell us? Link baiting works, lol. No but more importantly, people track themselves and those that they feel close, or involved with. Basically Rafiq's groupies and enemies where also checking in. Thus sending out a certain proposition to a certain person might get you in contact with others with a similar interest around there, perhaps even a competitor in the space you never may have known about.
What's your take on this? As a developer I have to ask, is there a place for a tool here? I reckon so, I wouldn't mind a tool where I can slot in my name and have it feed me an RSS feed of new items found out there on the web, Facebook, Flicker, Twitter, Blogs, Web Searches wherever. Call it a vanity aggregator, perhaps one already exists? The idea of the Vanity Folder is not a new one.
Microblogging, laziness and peace
Stii Pm'ed me a good article on ReadWriteWeb, a fairly long post about the shift from blogging to microblogging and some such. Not a bad read a lot of what they say is true, and could be interpreted as the end of blogging etc.
Stii then wrote on his that perhaps we (bloggers) are getting lazy and that perhaps Twitter is working for us cause we have short attention spans.
Here's my 2 cents.
Yes, traffic is moving from blogs to twitter. Thank god for that. Now, let me tell you why I am relieved before you people have a heart attack.
Reason 1: Most blogs have become rubbish. We are all guilty of this, but if I'm honest then when I come to your blog or open your feed then don't want to know what you had for dinner, or how your mug of coffee kicks ar*e, or how you have a toothache. I certainly don't want to see every bloody braindump you have throughout the day or have to click on 17 "this is so cool" links. Seriously.
Reason 2: Tweets can and should be short. I can take 140 chars no more.
Reason 3: Blogs are forever, put stuff there you want to perserve, the really important stuff.
Reason 4: Twitter is transient, if it gets to noisy I just ignore it, I don't really care. I hope I am not missing anything important, rather put that on your blog!
I hope what this means is that the noise will shift away from the blogs and onto the micro-b's (*cute shortening of microblogs) and that the blogosphere will reclaim some of the shining beauty it once had, that place where I did not want to miss a single post on YOUR feed.
Geek Dinner was fun
The Cape Town Stormhoek Geek dinner, another first in South Africa, was a ton of fun!
Thanks to Graham and the crew from Stormhoek, and to Dave for getting it going.
I particularly made sure to gobble up some prize winning Pinotage!
Herewith my very amateur wine review of the 2 wines I had:
I started of with the Pinot Grigio and found it pleasantly bubbly and quite fruity, not too dry, but not sweet. I think it will make a great accompaniment to seafood or a wine to pop open on a lazy summers afternoon with friends.
The Pinotage was fabulous, I have had some pretty awful pinotages that often sport a very unpleasant burnt and overly smokey taste (I hope that comes across right) , thankfully this is a very civilized taste, it felt rounded and smooth and was a very pleasant experience as a whole. I'll be looking out for this one in the shops!
Thanks again guys!
The Bloggers Identity
Hello universe
If I write this, does it really matter? In one hundred years I will be long forgotten, no one will know my name. My life is only a spec in the history of time. Not only that, I am one of billions of specs on this planet. Do I really matter? Do I have a purpose - or am I just waisting my time? *
But wait..
I blog, therefore I am.
We blog.
But who are we?
We are all different but our blogs are all similar in structure, we don't judge on page design or layout or spelling or vocabulary but we relish in the inspiration of others.
We write about what we love generally for no reward - we share our passions with those willing to lend an ear.
We write so others can listen - and hear our voices drowned out by the constraints of traditional media - take for example our friends at United We Blog! who are carrying the flame for a Democratic Nepal.
Sometimes its a plea for attention, literally a fight for life.
Sometimes we share our joys and good news like the new baby on the way or the photos taking in Rome last vacation.
Our writings are informal and engaging- we love to discuss open-ended topics and comment on the inspired or misguided writings of others,
We are always there available via comments, and email, and boy, do we love to chat!
You can get to know us by our writings, get the meat via the long post or share a short brainwave via a short post.
We Blog-roll our friends and nurture those relationships with the recognition of a link.
We promote exciting brands like certain wines and a coffee shop in Sea-point.
We take our virtual friendships and make them real by attending Geek Dinners!
Some of us are techies in the industry and we make fun of the latest tech news or wallow in the prospects of WWJD or "What Would Jobs Do"?
Some of us are fashion trendies with the iPod as our bible and the latest mp3 our hymn, others are housewives posting about the latest under 9 soccer score.
Some of us , like Jason Calacanis and Om Malik, have or will be making millions from our hobby-slash-jobs.
We are one in a million, 50 million to be exact.
Our time is now, this is the time for the revolution. Are you getting heard?
So back to my question, do I really matter?
Well you are reading my blog, aren't you?
*Quoted from and inspired by the book: I Blog,therefore I am by "The book of blogs"
Conversations tour
In case you have missed it, I know I have, Shel Israel, influential co-author of Naked Conversations and Rick Segal, Canadian VC and blogger are planning a whirlwind world tour and has earmarked South Africa as a stop. They are here somewhere around the 3rd of September though they still seem indecided on which city to visit, Cape Town or JHB? Here is my vote for Cape Town!
define:TYFYC
From now on why not thank all the friendly ppl leaving comments on yer blog?
All you need is this friendly little acronym thought up by Rafiq:
TYFYC: Thank You For Your Comment
Spread the love and keep an eye out for the definition on google. How is that for local innovation?
Ah.. I love these kumbaja moments, for more of those, come to BarCamp Cape Town. 
Technorati Tags: barcampcapetown, tyfyc
Vista and the saga of the impossible rewrite
One of the more interesting things to come out over the weekend is an article written by renown Australian journalist Dave Richards, provocatively titled 60% Of Windows Vista Code To Be Rewritten.
The article states that the Microsoft Vista team has undergone a large scale restructuring in order to meet its deadline for the CES show in January 2007. It then lists an internal memo verbatim that underlines this restructuring and the vision for the new team.
Let me say first off, before quoting others, that while it is believable that MS is rushing to get the final changes and tweaks done before going to the presses, it seems ridiculous and sensational to claim that any major OS is going to get a 60% rewrite at this stage of the project, the fact is that people have been running Vista betas for months now out there in the real world and it certainly doesn't seem like a product that needs to be near rebuilt. In terms of time frame this is just not feasible and if these projects are run properly there should be absolutely no reason for this to happen at this late stage.
In a further development today, Richards cites Mr Raymond Vardanega, MD of Acer Australia as having confirmed this rumour and hints that the problem is contained somewhere in the Media Center portion of Vista.
Robert Scoble is currently denying all reports and quotes the X-box team as having unvalidated the comments on them giving up developers towards the Vista cause.
Further more this quote from the Xbox blog:
In fact, Vista is feature complete - meaning the code writing process is essentially over. The next phase of development focuses on security, testing and fit/finish – not writing new code. Vista is on track for business availability in November 2006 and consumer availability in January 2007.
At this stage it is unclear what is exactly going on at Redmond, but for now it seems unlikely that there really exists such a massive problem on the code base and I am going to dismiss this as rumour mongering for now, at least until Microsoft takes up an official stance on the problem.
Further rumour based reporting at the inquirer.
What ever happened to getting both sides of the story before running with it? Is this the effect that blogs are having on mainstream reporting? I hope not. Is there still something to be called integrity and accuracy in reporting, or have blogging made it obsolete? I am not saying that there is no semblance of truth in these articles, merely that at this stage no one really knows enough to make any real concrete comments, its all word-of-mouth until Redmond takes an official stance, which is not Scoble's role btw.
Battle the bloat
All this talk around the "noisy" or "bloated" blogosphere had me thinking about a strategy to manage ones Attention distribution. I have a regular J-O-B and my spare time is very limited between a young wife, sideline projects and sleep, so I need to make this is efficient as possible.
Lets have a look at my reading habits:
In general the type of reading I do can split into 2 large categories, firstly there is the current news category which consists mainly of up-to-the-date info on current affairs, if you read it a week later it would be old news. Secondly there are the feeds that I read (not too many!) of a bunch of local bloggers as well as others that post more long form, insightful and interesting posts, which will have a longer shelf life.
So this is how I think I will manage this lot from now on:
* Assign 3 slots for current news sites like Engadget and memetrackers, I find that having a lower quantity of these is ok as long as you pick the right ones. These get handled the same way I read newspapers, first thing in the morning.
* Assign a limited number of slots for other regular sites containing more long term value (Think Doc Searls, NewSome.org here), with these sites it won't matter if I don't hit them everyday, I can always catch up later. I think around 30 slots will suffice. These become like the novels and non-fiction works on my bedside table, I get to them when I get to them.
* Rotate these slots, once a month pick one or two feeds that you don't like as much as before or that have gone dead and swap out with a couple if interesting ones that may have come up via other sources (I find a lot of new stuff via links on the blogs that I read), it may be worth keeping 5 or 10 up and coming feeds in a B-Pool for later upgrading. Remember you can always swap back an old favorite if you feel the need.
* Try and read in some sort of order, it is often tempting to go to your top 10 feeds first, but try and cycle through your list of 30+ in an orderly fashion, this way you won't get into a situation where you have tons of unreads on some and other privileged feeds are up to date, remember there may be JUST as much value elsewhere, and remember, you have time!
Tips to bloggers to keep my Attention:
* Give me full feeds, its way more productive than having to click and load a blog site.
* Get to the point, long form post are nice, but keep it under 2 minutes of reading time.
* Stop writing to me as though I am an academic, remember that huge portions of the world do not speak english natively, I like a nice vocabulary as much as the next guy, but there has to be some limits, ok
* Tell me what you mean by actually saying it, don't write long complex posts wrapped up in metaphors that only you and your immediate circle of friends "get".
* Don't get into stupid blogospats, they just waste my time. Be constructive, not destructive.
* Appear human once a while, crack a joke, tell me about your weekend, make me feel like a friend not a statistic.
About me
Web Engineer, lover of technology, tearer down of walls.
Recent Tweets
- Winter is a funny beast, looking out the window I feel pleased that I'm at work so early (dark outside) then I realize its already 7AM!
- @elanlohmann lol, the hottie is always in the row behind you :)
- I've had enough of this day, calling it quits. Churned out a record amount of graft though.
- Wondering how the market will respond to the telkom price cut, I am pretty chuffed with my new 9Gb cap.
- Pushed hard for important progress demo today, feeling knackered! But nice to see a project come together.
- Looks like I am on accidental Helkom uncapped this month - lolz
- It was awfully dark this morning when I got up *groan*
- Not sure if Morgan Freeman was expecting the tough questions from Lee-Ann on Morning live this morning, but he didn't do to badly imho.
- @mikestopforth Ok if its something that person truly believes it. If he's a glorified version of a glomail salesperson, not so much.
- I favorited a YouTube video -- Ableton LIve - Preparing your set for the APC40 / Launchpad http://youtu.be/76WvQNJB1bk?a