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In this address to TEDGlobal 2010, blogger and technologist Ethan Zuckerman talks about clever strategies to open up your Twitter world and read the news in languages you do not even know.

I’m an American, which means, generally, I ignore football unless it involves guys my size or Bruno’s size running into each other at extremely high speeds. That said, it’s been really hard to ignore football for the last couple of weeks. I go onto Twitter, there are all these strange words that I’ve never heard before: FIFA, vuvuzela, weird jokes about octopi. But the one that’s really been sort of stressing me out, that I haven’t been able to figure out, is this phrase “Cala a boca, Galvao.” If you’ve gone onto Twitter in the last couple of weeks, you’ve probably seen this. It’s been a major trending topic.

Being a monolingual American, I obviously don’t know what the phrase means. So I went onto Twitter, and I asked some people if they could explain to me “Cala a boca, Galvao.” And fortunately, my Brazilian friends were more than ready to help. They explained that the Galvao bird is a rare and endangered parrot that’s in terrible, terrible danger. In fact, I’ll let them tell you a bit more about it. Narrator: A word about Galvao, a very rare kind of bird native to Brazil. Every year, more than 300,000 Galvan birds are killed during Carnival parades. Ethan Zuckerman: Obviously, this is a tragic situation, and it actually gets worse. It turns out that, not only is the Galvan parrot very attractive, useful for headdresses, it evidently has certain hallucinogenic properties, which means that there’s a terrible problem with Galvan abuse. Some sick and twisted people have found themselves snorting Galvan. And it’s terribly endangered. The good news about this is that the global community — again, my Brazilian friends tell me — is pitching in to help out. It turns out that Lady Gaga has released a new single — actually five or six new singles, as near as I can tell — titled “Cala a boca, Galvao.” And my Brazilian friends tell me that if I just tweet the phrase “Cala a boca, Galvao,” 10 cents will be given to a global campaign to save this rare and beautiful bird.

Now, most of you have figured out that this was a prank, and actually a very, very good one. “Cala a boca, Galvao” actually means something very different. In Portugese, it means “Shut your mouth, Galvao.” And it specifically refers to this guy, Galvao Bueno, who’s the lead soccer commentator for Rede Globo. And what I understand from my Brazilian friends is that this guy is just a cliche machine. He can ruin the most interesting match by just spouting cliche again and again and again. So Brazilians went to that first match against North Korea, put up this banner, started a Twitter campaign and tried to convince the rest of us to tweet the phrase: “Cala a boca, Galvao.” And in fact, were so successful at this that it topped Twitter for two weeks.

Now there’s a couple — there’s a couple of lessons that you can take from this. And the first lesson, which I think is a worthwhile one, is that you cannot go wrong asking people to be active online, so long as activism just means retweeting a phrase. So as long as activism is that simple, it’s pretty easy to get away with. The other thing you can take from this, by the way, is that there are a lot of Brazilians on Twitter. There’s more than five million of them. As far as national representation, 11 percent of Brazilian internet users are on Twitter. That’s a much higher number than in the U.S. or U.K. Next to Japan, it’s the second most represented by population.

Now if you’re using Twitter or other social networks, and you didn’t realize this was a space with a lot of Brazilians in it, you’re like most of us. Because what happens on a social network is you interact with the people that you have chosen to interact with. And if you are like me, a big, geeky, white, American guy, to tend to interact with a lot of other geeky, white, American guys. And you don’t necessarily have the sense that Twitter is in fact a very heavily Brazilian space. It’s also extremely surprising to many Americans, a heavily African-American space. Twitter recently did some research. They looked at their local population. They believe that 24 percent of American Twitter users are African-American. That’s about twice as high as African-Americans are represented in the population. And again, that was very shocking to many Twitter users, but it shouldn’t be. And the reason it shouldn’t be is that on any day you can go into Trending Topics. And you tend to find topics that are almost entirely African-American conversations.

This was a visualization done by Fernando Viegas and Martin Wattenberg, two amazing visualization designers, who looked at a weekend’s worth of Twitter traffic and essentially found that a lot of these trending topics were basically segregated conversations — and in ways that you wouldn’t expect. It turns out that oil spill is a mostly white conversation, that cookout is a mostly black conversation. And what’s crazy about this is that if you wanted to mix up who you were seeing on Twitter, it’s literally a quick click away. You click on that cookout tag, there an entirely different conversation with different people participating in it. But generally speaking, most of us don’t. We end up within these filter bubbles, as my friend Eli Pariser calls them, where we see the people we already know and the people who are similar to the people we already know. And we tend not to see that wider picture.

Now for me, I’m surprised by this, because this wasn’t how the internet was supposed to be. If you go back into the early days of the internet, when cyber-utopians like Nick Negroponte were writing big books like “Being Digital,” the prediction was that the internet was going to be an incredibly powerful force to smooth out cultural differences, to put us all on a common field of one fashion or another. Negroponte started his book with a story about how hard it is to build connections in the world of atoms. He’s at a technology conference in Florida. And he’s looking at something really, truly absurd, which is bottles of Evian water on the table. And Negroponte says this is crazy. This is the old economy. It’s the economy of moving these heavy, slow atoms over long distances that’s very difficult to do. We’re heading to the future of bits, where everything is speedy, it’s weightless. It can be anywhere in the world at any time. And it’s going to change the world as we know it.

Now, Negroponte has been right about a lot of things. He’s totally wrong about this one. It turns out that in many cases atoms are much more mobile than bits. If I walk into a store in the United States, it’s very, very easy for me to buy water that’s bottled in Fiji, shipped at great expense to the United States. It’s actually surprisingly hard for me to see a Fijian feature film. It’s really difficult for me to listen to Fijian music. It’s extremely difficult for me to get Fijian news, which is strange, because actually there’s an enormous amount going on in Fiji. There’s a coup government. There’s a military government. There’s crackdowns on the press. It’s actually a place that we probably should be paying attention to at the moment.

Here’s what I think is going on. I think that we tend to look a lot at the infrastructure of globalization. We look at the framework that makes it possible to live in this connected world. And that’s a framework that includes things like airline routes. It includes things like the internet cable. We look at a map like this one, and it looks like the entire world is flat because everything is a hop or two away. You can get on a flight in London, you can end up in Bangalore later today. Two hops, you’re in Suva, the capitol of Fiji. It’s all right there.

When you start looking at what actually flows on top of these networks, you get a very different picture. You start looking at how the global plane flights move, and you suddenly discover that the world isn’t even close to flat. It’s extremely lumpy. There are parts of the world that are very, very well connected. There’s basically a giant pathway in the sky between London and New York. but look at this map, and you can watch this for, you know, two or three minutes. You won’t see very many planes go from South America to Africa. And you’ll discover that there are parts of the globe that are systematically cut off. When we stop looking at the infrastructure that makes connection possible, and we look at what actually happens, we start realizing that the world doesn’t work quite the same way that we think it does.

So here’s the problem that I’ve been interested in in the last decade or so. The world is, in fact, getting more global. It’s getting more connected. More of problems are global in scale. More of our economics is global in scale. And our media is less global by the day. If you watched a television broadcast in the United States in the 1970s, 35 to 40 percent of it would have been international news on a nightly new broadcast. That’s down to about 12 to 15 percent. And this tends to give us a very distorted view of the world. Here’s a slide that Alisa Miller showed at a previous TED Talk. Alisa’s the president of Public Radio International. And she made a cartogram, which is basically a distorted map based on what American television news casts looked at for a month. And you see that when you distort a map based on attention, the world within American television news is basically reduced to this giant bloated U.S. and a couple of other countries which we’ve invaded. And that’s basically what our media is about. And before you conclude that this is just a function of American TV news — which is dreadful, and I agree that it’s dreadful — I’ve been mapping elite media like the New York Times, and I get the same thing. When you look at the New York Times, you look at other elite media, what you largely get are pictures of very wealthy nations and the nations we’ve invaded.

It turns out that new media isn’t necessarily helping us all that much. Here’s a map made by Mark Graham who’s down the street at the Oxford Internet Institute. A this is a map of articles in Wikipedia that have been geo-coded. And you’ll notice that there’s a very heavy bias towards North America and Western Europe. Even within Encyclopedias, where we’re creating their own content online, there’s a heavy bias towards the place where a lot of the Wikipedia authors are based, rather than to the rest of the world. In the U.K., we can get up. You can pick up your computer when you get out of this session. You could read a newspaper from India or from Australia, from Canada, God forbid from the U.S. You probably won’t. If you look at online media consumption — in this case, in the top 10 users of the internet — more than 95 percent of the news readership is on domestic news sites. It’s one of these rare cases where the U.S. is actually slightly better than Canada because we actually like reading your media, rather than vice versa.

So all of this starts leading me to think that we’re in a state that I refer to as imaginary cosmopolitanism. We look at the internet. We think we’re getting this wide view of the globe. We occasionally stumble onto a page in Chinese, and we decide that we do in fact have the greatest technology ever built to connect us to the rest of the world. And we forget that most of the time we’re checking Boston Red Sox scores. So this is a real problem — not just because the Red Sox are having a bad year — but it’s a real problem because, as we’re we’re discussing here at TED, the real problems in the world the interesting problems to solve are global in scale and scope, they require global conversations to get to global solutions. This is a problem we have to solve.

So here’s the good news. For six years, I’ve been hanging out with these guys. This is a group called Global Voices. This is a team of bloggers from around the world. Our mission was to fix the world’s media. We started in 2004. You might have noticed, we haven’t done all that well so far. Nor do I think we are by ourselves, actually going to solve the problem. But the more that I think about it, the more that I think that a few things that we have learned along the way are interesting lessons for how we would rewire if we we wanted to use the web to have a wider world. The first thing you have to consider is that there are parts of the world that are dark spots in terms of attention. In this case — the map of the world at night by NASA — their dark literally because of lack of electricity. And I used to think that a dark spot on this map basically meant you’re not going to get media from there because there are more basic needs.

What I’m starting to realize is that you can get media, it’s just an enormous amount of work, and you need an enormous amount of encouragement. One of those dark spots is Madagascar, a country which is generally better known for the Dreamworks film than it is actually known for the lovely people who live there. And so the people who founded Foko Club in Madagascar weren’t actually concerned with trying to change the image of their country. They were doing something much simpler. It was a club to learn English and to learn computers and the internet. but what happened was that Madagascar went through a violent coup. Most independent media was shut down. And the high school students who were learning to blog through Foko Club suddenly found themselves talking to an international audience about the demonstrations, the violence, everything that was going on within this country. So a very, very small program designed to get people in front of computers, publishing their own thoughts, publishing independent media, ended up having a huge impact on what we know about this country.

Now the trick with this is that I’m guessing most people here don’t speak Malagasy. I’m also guessing that most of you don’t even speak Chinese — which is sort of sad if you think about it, as it’s now the most represented language on the internet. Fortunately people are trying to figure out how to fix this. If you’re using Google Chrome and you go to a Chinese language site, you notice this really cute box at the top, which automatically detects that the page is in Chinese and very quickly at a mouse click will give you a translation of the page. Unfortunately, it’s a machine translation of the page. And while Google is very, very good with some languages, it’s actually pretty dreadful with Chinese. And the results can be pretty funny. What you really want — what I really want, is eventually the ability to push a button and have this queued so a human being can translate this.

And if you think this is absurd, it’s not. There’s a group right now in China called Yeeyan. And Yeeyan is a group of 150,000 volunteers who get online every day. They look for the most interesting content in the English language. They translate roughly 100 articles a day from major newspapers, major websites. They put it online for free. It’s the project of a guy named Zhang Lei, who was living in the United States during the Lhasa riots and who couldn’t believe how biased American media coverage was. And he said, “If there’s one thing I can do, I can start translating, so that people between these countries start understanding each other a little bit better.” And my question to you is: in Yeeyan can line up 150,000 people to translate the English internet into Chinese, where’s the English language Yeeyan? Who’s going after Chinese, which now has 400 million internet users out there? My guess is at least one of them has something interesting to say.

So even if we can find a way to translate from Chinese, there’s no guarantee that we’re going to find it. When we look for information online, we basically have two strategies. We use a lot of search. And search is terrific if you know what you’re looking for. But if what you’re looking for is serendipity, if you want to stumble onto something that you didn’t know you needed, our main philosophy is to look to our social networks, to look for our friends. What are they looking at? Maybe we should be looking at it. The problem with this is that essentially what you end up getting after a while is the wisdom of the flock. You end up flocking with a lot of people who are probably similar to you, who have similar interests. And it’s very, very hard to get information from the other flocks, from the other parts of the world where people getting together and talking about their own interests. To do this, at a certain point, you need someone to bump you out of your flock and into another flock. You need a guide.

So this is Amira Al Hussaini. She is the Middle East editor for Global Voices. She has one of the hardest jobs in the world. Not only does she have to keep our Israeli and Palestinian contributors from killing each other, she has to figure out what is going to interest you about the Middle East. And in that sense of trying to get you out of your normal orbit, and to try to get you to pay attention to a story about someone who’s given up smoking for the month of Ramadan, she has to know something about a global audience. She has to know something about what stories are available. Basically, she’s a deejay. She’s a skilled human curator who knows what material is available to her, who’s able to listen to the audience, and who’s able to make a selection and push people forward in one fashion or another. I don’t think this is necessarily an algorithmic process. I think what’s great about the internet is that it actually makes it much easier for deejays to reach a wider audience. I know Amira. I can ask her what to read. But with the internet, she’s in a position where she can tell a lot of people what to read. And you can listen to her as well, if this is a way that you’re interested in having your web widened.

So once you start widening like this, once you start lighting up voices in the dark spots, once you start translating, once you start curating, you end up in some really weird places. This is an image from pretty much my favorite blog, which is AfriGadget. And AfriGadget is a blog that looks at technology in an Africa context. And specifically, it’s looking at a blacksmith in Kibera in Nairobi, who is turning the shaft of a Landrover into a cold chisel. And when you look at this image, you might find yourself going, “Why would I conceivably care about this?” And the truth is, this guy can probably explain this to you. This is Erik Hersman. You guys may have seen him around the conference. He goes by the moniker White African. He’s both a very well known American geek, but he’s also Kenyan; he was born in Sudan, grew up in Kenya. He is a bridge figure. He is someone who literally has feet in both worlds — one in the world of the African technology community, one in the world of the American technology community. And so he’s able to tell a story about this blacksmith in Kibera and turn it into a story about repurposing technology, about innovating from constraint, about looking for inspiration based on reusing materials. He knows one world, and he’s finding a way to communicate it to another world, both of which he has deep connections to. These bridge figures, I’m pretty well convinced, are the future of how we try to make the world wider through using the web.

But the trick with bridges is, ultimately, you need someone to cross them. And that’s where we start talking about xenophiles. So if I found myself in the NFL, I suspect I would spend my off-season nursing my wounds, enjoying my house, so on and so forth — possibly recording a hip-hop album. Dhani Jones, who is the middle linebacker for the Cincinnati Bengals, has a slightly different approach to the off-season. Dhani has a television show. It’s called “Dhani Tackles the Globe.” And every week on this television show, Dhani travels to a different nation of the world. He finds a local sporting team. He trains with them for a week, and he plays a match with them. And his reason for this is not just that he wants to master Muay Tai boxing. It’s because, for him, sport is the language that allows him to encounter the full width and wonder of the world. For some of us it might be music. For some of us it might be food. For a lot of us it might be literature or writing. But there are all these different techniques that allow you to go out and look at the world and find your place within it.

The goal of my Talk here is not to persuade the people in this room to embrace your xenophilia. My guess — given that you’re at a conference called TEDGlobal — is that most of you are xenophiles, whether or not you use that term. My challenge instead is this. It’s not enough to make the personal decision that you want a wider world. We have to figure out how to rewire the systems that we have. We have to fix our media. We have to fix the internet. We have to fix our education. We have to fix our immigration policy. We need to look at ways of creating serendipity, of making translation pervasive, and we need to find ways to embrace and celebrate these bridge figures. And we need to figure out how to cultivate xenophiles. That’s what I’m trying to do. I need your help.

Related posts:

1. Blogging from TED Global 2007
2. The Times mentioned in a talk at TED Global 2007
3. Quick and Dirty Solution to Global Warming

Have you ever tried selling anything on Gumtree? Whenever I always wondered why they kept putting little warnings in the sidebar.

Avoid fraud by meeting all sellers in-person to pay for items. Gumtree does not offer any transaction or payment services.

I didn’t think people would actually fall for blatant scams until it almost happened to me. We had this extra laptop computer that was just collecting dust and though we could use Gumtree to sell it quickly. It was a Friday afternoon and we were planning to go away for the weekend. We got a call from a man who wanted the laptop computer immediately and wanted to know where he could pick it up, he’d send his driver, and requested our bank details.

We gave him our bank details and said we’d arrange a place to collect the computer once proof of payment has been received. Minutes later a proof of payment was received via email. Only problem was that the proof of payment was an attached document from a non-bank email address. The document was called Doc1.doc and had the banks logo in it and followed the same formatting you’d expect. Being a Web AddiCT I didn’t fall for this con but later found out that many colleagues and friends’ families have lost thousands of rands worth of items in similar scams on Gumtree.

I though to myself then that we need an onlien marketplace to buy and sell goods that offer an escrow service. So what is an escrow service? This is where a third party, usually a law firm or title company, plays the middle entity by making sure a fair trade is made between interested parties. It’s been months since having that thought and nearly being ripped of on Gumtree but finally such a service is available in South Africa.

Say Hello to Kalahari.net Marketplace. The new and used platform was launched as part of the kalahari.net website in February this year. It already boasts more than 500 000 products for sale and the company expects this number to double by the end of the year. The launch categories include books, CDs, DVDs and games. They are planning to launch new categories later this year.

Why is Kalahari Marketplace safer than Gumtree?

kalahari.net has made the upload process really simple. Sellers register and their banking details are verified. Once this step is complete, they upload their products by entering the name of the book, DVD, CD or game or by entering the ISBN number on the product. The system searches for the product and once found, the seller nominates a price that he or she would like to sell the item for, as well as the delivery method (courier or postal service). Once uploaded, the item is automatically live on the kalahari.net website.

A buyer browsing kalahari.net has the option of buying a new item or a new or used item from registered sellers on kalahari.net’s new marketplace. If the buyer selects the used item, the money paid by the buyer is held in kalahari.net’s escrow account until the buyer confirms receipt of the purchase. Once this is done, the money is paid directly into the sellers bank account.

What makes kalahari.net’s marketplace different is that it holds the buyers funds in an escrow account until the buyer received the product and confirms that it is in the condition that the seller advertised. Unlike other websites, once a product is purchased it is automatically removed from the website, which means that the only products that customers see are those which are actively available.

This service on Kalahari Marketplace is currently free and they are planning to change this in the near future. I hope it remains free as this will be a much safer alternative Gumtree. Will you pay for safety?

Related posts:

1. Pay Online, safer and less hassle
2. Do you consider the online marketplace your playground? Here’s R40 000

This week’s featured WordPress Wednesday developer is Christopher Mills.  He started developing using PHP and MySQL in 1997 when he decided to build the platform for his blog; a place where he could share his ideas.  Later on he converted to WordPress which is his content management system of choice.  In later years his interest for coding developed and he has been hooked on WordPress ever since.

He finds WordPress satisfying to work with as it is written in PHP and MySQL, which fits comfortably with his skill set. He started programming because of his love for problem solving and the amazing feeling it gave him when he solved a problem. Naturally, tying up these two entities is what makes him really enjoy working with WordPress.

Christopher Mills is located in Cape Town and he is employed by  The Forge Web Creations.  He can also be reached via his blog, iMod.co.za, which is ranked number 1 in Africa.

He has experience with languages ranging from ASM all the way to C# and obviously open source languages too. He does, however, enjoy developing for WordPress the most.

During his time of development, he coded a few plug-ins most notably, Remind Me, which is a plug-in that enables easy deep linking between articles on websites running WordPress.

He has played a role in the creation of several themes, which were produced by The Forge Web Creations. Currently they have released three, Organic (28,000 downloads),Greyzed (23,000 downloads and was recently re-released as one of Automatic’s WordPress.com templates available to all WordPress.com users) and Aqualine (Released on OneExtraPixel).

I have been featured/ worked in/ with several publications, the most notable being: The Big Issue, Askmen.com, News24.com, ReadWriteWeb, The Times and Weekend Argus.

Besides the coding, Christopher Mills loves interior design and fashion design, he’s passionate about fishing, fine wine and enjoys spending time with his fiancé and his wonderful family.

Advice for someone new to WordPress:  “Don’t be overwhelmed, it’s far easier than it looks.”

Related posts:

1. Matty Cohen – WordPress Developer
2. Gerhard Potgieter – WordPress Developer
3. Ryan Peel – WordPress Developer

Do you prefer a Cell C PhotoCode or the tried and tested QR Code?

Web AddiCT(s); photocode

or

Web AddiCT(s) QR Code

For obvious reasons the PhotoCode as pushed by Cell C in all forms of traditional media fits nicely with this blog’s style but Your Web AddiCT still prefers the QR Code that is used the world over.

What exactly is thsi Cell C PhotoCode? It is nothing new, its just being advertised like it is. Chris Mills explains more…

What’s Cell C got for us?

Cell C will introduce PhotoCode to the public in conjunction with media partners, YOU, Huisgenoot, People, Sunday Times, The Times, 5FM, Multichoice and Oppikoppi and it will be will be rolled out further via retailers, restaurants and bars, amongst others.

Cell C’s PhotoCodes can unlock a host of new experiences for customers and Reichelt (Cell C CEO) says new applications are being devised almost daily. “All customers have to do is download the PhotoCode reader, then point and snap,” he says.

I’m with Marc Forrest when he says…CellC gets it all wrong with Photocode

Photocode is a name they have used for what is essentially called BeeTaggCode. BeeTagg is a mobile application that you can download to your phone, which allows you to capture the popular 2D bar codes, including THEIR proprietary code, called BeeTaggCode.I have spoken about QR codes on my site a number of times, and while there are a number of formats you can use, QR code has by far been the most popular, around the world. The concept, has never taken off in South Africa, despite the guys from the Sunday Times trying to implement it a couple of years back.

But there is a catch, you have to download BeeTagg to capture the Photocode code. And, to download BeeTagg, you need to send an SMS which costs R1, which they will then send you a link for a free piece of software. (Thanks to Gerhard, you can go straight to http://cellc.beetagg.com, and download it from there) There are a number of other 2D bar code readers that allow you to capture a variety of codes, but only BeeTagg can capture Photocode.Not only that but brands like Nokia are now including a QR reader in their software as a standard application

So how do you create your own BeeTagg Cell C PhotCode? Head on over to http://generator.beetagg.com/ and you can create your own PhotoCode with your own logo. Strange that Cell C is not mentioned anywhere on that page even though this has been introduced to South Africa as their innovation.

Related posts:

1. HowTo create & use 2007 SA Blog Awards widget
2. #m4change How to create MXit chat rooms
3. free SMS (Vodacom4me or Cell C) from your phone

FNB & Paypal have just recently announced a new competition to awards developers for their innovative use of the Paypal payment platform.

Want to win a trip to the USA to the value of $10 000? This is how to enter the FNb Paypal X contest.

To submit for the FNB and PayPal X Award, log on to x.com and click to register for the PayPal X Developer Challenge. Select the box for the FNB and PayPal X Award.

Developers who register by 4 August, 2010 at 11:59 p.m. PDT will be entered to win one of 10 iPads. The use of some of PayPal’s products requires approval by 1 September, 2010; please check x.com for detailed contest timelines and deadlines. The winner of the FNB/PayPal X Award will be notified on 29 September, 2010.

Winners of the local FNB and PayPal X Award will receive a trip to the United States to attend PayPal’s second annual Innovate Conference, which is taking place 26 and 27 October. The prize will include airfare, accommodation, meals, conference costs, visa expenses and insurance to an approximate value of $10,000.  In addition, developers will also be automatically entered into PayPal’s X Developer Challenge and could receive an award totaling up to $100,000 in prizes.

This year’s PayPal X Innovate 2010 will be held at Moscone West in San Francisco. The conference will feature presentations from industry experts, new product announcements and sessions that will give developers the tools and support they need to create the future of payments.

“The first FNB and PayPal X Award seeks to reward South Africa’s entrepreneurial spirit and jump start local innovation and new business ventures,” said Chris Savides, General Manager, FNB Complementary Online Services.

PayPal opened its application programming interfaces (APIs) last year, giving developers around the world the ability to monetize their ideas and build new payment applications on new devices and development platforms.

“PayPal has always stood for innovation in payments,” said Oded Zehavi, regional director of PayPal Israel and South Africa. “We are excited to partner with FNB to encourage developers to build their dream apps and make payments safer and easier for people in South Africa.”

Related posts:

1. FNB Paypal post vanished
2. PayPal South Africa?
3. Google is putting $10 Million on the table for Mobile Application Developers

The Bees Awards grant recognition to the best Social Media practices of the year in order to define and promote outstanding professionals and their marketing expertise.

We are interested in seeing social media work (campaigns using
Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, and so on) from all over the
world. The Bees Awards are calling for entries.

The Bees Awards is the first international social media award show for
marketing professionals. Our jury is composed by 20 of the most
renowned experts from 13 different countries. The event will take
place in San Francisco on November 9, 2010 and will be live-streamed.
We hope to see you joining the celebration!

You have the opportunity to challenge the industry worldwide and
establish an international reputation in this emerging market.

Submit work at: http://www.beesawards.com/bees/entry/

Social Media is an extremely new medium for advertising. Aside from
entries we are also looking for case studies to share with the
international press. Should you have an interest in sharing your work
publicly, please advise us.

We are looking forward to hearing back from you.

If you know of any person or company who has excelled in any one of the following categories feel free to recommend them.

• Best 140 Characters Message (SMS, Tweet)
• Best Use of Micro-Blogging Platform
• Best Use of Social Media Platform
• Best Use of Mobile
• Best Relationship with Blogs
• Best Conversation with Customers
• Best Use of Alternative Tools
• Best Use of Media Press Room
• Best Writing
• Best Art Direction
• Best Social CRM
• Best Innovation
• Best Campaign
• Best Student Work
• Agency of the Year
• Client of the Year

For Agencies to enter it cost $175, students $25. Nominating is free though. If you’re like me you’re probably also wondering why they’re charging to enter. This is the response I got…

Because it costs a lot to organize an event like this.
All awards show charge. It is also a way to filter the bad entries.
Agencies take the time to send only their best ones. That save the
jury some time.

Related posts:

1. Jail4Bail: Does Social Media have no power or have some PRs gone sour?
2. Anti-Social Media
3. Social Media Usernames like Website Domain Names

Following on from our previous WordPress Wednesday post, this week I’d like to introduce Ryan Peel (Twitter), a WordPress (WP) developer from Durban but based in Cape Town since 2005.

Ryan Peel built his first website in 1998 but has only been doing web development at a full time capacity since 2007. He’s been working with WP since around 2005 but only focusing primarily on WP based projects since 2008.

Javascript is Ryan’s coding language of choice as he specialises in UX (User Experience) and front-end development.  More recently he’s been working with the latest CSS3 and HTML5.

His plugin called AnyFont was released to the WordPress repository in 2009 and it has since been downloaded 36 000 times.  This plugin allows you to use any font you wish to use on your personal WP site. The plug-in has been featured on design sites such as Smashing Magazine as well as in the May 2010 issue of Website Magazine, a print magazine sold in the US and Canada.

He’s also released a widget called last.fm LIVE! which shows what the owner of the site is currently listening to via last.fm.

One of his biggest plug-ins to date and the one that apparently took him almost a full year to complete is the Family Tree Builder which Ancestry24.com released earlier this year.  The plug-in was designed for BuddyPress and it was written primarily in Javascript as the main requirement was that it had to be as interactive as its Flash-based counterparts, but without using Flash.

A screenshot of the Family Tree Builder.

Apart from all the lines of code and the lack of sleep, he enjoys making furniture items out of wood, gaming on his Xbox360 and spending quality time with his staffy puppy or attending live music shows with his girlfriend.

If you are interested in working with Ryan, he is a freelancer and can be contacted via his blog 2amlife.com.

His advice to new WP devs is “Read the available documentation online and stick to the standards to maintain compatibility with all the other plug-ins/themes out there.”

If you are a WordPress developer who would like to be featured in this series, please contact @anastacia on Twitter or simply post a comment below.

Related posts:

1. Matty Cohen – WordPress Developer
2. Christopher Mills – WordPress Developer
3. Gerhard Potgieter – WordPress Developer

Back in 2008 when you could still tweet via instant messenger (we’re you on twitter then?) Your Web AddiCT asked, ‘Let me Twitter from MXit please‘ It is now 2 years later so i decided to ask @MXit via twitter if it was possible. And yes it is now possible. You can add your Twitter profile to your MXit profile and all your MXit status updates will be pushed to Twitter.

How to Update Twitter from MXit:

select “Menu” – “My Profile” – “Twitter status update” and authenticate your Twitter profile

Currently you can only do it from a J2ME client and this feature is currently on the backlog for Android, iPhone and the EVO client.

You can update your Facebook status using a similar procedure.

Related posts:

1. Facebook Less: HowTo Update your status with Twitter
2. Twitterbook: Automated update of Twitter using your Facebook status
3. MXit Facebook Status Update

Want to send Bulk SMS messages from your WordPress blog? It is now possible to send text messages to your SMS subscribers using the International SMS Subscription Manager.

International SMS Subscription Manager is a WordPress plugin that allows you to place a widget on your blog through which readers can subscribe/unsubscribe their mobile numbers to receive SMS Text updates to their mobile phones.

Blog owners have the functionality to send out SMS Text messages to subscribed numbers through the WordPress dashboard and also manage their subscribed numbers and widget options from there.

Features include:

• SMS subscribe/unsubscribe through a widget.
• Ajax enabled widget (No page reloading)
• Custom widget header and footer.
• Send SMS Text Messages through WordPress dashboard.
• IP tracking on who subscribed a mobile number.
• Manage subscribed mobile numbers through WordPress dashboard.
• International Number format eg. 27730000000 (country code + number with no leading zero)

See the widget in action on this blog is you want to subscribe to SMS alerts for when I run a competition again.

WordPress SMS Widget

When you’re logged into you WordPress dashboard you’ll be able to see how many subscribers you have and send a text to everyone simultaneously.

Send a Bulk SMS to your WordPress subscribers

So how exactly would you use this plugin? Here are a few examples…

If you were a musician who uses WordPress and would like to notify your subscribers of your album launch or gig this weekend the plugin could be for you.

If you were a consultant who happened to have a blog, like most consultant these days do, you could notify your subscribers of when a new ebook or webinar is released via a SMS straight from WordPress.

I’m sure by now your get the idea of how this text messaging plugin works. It works in over 220 countries covering 800 networks thanks iGeek‘s innovative use of Clickatell’s bulk SMS Gateway. This plugin started out as an idea just 12 days ago.

Related posts:

1. SMS Alert WordPress Plugin idea
2. MobilePress – Make your WordPress blog mobile friendly
3. Community Cloud WordPress Plugin Released

How exactly do search trends affect SEO? Well if you wrote any useful content on your website or blog over the past month and the few weeks leading up to the 2010 FIFA World Cup you would of seen a steady boost in your traffic. Thank you Sepp Blatter. As we wait in anticipation for Sunday’s final match, Google examines the most prominent search trends over the last 30 days.

The vuvuzela has certainly been one of the biggest talking points of the 2010 FIFA World Cup™, and has since crossed beyond our borders into other countries. Even celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio have been spotted with their lips around this plastic phenomenon. Google Zeitgeist – which provides insight into global, national, past and present search trends – has revealed that the United Kingdom is the number one country searching for places to buy the vuvuzela, followed by the United States and the United Arab Emirates.

Top 10 countries interested in buying vuvuzelas

Vuvuzela searches by country

Meanwhile, Uruguayans have been the most interested in Zakumi (the Official 2010 FIFA World Cup Mascot™), with the majority of searches taking place just before Bafana Bafana’s 3-0 clash against Uruguay. Besides South Africa, it seems that Peru, Argentina and Venezuela have also taken quite a liking to this cuddly, green haired leopard, who celebrated his 16th birthday during the World Cup.

When French coach, Raymond Domenech, snubbed a handshake from South African coach, Carlos Alberto Parreira, searches combining their names rose; particularly in France on the day of the momentous match in Bloemfontein. Luis Suarez’s infamous hand ball against Ghana during the quarter finals also sparked a series of searches, with the United States being the most eager to research the controversial play that inevitably dashed Africa’s hopes in the tournament.

Interestingly, Bangladesh leads the pack in trying to find out more about ‘Waka Waka’ (the official 2010 FIFA World Cup™ anthem), with Paraguay and Mauritius coming in second and third respectively. K’naan’s ‘Wavin’ Flag’, although slightly less popular, appears to have resonated with citizens in Hungry, Argentina and India.

Highest regional interest for Shakira’s ‘Waka Waka’ song in the last 30 days:

World Cup 2010 Google Seach trends

The 2010 FIFA World Cup™ has also brought a number of celebrity soccer fans to our shores, including John Travolta and Mick Jagger. It’s not surprising that South Africa was the most curious about Paris Hilton during the last 30 days, especially with her glamourised arrival at Lanseria Airport, her attendance at a World Cup match and her subsequent brush with the law in Port Elizabeth on July 2nd.

Web search interest in South Africa on Paris Hilton.

Paris Hilton is so dope

Anyone can use Insights for search to come up with their own rankings by visiting http://google.com/insights/search/ and Trends http://www.google.com/trends

Related posts:

1. Weekly Zeitgeist coming to Google Trends
2. Blog your way to the 2010 FIFA World Cup™
3. Google Doodle World Cup 2010

This week has been really tough if you are one of those users reliant on a Seacom connection, the cable
which connects you to the world is down and will be for at least a few more days. So now you sit there with
absolutely no idea what to do… no worries! There is always the local internet.

Since I started Local List with help from ISLabs two years ago I have indexing local websites and services for
you to enjoy in times like these.

5.) Google and Bing

Both Google and Bing host locally, even though they won’t be able to help you much with regards to search
as the results will be international, they both still have an impressive list of product that you can access locally, for example Google Maps etc.

4.) Antfarm Radio streams like 5FM

I live in a place with terrible radio reception and almost exclusively stream Dj Fresh into my hear lobes, thus it’s very cool that they
host the audio stream locally, because not only can I use it when I am capped or Seacom is down, but it is also fast and uninterrupted due to locality.

3.) News24 and TimesLive

I religiously look at these two news sites all day, so the fact that they host locally is a life saver. All Media24 and Avusa sites are hosted in SA.

2.) Youtube and Metacafe

Yes, I’m not kidding you Youtube is hosted locally! You can now waste away your time watching videos for hours forgetting all together that Seacom is even down.
Who are you kidding, you know this is what you would have been doing even if Seacom wasn’t down.

1.) Facebook

The most popular social network on the planet is also locally hosted! I personally cannot live without checking FB every 5 seconds and even though Seacom is down
you can too! Hint: Just make sure you never log out because the log in requires you to have international access.

So now you have no reason to complain about Seacom being down, most of what you need is hosted locally anyway!

Check out Local List for more websites you can visit while Seacom is down.

This guest post was written by Jason Adriaan, founder of Local List.

Related posts:

1. Local Mirror for TED talks
2. Web Hosting South Africa – who hosts your blog or website?
3. New Local List project conceived at Geek Retreat

WordPress is an open-source project which started out seven years ago as a blogging platform and has since grown in to a framework which can be used for blogs, content management system, social networking sites and so much more. The developers we will feature in this series are all contributors to the WordPress community and are all based in Africa.

To give you an idea of just how much WordPress is being used out there, currently there are about 10000+ plug-ins available for users to download, and these plug-ins have been downloaded over 100 million times so far. The latest version of WordPress (version 3.0) was downloaded just over one million times within the first week of its release.

If any of you are thinking of getting in to WordPress development or looking to have custom WordPress development done for you, we’ll be catching up with some new as well as experienced WordPress developers, each Wednesday to give you insights on working with WordPress as we recognise the contributions each of these developers have made to the WordPress community…

This week, I managed to catch up with Matty Cohen (twitter), a WordPress developer from Cape Town.

Matty blogs about WordPress, he’s a major WordPress enthusiast, a web developer, an avid music lover and musician playing the guitar since he was eleven years old.

He took an interest in web development during his years at high school and branched in to WordPress development in late 2008. Besides using PHP, he mainly uses front-end scripting languages such as XHTML, CSS, Javascript and then MySQL for database interactions and is keen to learn Python.

Matty codes bespoke WordPress projects daily i.e. themes and plug-ins but has only just started releasing plugins to the WordPress repository. The plug-ins are features he’s found to be useful in projects. His first plugin released is called WP Section Index plug-in which creates an automated table of contents for the current page or blog post the user is viewing.

Below are the personal / advice type interview questions I asked him:

Q: What is your most satisfying and rewarding experience while working as a WordPress developer?

A: The most rewarding part, for me, is the feeling after hours of coding, to see the finished product, polished and working as was intended.

Q: What drives your ideas and what inspires you most? Feel free to even mention your most productive working environment e.g. like working on the beach, or coffee shop, or locked up in a black box with headphones on

A: Inspiration, for me, comes in a range of different forms. Getting tasks done drives my output greatly, as well as a pleasant working environment and an exciting project.

Best working environment: a misty Sunday morning at around 7am. Yep, Sunday. Morning. Early.

Q: How much sleep do you honestly get?

A: I get a full night’s sleep. Definitely does wonders for the concentration span.

Q: What advice would you give (if any) to someone looking to enter the world of WordPress development?

A: Code often. The more you code, the more you will learn. You’ll discover new methods, conceive new ideas and learn.

In addition to practice, when coding for a platform such as WordPress, it is important to code in line with the best practices guide set out by the platform developers, as well as use the methodologies provided for plugin and theme developers to work with. The WordPress set of APIs are incredibly useful and make developing for WordPress a dream.

Read and research. The WordPress Codex, as well as many other community-driven websites and blogs, have a wealth of information on the best practices for coding with WordPress. Adopting these and staying up to date with the latest core developments will ensure that your plugin is stable with the latest version of WordPress, which in turn keeps your users happy.

Approach the project from an ideals point of view. Ascertain what exactly it is you aim to achieve with your project and then, without any boundaries (other than the scope you’ve just set out for your project) make the project happen, rather than letting the platform dictate what it is that you can and cannot do. If you find the appropriate approach to your WordPress project, virtually anything is possible.

And last, but not least, simplify. Keep it simple. Make sure your functionality is clearly set out and has a clear end point.

Q: If WP could be written in any other language, which would you choose and why?

(WordPress is written in PHP for those who don’t know)

A: I don’t feel that I would change the language, actually. PHP’s open environment, as well as it’s accessibility and relatively steady learning curve (compared to other languages) make it an un-intimidating language with which to learn programming skills. When the number of PHP developers increases globally, so does the global code base and knowledge of the language, which, in turn, can only aid the WordPress system and its development.

Next week Wednesday, we’ll catch up with a WordPress developer originally from Durban and based in Cape Town…be sure to check back.

If you are a WordPress developer who would like to be featured in this series, please contact @anastacia on Twitter or simply post a comment below.

Related posts:

1. Ryan Peel – WordPress Developer
2. Christopher Mills – WordPress Developer
3. SMS Alert WordPress Plugin idea

I you were like me, a kid born in the 80s, most of the Lyrics in the song ‘I Miss’ by Jack Parow will ring true.

Continue reading for the Jack Parow – I miss lyrics…

i miss two tone clothes from Andre Carl
i miss fokken early monday morning skoolsaal
i miss the parties when my parents where gone
i miss the days when the booze was still strong

i miss those hip high fullsuite bikinis
i miss mickey mouse shirts and polkadot minis
i miss the original indiana jones merch
i miss the duck from fokken telefun quiz
i miss early morning kaalvoet rugby
i miss kfc when it was still called kentucky
i miss days when i thought movies were real
i miss my ouma sitting reading danielle steel
i miss the first childs play and jurassic park
i miss jake the snake, gold dust and owen heart
i miss it and freddy and jason volies
i miss sneaking down the to tv and watching late night movies

bad old pussycat
whole day long
by the power of greyskull
ghostbusters

i miss the students seats at newlands rugby park
i miss sleeping with the lights on because im scared at the dark
i miss leon schuster when he was still taking the piss
i miss screaming province with my hand in a fist
I miss doing cut and paste projects for school
I miss pollyotters and having braais by the pool
I miss Dinoryders, Bravestar and Bionic Six
I miss Cheers, Arende, Who’s the Boss and Wings
I miss puzzles with mom and playing with play dough
tell me “where in the world is carmen sandiego”
I miss giving girls lifts home on my poegie
I miss the days in Marc’s car of just smoking and cruising
I miss the A Team and Murder She Wrote
I miss the days when I was still kak scared to smoke
I miss the days when special effects were hand made
when Francios Pienaar still played rugby and didn’t eat Lays

there’s so much I miss from the old days
there’s so much that I learnt from the old ways
Another kid fokken raised by the 80′s
Kytie Kytie, jy was nie net n mytie
I was raise by girls in outfits and kop doeke
kaal bolyf, kla oortyd en kaal fokken voete
Dallas, Dynasty en Agter elke man
Kringe innie bos en Ballade vir n enkeling
Voortrekker camps and CSV kampe
Mufasa, Aladin, Bambi and Thumper
Klei lat, Swart Kat and self-built tree houses
no shoes, no worries, play holes in my trousers
there’s a lot of good things that happened back then
but I cant keep going on about way back when
so that’s enough of that, no way no how..
Cause I’ll miss all the shit that im doing right now

Related posts:

1. What’s your 1 prediction for 2010?
2. We’re going down to CLUG park…

Vital new blood has entered the Cape economy with the graduation of 15 extraordinary new ventures from the intensive enterprise development programme of Cape IT initiative (CITi) subsidiary Bandwidth Barn.

Programme organiser PeerPower says while entrepreneurs are not in short supply in South Africa, business skills are at a dire shortage. Mignon Keyser, director and course facilitator, says VeloCITI bridges the gap by targeting start-ups that have been trading for a short while.

“We offer a comprehensive business development programme that gives entrepreneurs the business skills to cope with the challenges and opportunities they’ll encounter.” Keyser says recruitment has already begun for the 2010/11 programme, which will be known as VeloCITIafter running as Accel for the past 10 months.

The difference

Six entrepreneurs that have been under PeerPower’s tutelage have gone on to win sought-after awards, such as the Cape Times/KPMG Editor’s Award, VeloCITI Award and SAB Kickstart Award, says Keyser.

The VeloCITI programme leverages this expertise to offer a strong strategic approach, says Keyser. “Entrepreneurs get valuable input from industry experts that they can apply in real-life scenarios in workshops, using examples from their own business.”

The course also offers a peer forum in which participants hold each other accountable for implementing lessons correctly. “It’s an action learning model,” Keyser explains. “It goes far beyond training, giving participants a space to reflect on what their knowledge means in practice.”

Star pupils

In the past year, the following five entrepreneurs stood out, but all 15 participants that made it through the programme have made tremendous progress, says Keyser.

Infointeg, co-founded in 2009 by serial entrepreneur Shana Kay, is an online information verification provider. “The course allowed us to share our business challenges and get feedback,” says Kay. “These kinds of programmes are essential; only other entrepreneurs can truly understand how to grow a business from an idea.”

www.capetownkids.co.za offers an online directory and printed map of family-friendly places to eat, play, shop and stay, in and around Cape Town. Founder Eli Alperstein says the course caused her to grow up as a businesswoman. “My accountability to my business in everything I do was brought home to me.”

Xedge Technologies builds Web-delivered software. Alessio Harri, chief executive officer, says the programme taught him to think like a business owner, rather than a programmer. “I discovered my unique selling points and learned, among other things, that my business model had to change from service-based to product-based, to allow it to scale.”

The Windowsis an outsourced IT department for small and medium-sized businesses. Mark Johns, director, says the difference of the programme was evident in many ways touching on the financial, marketing and business process aspects of running a business. “PeerPower gave us the tools that directly contributed to us turning a loss by mid-2009 into a profit by financial year-end.”

Stickmen is a website developer whose websites leverage powerful content management systems with advanced CMS, CRM, e-marketing and reporting functionality. Jeannine Buest, account director, says the programme helped her gain clarity about her business. “They pushed us to make hard decisions and gave us the tools to handle marketing, sales and finance.

Success breeds success

Keyser says a good intake of new programme candidates is vital not just to the programme’s future success, but also that of the entire ICT industry and economy of the Cape. “The more successful the programme is, the more support it will attract and boost emerging business in the Cape and the region’s economy. Start-ups are a very important source of employment.

“We invite the good and the great ideas out there that have made it into full-time ventures. The difference VeloCITI can make to their businesses is enormous.”

Interested parties can visit http://www.bandwidthbarn.org/ to apply.

Related posts:

1. Bandwidth Barn
2. VeloCITI business, team, personal profiling
3. VeloCITI Bridging Course explained

Update: You can now download this WordPress SMS plugin.

If you thinking free SMS stop right there. Here’s an idea to send SMS alerts via WordPress to users who have subscribed using their mobile phone numbers on your WordPress blog.

Has this SMS Text Message WordPress plugin been done before you might be thinking. Well yes and no. Michael Torbert has created a plugin for WordPress called SMS Text Message that…

Allows a reader to submit their phone number through a sidebar widget. The blog owner then can periodically send alerts, updates, etc via SMS to everyone at once.

Here are some of the features.

• includes built-in widget
• easy, simple administrative management interface
• support for all the major wireless carriers

Unfortunately the SMS WordPress plugin that already exists does not support all major wireless carriers and only supports US carriers. The majority of wordpress users who might even need this service will most likely be outside the iPhone toting US of A. They’ll probably be in the devleoping wwworld where Nokia/Symbian rules.

How would one go about improving the WordPress SMS plugin to support the majority of mobile networks throughout the world? You could use a SMS gateway API that covers over 220 countries
and nearly 900 different mobile networks.

Built-in SMS Subscribe/Unsubscribe Widget or Code Snippet.
This is a feature that must be included with the new and improved WordPress SMS Alert plugin. Iy will allow users to easily subscribe to SMS alerts from your blog’s sidebar or any post or page on your wordpress blog with a simple code snippet like .

SMS Administrative Management Interface
So when a blog owner is logged into their wordpress blog they can easily do the following:

• Enter API credentials that enable the blog owner to send SMS messages to the people who have subscribed via the SMS alert widget. The subscribers will receive the SMS for free or at normal carrier rates but the blog owner will pay for the sending of the SMS.
• Quickly send an SMS alert to all subscribers from the WordPress administration area when logged in or if you update your blog infrequently, send an alert every time you wirte a new article on your blog (this could become expensive to the blog owner or irritating end user. This all depends on the blog so allowing both options would be ideal. there should definitely be an option to toggle the post to SMS feature on or off. Default should be off.
• View the subscriber count in order to budget your SMS Alert sending costs

An example of how Your Web AddiCT would use this WordPress plugin is to allow you to subscribe to competition alerts for when there will be another mobile phone give away. Would you find this WordPress SMS plugin useful or does a SMS plugin like this already exist? Let me know in the comments.

Update: You can now download this WordPress SMS plugin.

Related posts:

1. Bulk SMS WordPress plugin
2. Community Cloud WordPress Plugin Released
3. HowTo: Sociable social bookmark WordPress plugin with Muti.co.za Button

Google this year will bring four speakers and trainers to the influential pan-African journalism gathering, Highway Africa, held in Grahamstown at the start of July (http://www.highwayafrica.com/).

Andrew Bangs, Community Marketing representative at YouTube will speak about the rise of citizen journalism across the globe, and the significance of the internet in enabling free expression and ground-breaking reporting.

Participants will be able to attend training workshops on Google Search and other useful applications to aid their information-gathering, including Google Scholar, Translate, Books, News, Trends and more.  The workshops are being run in collaboration with Izak Minnaar of the SABC, who has offered computer-aided journalism courses at previous conferences.  Participants will also have the opportunity to get hands-on experience using Google’s numerous geographic products, particularly Google Maps, which has now been launched across 32 Sub-Saharan African countries.

Google representatives will include Ravi S. Yadavilli, head of Geo Content operations at Google and a key player in Google’s efforts to map Africa; Jacqueline Rajuai, a GIS Specialist from the Google Kenya office, who focuses on enriching Google Maps content across the continent; and Julie Taylor, Communications and Public Affairs Manager for Google South Africa.

Google’s innovative search technologies connect millions of people around the world with information every day.  In Africa, the company is focusing on making the internet more relevant and useful to Africans by creating more African content online; raising awareness among consumers and businesses about the opportunities offered by the internet; and developing products that are meaningful to Africans.  Recent efforts in the past year to strengthen web developer communities include training for hundreds of developers and entrepreneurs at Google events in Ghana, Senegal, Nigeria and Mauritius.

In South Africa, Google recently announced the launches of Street View in Google Maps, and a local YouTube domain (http://www.youtube.co.za/).

To keep abreast of Google in Africa, follow our Africa Blog, http://google-africa.blogspot.com/

Related posts:

1. Google Android Phones available in South Africa
2. Google Maps South Africa launches today
3. Google Maps Navigation South Africa

Unless you’ve already got tickets to see the 2010 FIFA World Cup knock out stages the only option would be to be like the rest of us and watch it live on television, at a fan park, or streaming live on your computer.

There is now another way to catch all the World Cup action live and in 3D at your nearest Ster Kinekor cinema.

Upcoming 2010 World Cup matches in 3D: Netherlands vs. Slovakia - 28 Jun 4:00pm (South Africa Time) Brazil vs. Chile - 28 Jun 8:30pm (South Africa Time) Paraguay vs. Japan - 29 Jun 4:00pm (South Africa Time) Spain vs. Portugal - 29 Jun 8:30pm (South Africa Time)

For more information to book tickets and watch the 2010 World Cup in 3D read this. I wonder if you can bring your Vuvuzela along. Have you watched a World Cup match in 3D yet? Would love to know your experience.

Related posts:

1. 2010 World Cup Live Streaming
2. How the 2010 World Cup Draw works
3. How we ‘Watch’ the FIFA World Cup 2006

Tech4Africa

TECH4AFRICA is the first Web, mobile and emerging technology conference of it’s kind in Africa, bringing global perspective to the African context. It’s taking place in Johannesburg at The Forum on August 12-13, 2010, and as such the conference promises to be a pioneering and intimate affair, congregating digital elite for the first time in Africa.

We’re featuring Clay Shirky, Matthew Mullenweg (WordPress), Andy Budd (Clearleft), Alex Hunter (ex-Virgin), Joe Stump (SimpleGeo), Jonathan Snook (Yahoo!) and Dustin Diaz (Twitter), among many other great local speakers (profiles below). Clay Shirky is one of the worlds leading voices on all things Internet, and will be delivering the Keynote speech.
More at: http://tech4africa.com/speakers/

We’re also happy to announce that Seedcamp, Europe’s programme to jumpstart the entrepreneurial community, will be at Tech4Africa looking to invest in the most promising start-ups.
More at: http://www.tech4africa.com/seedcamp/

Conference registrations are now open at: http://tech4africa.com/register/
(hurry up! discounted tickets for early birds)
Find out more below, or at http://tech4africa.com/

We’d love to follow you on Twitter too! We’re @tech4africa

Bonus: Attend 27Dinner in Jozi on the 28th? and receive a R500 discount to attend tech4africa.

Lance Davids was discovered by former Bafana Bafana coach Stuart Baxter in 2004 at the age of just 18, Lance Davids’ increased maturity in recent years has been rewarded by a return to national-team contention. The well-travelled midfield man left South Africa at an early age to join German side 1860 Munich, where he made his Bundesliga debut in 2003. He later made the switch from Germany to Sweden when signing for Djurgardens.

He, however, faces very tough competition in midfield and will have to prove his worth before he can topple the formidable midfield combination of McBeth Sibaya and Kagiso Dikgacoi. His return to the South African football in early 2009 was motivated by a desire to safeguard his spot in the Bafana Bafana squad and to prove his worth ahead of the following year’s FIFA World Cup. A short spell at Supersport United he moved to Cape Town-based outfit, Ajax Cape Town, but he enjoyed a mixed spell of form this season.

For full player Profile of Lance Davids visit FIFA.com. His Who’s Who profile is out of date already but that’s because he’s just signed a 3 year deal with Lierse SK.

Davids has been back in South Africa for the past 18 months first doing duty for SuperSport United before returning to his home town.

“I signed a three year deal with Lierse on Saturday. This is all happening because I have had a good season with Ajax. They came here to close the deal. What has impressed me about the club is that the new Egyptian owners have shown tremendous ambition,” says Davids who has previously played in Germany and Sweden.

The Belgium club was promoted into the top league at the end of last season and has recently been bought by Egyptian businessman Maged Samy who also owns Wadi Degla Sporting Club back in his homeland.

If you followed Lance Davids on twitter you would have known that already So why on earth would a Web AddiCT write a post about Lance Davids? He’s my family and part of the Bafana Bafana squad at this years World Cup. We might not see him play this year but he is a star to watch in the next few years. Back in 1999 I learnt a few life lessons that I’ve applied to life online but that will require a follow up post. Get your vuvuzela read to support Bafana Bafana in the match that will start in the next few hours.

Related posts:

1. Cape Town Geek Dinner v2.0: Summer in Cape Town

My name is Ashraf Stakala and I’m a part-time football blogger from Cape Town South Africa. I have been asked by Web Addict(s); to write about how I was able to get my hands on a Media Pass for the 2010 world Cup and in effect a ticket to every game in Cape Town.

I started a football blog back in 2008 called safootballfans.co.za which focused largely on the South African Premier Soccer League and the English Premier League. Like many aspiring bloggers, I started out with the idea that blogging would be a lucrative form of income for me. I could not have been any more wrong. I think I made about $5 with Google adsense in a good month!

It became clear to me that blogging would only work if you had a passion for what you were blogging about and luckily for me football was something that I was very passionate about. I continued to blog at SA Football Fans for just over a year and a half before I finally decided to close the blog due to pressure from my day job as an Engineer. The passion was still there though and a few weeks later I decided to start a new blog using Gooogle’s Blogger platform, which I would use as a portfolio of sorts. (Link: http://safootballfans.blogspot.com/)

One of my blog posts became quite popular and was picked up by the biggest football website in Africa, and was later also picked up by one of the biggest football websites in the world, Goal.com.

I never got paid for the article but the Goal.com editor kept in contact with me, and a couple of months ago he asked me if I would be interested in working for them as a South African field reporter at Cape Town Stadium during the 2010 World Cup. Needless to say my response was something along the lines of “HELL YEAH”.

It has been an amazing experience thus far and quite surprising to see how much behind the scenes work goes into every World Cup match to ensure that things go off without a hitch.

I have been stationed inside the Stadium Media Centre, along with the other journalists and photographers. The facilities are world class. HD Sony Viao laptops in the Internet corners, Full HD 40” Sony Bravia TV’s at every table, and lightning fast internet provided by Telkom (believe it or not). Here is a speedtest I did at the Stadium Media Centre.

Internet Speed test at Green point Stadium

My day starts with me making my way over to Cape Town Stadium from my home in Mitchell’s Plain and collecting my match ticket, parking pass and a pass to either the press conference or the mixed zone (an area where all the players pass through before leaving the stadium). I then head off to the Waterfront where I interview fans of both sides, asking them for their predictions, while also taking some pictures of the fans who put some effort into dressing up for the occasion. I will then head back to the SMC and write an article about the fans predictions and mail it to the Editor.

My only task for the rest of the day is to try and get some exclusive quotes from the players, coaches or a well known media figure like Bruce Grobelaar for example. I also have to update(via twitter) the editors with information that the camera might miss, like a substitute being told to get ready by the coach or a player struggling with an injury.

So in a (very large) nutshell, that’s how a part time blogger from Cape Town managed to get front row seats to the 2010 World Cup.

Related posts:

1. Blog your way to the 2010 FIFA World Cup™
2. Google Doodle World Cup 2010
3. More ways to follow the World Cup online