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I awoke a few days ago to a countdown timer on Godaddy.com. I’ve made a conscious choice recently to purchase whatever domains I feel are or might be worth something, anything, to anyone.

So with intrigue I registered two domains that I have now been told I did not manage to register.

I first went straight to southafrica.me and bought it, money off my credit card.
Then I went and tried to buy talk2.me and again, money off my credit card. Gone.

About twenty minutes later and I received confirmation of the registration of both the .me domains successfully went through. Unfortunately that was not to be as I received this:

Dear Nic Haralambous,

The following domain name has failed to be registered:

SOUTHAFRICA.ME

Error: SOUTHAFRICA.ME: cannot register - already registered

We will evaluate this error and retry the registration
if appropriate.

If we are unable to successfully register the domain
name, your account will be credited accordingly. Please
allow one business day for the refund to be processed.

Please contact GoDaddy.com, Inc. if you need any further
assistance:
http://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/support.asp?prog_id=GoDaddy&isc=gdbb14

Sincerely,
GoDaddy.com, Inc.

And that was that. Done and dusted. No domain, no millions of dollars from the fantastic SEO tips that obviously have cause they are hot property right now. Now talk2.me, no southafrica.me no nothing, at all, nada, zip.

But I think I’ll make it out alive, I still have a trump card or two that could come in to play. But who doesn’t these days?

I did manage to purchase haralambous.me which I have redirected to this domain. My question, in the end, is whether or not it’s actually worth owning a .me domain?

Just a short post to alert whoever it is that cares that I haven’t been blogging very much because I have been KO with Bronchitis. I’ve been off work for 4 working days tomorrow but am off to the doctor yet again because I am not better.

I am fast losing faith in the medical profession.

Lately I’ve been thinking alot about monetizing blogs.

There are obvious solutions to try and generate revenue from a blog such as Traffic Synergy and Google Ads.

But I honestly think that there is more valuable to be had than simple clickthrough earnings.

There are a few things that are important to consider

Are you even trying to generate revenue from your blog?
Some people just love writing whether it is coherent or not, they just like to write and have no intention of earning any money from there blogs. If this is you then you don’t really have to worry about implementation of various methods to earn money. Throw on some Google ads in strategic position and hope for the best.

Do you have a well established brand?
If you do then this is your biggest value proposition. Using SA Rocks as an example. It is a valuable brand that can aid a products public image merely by association. In this case it’s important to find sponsorships and build relationships with the advertisers on your site. They will gain value from brand association. Think outside of the box here, what you offer isn’t merely clicks or immediate feedback, it’s having their brand present on your site. This is value that deserves recognition and pay.

Your business only operates online
You probably need to monetize your blog quickly. But if you aren’t desperate and have other projects in the online sphere your blog might prove to be a valuable place to talk about your projects and rally support for them. This can indirectly translate in to profit or revenue. This can actually be interpreted as revenue generated from your blog.

Your business is online and in the “real world”
This is possibly where your blog-brand can extend your profits the most in my mind. It’s here where I think bloggers need to start extending themselves and pushing their brands in to real results. A great example of someone who puts himself out there and has seen the results is Mail & Guardian Blogger Michael Trapido. Traps is a fantastic mind with lots to say and a firm and educated opinion on a variety of topics. He blogs on Thought Leader and Sports Leader and has turned online blogging in to an offline growth of his core business. Fantastic news and the way that online personalities and specialists need to start migrating.

Another great example is the Girl With A One Track Mind blog. This used to be an anonymous blog that generated huge visits and pageviews. Then the author was outed by a journalist and Zoe Margolis was born. This has possibly been one of the best things that happened to her blog (see this interview by Paul Carr). She could become the face of her brand and take her thoughts in to the real world. This allowed her to generate more and different kinds of revenue from her blog.

You blog to build a reputation
This can be one of the most valuable blogging currencies. If you are careful and smart about your blog you can gain a very strong following and a very good reputation in a relatively short period of time. This can be converted in to many different revenue streams.

How do you or have you earned money from blogging? Let me know.

I’m noticing a strange trend. It’s in my writing and it’s becoming more noticeable in the writing of many, many bloggers that I read. What am I talking about? Incoherent blog posts.

These have become the bane of my reading online. I am seeing it everywhere. People are posting short thoughts of larger principles, concepts and ideas that could be fantastic blog posts but turn out to be incoherent cyber-babble.

Let me elaborate before I appear to be a stark raving lunatic.

For me a post is simple (not always executed in such a manner but I always try) and consists of basic things to make it a readable blog post.

Cement an idea or concept in your mind and think it through. Pitch it to your reader in the first paragraph and then present more analytical opinion, fact or information that can substantiate your initial premise.

This could all happen in the space of 3 paragraphs, three sentences or three thousand words, but for crying in a bucket be sure to have an opinion, be conclusive, state things, back them up, do a tiny bit of a research and just pop in a link. You don’t have to rehash things that other people might already have explained, it’s the nature of the internet, hyperlink it.

On top of that, we are in South Africa in case you hadn’t notice, there are a fair amount of blogs that are probably going to be writing or have written about (in some manner or another) what you have written about so see what they had to say and reference them, pull their posts to shreds or applaud their logic, whatever you like, but use their writings to draw them in to your writing. This will entice debate and create a buzz around your writing or blog.

Tyler Reed did it a while back when he broke a story about Amatomu launching. It got him attention and launched him on to the local scene. If you hadn’t had screenshots, and opinion, a review of some sorts people would’ve picked up the story, done their own research and bettered the post. It can be done and has been done.

A couple of examples that I’ve found in the last few days:

Today Paul Slade blogged about social media experts carving their way in to the market and in fact, carving the market. I loved the idea of the post, it had so much potential but flaked out in to a very bland post.

Paul pitched a Pros and Cons kind of post but really wasn’t very decisive in the pros or cons. I would’ve loved to see a list, everyone loves lists. The cons were brief and could well have been expanded on to make for a really gripping post that would’ve done well everywhere. Same goes for the pros. My immediate suggestion would have been to get Mike to list his own pros and cons on the subject and then for Paul to develop what he thinks the pros and cons are or could be. Look I’m being picky on this article because I really think it was a good article but could’ve been great with a bit more care and research. I am sure there are lots of resources that Paul could have made use of and linked to.

The next example really set me on this blog post: “How Muti has successfully built a self-sustainable community“.

This blog post had all the potential to be a sterling analysis of what Muti is, was and might become. It could have been an in-depth look at the community of Muti and how it is self-sustaining. Instead I read two examples supplied in the post one of down voting on Muti and the other was the Afrigator/Regator debacle. Neither told me anything about the Muti community or it’s self-sustaining nature directly. By inference, maybe, but no statements.

The first summed up:

Whether Down-Voting should be brought back or not , but surely there seems to coexist amongst the users , a sense that the overall outcome should act in the best possible interests of the community.

The second in a nutshell:

Along came Regator — which in my opinion looks pretty much similar (but not so supreme) to Afrigator. The community was outraged to an extent that seven posts were seating at the top of muti expressing their disgust towards Regator … But as to whom emerged triumphant? Im not entirely sure.

The only mention of the Afrigator/Regator issue in relation to Muti is above. “Seven posts were seating at the top of muti,” and from that I must deduce how Muti has managed to establish a self-sustaining community?

All that I am saying is that when you write a fantastic headline like How Muti has successfully built a self-sustainable community and have a great idea, have the insight to follow it through. Yasser had the right idea, the right concept but lacked follow through. That’s all.

At the end of the day what you want to avoid is people reading your article and leaving your site while mumbling: “Hmmm that could’ve been a great read”.

Thanks to twitter I have managed to amass a large scope of online payment options.

Here’s the list:

• Virtual Card Services
• 2CheckOut
• MyGate
• Setcom
• PayGate
• Bango

I can’t write a more detailed description of these offerings as I haven’t delved in to them yet. As soon as I have made a choice and the system has been put in place I’ll blog about my choice.

Thanks to Jason, Simone, Luke, Charl, Andrew and Workhomeparents for tweeting suggestions.

Doritos has been everywhere lately, all over the radio, a few other ads here and there. Basically they have been punting their Facebook page.

I eventually saw that one of my friends on FB had joined the group as well as ±1500 people.

My immediate reaction is that this is a flop of a campaign. Advertising on radio is no cheap affair but an affair it is. You face the risk of being caught out by your better half - the listeners or target market. And to me it seems as though this has happened to Doritos.

Why I think this is campaign was a flop?

Coming off the back of a great advertising campaign with their “Moment of boldness” A few years ago I can’t believe that Doritos could have done so badly with this one. That campaign was a viral campaign before there were viral campaigns. To this day I know many people who still joke about their moments of boldness.

At the time of writing this post there were 777 122 people from South Africa above the age of 18 on Facebook. That works out to about 0.2% of the users on FB, from SA actually bothered to become a fan of the brand. In my mind, that’s a bit of a flop.

Why this could be perceived to be a successful campaign

Theoretically what we could be looking at here is quality over quantity. Involvement and activity over masses of inactive users/fans.

But let’s look at this for a moment before we get ahead of ourselves. The available features on the FB page of Doritos are: Notes, Photos, Video, Wall Comments, Events and Discussion Board.

To analyse these in a bit more detail:

Wall
313 posts

Discussion Board
Topic 1: 120 posts by 95 people
Topic 2: 29 posts by 25 people

Videos
12 fan videos

Photos
44 photos
5 albums

Events
Event 1 - 6 confirmed guests, 4 wall posts
Event 2 - 28 confirmed guests, 6 wall posts

Notes
7 notes
144 comments

Looking at the above breakdowns I honestly cannot say that all the money Doritos must have spent on their mainstream ad campaigns was worth it. 44 photographs and 12 videos is really not a good response in my opinion. Especially considering that there are ±1500 people in the group and over 750 000 people in SA on FB. That means that less than 1% of the fans on the page posted a video and almost 3% of the fans posted a photograph.

I’m not sure about you, but I’ve posted, viewed and commented on hundreds of photos on FB, that should’ve been the saving grace but alas, it wasn’t.

What Doritos could have done differently

Expanded their “moment of boldness” campaign to an online network of viral campaigns. Blogs, videos, podcasts and “fake events” that could have boosted the reputation of the brand for the young and socially in touch.

I can picture the blog and videos now; South Africans all over filming their moment of boldness, recording fake jumps, dares and ironic, satirical parodies of the “bold” factor.

Doritos could have done more with their Facebook group. Updates, invites, ads, coupons, giveaways, freebies. Sometimes it just takes a bit of gritty interaction to spread the word for a fan page, not an entire radio ad campaign. Other than giveaways the Doritos fan page gave nothing to its members. No community offering. I know a lot of people who feel an affinity to Doritos, it’s their choice chip, but they were not enticed to join this group. People like Apple Students has it right on their page. They have a community, not a product.

Below the line marketing would have worked better. Get bloggers involved, send them a box of crisps and ask them to eat them, rally a party around the chips, get other bloggers in on it and spread the word slowly to all their readers via the subsequent posts.

Print would even have worked better than radio. More people will sit near a computer while reading a newspaper/magazine than will be listening to the radio, so why put it on the radio? You are probably driving in your car when you hear about the Doritos fan page, not sitting by a pc with internet access. Bad move.

I did try to contact Doritos, the admin of the group or anyone but no one responded. I gave them a few working days. I’d love to know if they consider this campaign to be successful or if they are looking in to recovering from the flop that I see?

I always thought the views per video that Zoopy showed on each video were a bit low. Now I know that they were.

How I know is quite simple, Zoopy blogged about it:

As of last night, ‘views’ on Zoopy means the number of times the media item’s page has been viewed on Zoopy, plus the number of times the media item has been viewed when embedded on the home page or on other websites. We hope that the new figure will give Zoopy users a better idea of how many times a video has been watched, or how many times a photo has been viewed.

The above basically means that the numbers will become more representative and holistic including embed views as well as pageviews on the media item page on Zoopy and on the homepage of Zoopy. This is definitely a step in the right direction and a move that couldn’t have come at a better time. I was really beginning to think that Zoopy was slowing down. Now we can all see that things are picking up!

This is fantastic. Thanks to Mike for posting this. Since I am part of the fun in Rex’s first “vodcast” I thought it only appropriate to place this brilliant video on my blog.

Now, Mr Jason Elk, when exactly are you going to own up to this bit of brilliance?

I wonder who’s next on Rex’s menu?

UPDATE:

And dip my head for a brief moment to show that I have learned my lesson and wont be jumping on bandwagons any longer (I hope). My closing words: Stii, you got it spot on yet again.

I feel compelled to add my voice (or this blog’s words) the struggle.

Regator.com just opened a beta of their new site. TechCrunch covered it as did ReadWriteWeb and Mashable.

First issue I have with this is that I know that TechCrunch fobbed off the Afrigator guys when they asked for some exposure. Secondly TechCrunch should’ve done their homework and thirdly ReadWriteWeb did cover Afrigator and should be more aware of their content.

Justin and Mike both speak out against this and I think it’s important that we all try and add our voices to this sort of rubbish.

People need to innovate. We all take a little from here, a bit from there but we never duplicate and publicise accordingly. Shocker.

I watched an interesting movie recently that made me think about language, poetry, writing and the modern-day poet.

I love language. It’s part of the reason that I became a journalist initially. Language is the media that portrays a message, evokes an emotion, tells a story and more literally allows us to communicate with one another. However I have forgotten how to enjoy my obsession with language in the last four years or so. I went to varsity and language became a means to an end not the end result.

What I mean by this is simple, poets make language their result. Yes the message exists but it is enhanced through the language they use, the words they choose and the sorts of construction that they decide to make use of.

If you don’t know anything about poetry and wondered what all the high-faluted hype was about do yourself a favour and read up about poetry a bit. Then go and read Frost, Thomas, Cummings, Blake and Eliot for a start. These are the greats of the past and the definitive poets of “our time”. The reason I say “our time” is that these poets are not part of my time, my era or existence.

Here are snippets of some of my favourite poet’s writings:

The Road Not Taken
by Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I–
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

And another:

why must itself up every of a park
by E. E. Cummings

why must itself up every of a park

anus stick some quote statue unquote to

prove that a hero equals any jerk

who was afraid to dare to answer “no”?

Now tell me something. Who are the the poets of my era? Who wrote the great words of my time? Who told the stories that would define the present-day history?

I would like to suggest that musicians today have become the poets of yesteryear.

Here are some examples:

There’s always somebody taller with more of a wit
And he’s equipped to enthrall her and her friends think he’s fit
And you just can’t measure up though, you don’t have a prayer
Wishing that you’d made the most of her when she was there

They’ve got engaged there’s no intention of a wedding
He’s pinched ya bird and he’d probably kick your head in

Bigger boys and stolen sweethearts
Oh, you’re better off without her anyway
You said you wasn’t sad to see her go
Yeah, but I know you were though

Now you don’t know what she’s up to you can only assume
If she’s not in the front of the shops then they’ve gone to his room
Bet she’s gone ’round in her school stuff, bet that’s what he likes
I know you thought she were different and you thought she were nice

But she’s not nice, she’s pretty fucking far from nice
She’s looking at you funny rarely looking at you twice

That is a band I love, the Arctic Monkeys. The writing above, without the music, is poetry to me. It might not be an iambic pentameter. But Poetry, it is.

The next example is from Greenday, one of the definitive bands of my era and I think one of the definitive poetry sources of my time.

I’m the son of rage and love
The Jesus of Suburbia
From the bible of none of the above
On a steady diet of soda pop and Ritalin
No one ever died for my sins in hell
As far as I can tell
At least the ones I got away with

And there’s nothing wrong with me
This is how I’m supposed to be
In a land of make believe
That don’t believe in me

Get my television fix sitting on my crucifix
The living room or my private womb
While the moms and brads are away
To fall in love and fall in debt
To alcohol and cigarettes and Mary Jane
To keep me insane and doing someone else’s cocaine

And there’s nothing wrong with me
This is how I’m supposed to be
In a land of make believe
That don’t believe in me

Above is part 1 of “Jesus of Suburbia”.

Next is one of my favourite songs from the last 5 years, The Foo Fighters and “Best of You”:

I’ve got another confession to make
I’m your fool
Everyone’s got their chains to break
Holdin’ you

Were you born to resist or be abused?
Is someone getting the best, the best, the best, the best of you?
Is someone getting the best, the best, the best, the best of you?
Are you gone and onto someone new?

I needed somewhere to hang my head
Without your noose
You gave me something that I didn’t have
But had no use
I was too weak to give in
Too strong to lose
My heart is under arrest again
But I break loose
My head is giving me life or death
But I can’t choose
I swear I’ll never give in
No, I refuse

Is someone getting the best, the best, the best, the best of you?
Is someone getting the best, the best, the best, the best of you?
Has someone taken your faith?
Its real, the pain you feel
Your trust, you must
Confess

So to answer my own question, where are the poets of today, the modern-day writers that define our present-day history, they are in music, in the popular form of communication today. Poetry is no longer in the mainstream as it was back in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, today it is music and the musicians, songwriters and definitive minds might just exist in our music.

For more poets of today I suggest reading:
Lennon
Dylan
Marley
Stevens
Matthews
Apple
Taylor
King
Nirvana (Kurt Cobain)
Oasis
Tupac Shakur
Chapman

Who would you consider poets of your era? Which poets do you read? What would you classify as poetry?

I just received a very interesting email.

Here it is:

Hi Nic,

Thought this might of interest to you. If you access the Internet via your
mobile, and you are a Vodacom subscriber, I’m sure you’ve run into some
difficulty especially with sites like Twitter.

The Internet Society of South Africa released a statement strongly
condemning Vodacom’s actions. The full statement is below.

Let me know if you need some additional info. ISOC-ZA’s past chairman Alan
Levin is the official spokesperson for ISOC-ZA on this, and his contact
details are below if you want to chat with him.

Hope you have a great weekend!

Cheers,

Sentient Communications CC

ISOC-ZA strongly condemns Vodacom behaviour

On Wednesday, June 25, 2008 Vodacom claimed to revolutionise Internet
on the cellphone. They falsely claimed that millions of Vodacom
customers now (effectively) have the same experience of the Internet
on their cellphones as they do on a PC. In reality Vodacom have broken
the Internet for these millions of customers. This came without any
warning and ISOC-ZA is united against this sort of behaviour.

Various applications that include instant messaging, banking,
specialised mobile applications such as email, Youtube, Twitter, Fring
and at least a dozen others, are no longer working. In technical terms,
Vodacom installed a proxy service that was not sufficiently tested.
As one blogger so correctly pointed out: “Vodacom is essentially using the
public as subjects for an alpha test of their technology” (Flint.za 25 June)

The technology that Vodacom is using is not standards compliant and,
considering Vodacom¹s position as a dominant ISP, it should behave in a more
responsible fashion. Furthermore, some of our members have claimed that
Vodacom block many applications that it feels may threaten its business.
While we have no direct evidence of this, we appeal to Vodacom to disclose
what it blocks and intercepts on its networks.

Happily, some users have worked out how to bypass the new Vodacom changes
and ISOC-ZA urges all mobile Internet users to make use of this should they
too be unhappy with Vodacom¹s actions.

There are a number of bypasses freely available on the Internet, and are
simple to affect.

For example: If you use a Nokia phone then the following should work:
Access:

Tools
Settings
Connection
Access points
Vodacom
Options
Advanced Settings
Remove the Proxy server address

About ISOC
The Internet Society is a global not-for-profit membership organisation
founded in 1991 to provide leadership in the management of Internet
related standards, educational, and policy development issues. It has
chapters in over 90 countries around the world. Through its current
initiatives in support of education and training, Internet standards
and protocol, and public policy, ISOC has played a critical role in
ensuring that the Internet has developed in a stable and open manner.
It is the organizational home of the Internet Engineering Task Force
(IETF), the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), the Internet
Engineering Steering Group (IESG) and other Internet-related bodies.

I’ve removed names until I can do a bit more background research and chat to a few more people. But I just tried to access twitter mobile…it didn’t work. This doesn’t look promising for Vodacom and their mobile internet tactics.

There has been a bit of a buzz surrounding Google Trends and their alleged intention to take on Alexa in the tracking, trends and statistics game.

I’ve chatted to Vincent about this and he seemed underwhelmed by the entire concept.

I have a different perspective. I am quote excited about the comparative search terms and vague unique visitors per month.

From what I can gather, the basic premise is that you can compare what users are searching for and visiting with one website as the focus.

The graph below is a comparison of four news websites in South Africa. News24.com, IOL, Mail & Guardian Online and The Times Online.

click to enlarge

Using the above graph as an example, Mail & Guardian Online is the focus of the graph and data you are able to see the graph, regions, also visited and also searched for. The key to these comparative graphs is the colours. Note the colours carefully and pay attention because they are important.

Mail & Guardian Online is clearly blue and the little button says that the statistics are ranked by/according to Mail & Guardian Online.

I can see that people who visited Mail and Guardian Online also visited The Times, searched for vuyo mokoena and South African newspapers.

I think this is useful information.

What can you do with information like this? It’s habitual I think. You can know what your target audiences habits might be. I say might be because there are never any certainties. But we can know with a greater sense of surety (read confusion) than previously. This means targeting. Targeted advertising, targeted content, themes, links, relevance.

To me, this is potentially more important than knowing what your users are clicking on in your own site. Why? Because things are different and evolving online, especially in the online news media market. Mail & Guardian Online have implemented a system of cross referencing and external linking. These links directly provide our potential opposition websites with links taking users out of the Mail & Guardian Online in to a different news organisations website. Now if we know which opposition our users prefer, how frequently they visit and what search terms took them in to or out of our websites and our oppositions then the chance exists that the word “opposition” is being used unnecessarily.

It could be possible down the line that news is customised by the organisations, users, competitors, advertisers and anyone else in such a way that the flow of information suits each individual in a broader context.

Thanks Stii!! Now I just need to get my head around that XFN stuff and I’m golden.

Have a look at the pictures below. I have seen pictures of the digging, burying, building and more at the Gautrain sites but I have yet to see images of the actual train that people will be using.

Here they are:

What do you think of this advert?

Visit Mail & Guardian Online now to have a look at the advert.

I am in two minds. Initially I hated the concept, but then, it’s not so bad really. It’s effective, interesting and different. Plus it can be closed at any moment if you can find the relevant button.