Brazillian Victory Lap Brazillian Victory Lap Brazillian Victory Lap Brazillian Victory Lap Brazillian Victory Lap Brazillian Victory Lap Brazillian Victory Lap Closing Ceremony Rudolph Muller from MyBroadBand.co.za 

Archive for July, 2006

31
Jul

DCI Opens for Registration

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DCI 2006

The Digital Citizen Indaba (DCI) on Blogging is a 2 day conference that I am co-ordinating in association with Osisa and Niza which will take place in September, 14-15th straight after Highway Africa in Grahamstown. Vincent and I got the site live on Friday and officially launched it today. We are hoping to limit the numbers to around 90 African bloggers, citizen journalists, media practitioners and representatives from civil society, and it will be very much focused around developing skills through practical workshops and discussions with experts from around the globe, including a key note from Ethan Zuckerman. As far as we know it will be the first of its kind on the African continent and I am very excited about playing an active, albeit stressful, role in it.

If you would like to apply for a scholarship or register for the Indaba, do it now! You won’t regret it…

27
Jul

$100 Laptop Design

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Wired Magazine have posted a very interesting interview with Yves Béhar, the Swiss-born designer who has been given the arduous task of designing the $100 laptops for the One Laptop Per Child Foundation (OLPC), which are due to be rolled out at the end of this year/early next year.

In it he discusses the difficulties of designing a laptop that is robust, practical and aesthetically pleasing to children and responds to some of the criticisms that the project has faced.

26
Jul

I’m Crazy for ShoZu

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This is a post bound to interest other bloggers. So my beloved Nokia N70 was recently lost/stolen/who cares etc. and I was faced with a very tough decision – one of those decisions you prefer having to make only once a year. What new phone to get.

The N70 was on contract and cost a ridiculous amount to buy new so I was forced to look at alternatives. Although it’s not a 3G Smartphone, I ended up going for the Sony Ericsson W810i. Many years ago I swore I would never deviate from Nokia after some bad experiences with the other manufacturers, but after conducting some intensive online research, the jury’s verdict was out on the W810i and it said go go go!

I managed to get the W810i on a really good package and it was delivered to my door a few days later. So far my impression is that it’s the best phone I’ve ever had. It really does have it all – sexy design that will appeal to a large target audience, breathtaking camera (see pic quality here), mp3 walkman with expandable memory slots, nice size and weight (99g with battery), great user interface and excellent reception and battery life.

Anyway, this was not supposed to be all about the phone necessarily, but also a free java application that it came with called Shozu, which you should be able to download for your own phone here. Shozu is a free service which synchronizes with your Flickr, YouTube, Buzznet, Webshots accounts and allows you to post pictures and video straight from your mobile phone using GPRS, which is great for older phones that don’t support email as it also allows you to email from within the application. What’s really nice about Shozu, however, is that it allows you to specify what content you want to upload from your phone, title it, describe it and tag it seamlessly. You can even rotate pictures before you upload them.

Right now I am using it on my phone to send pictures to Flickr and video clips to YouTube. I can also see this becoming very useful for journalists, who can literally produce and upload multimedia straight from the field with their mobile phones. Perfect for all this conflict going around or mayhem on Friday nights…

24
Jul

Brilliant New Freeware Apps

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While finding things to do short of cleaning the toilet this past weekend in order to avoid the 8 000 word paper I still need to finish, I had the chance of installing and trying out some free applications for Windows (yes I know we’re a dying breed).

Visual Task Tips is a lightweight shell enhancement which adds thumbnail previews of the software apps you currently have minimized in your Taskbar. If you’re like me and have 50 million programs minimized at any one time then this is sure to became a useful enhancement as it allows you to preview a thumbnail of the programme (be it a browser window or word document) merely by hovering over it. This is a feature that will probably be included in the upcoming Windows Vista, but who knows when that will be right?

RunIt! is another cool app taken from the Windows Vista school of thought, and allows you to assign keywords to your software programmes so in future you can run them by entering this name instead of searching for the desktop shortcut or trying to find it buried somewhere in the Programs menu.

Possibly my favourite, Paessler Site Inspector is the app I’ve been wanting for a very long time. Whether you’re a web-developer or anybody that uses the Internet a lot, this useful piece of software combines a whole bunch of frequently used tools which will definitely make your life easier. For example it allows you to test what a webpage looks like in IE and Mozilla straight within its interface and provides other page analysis features which single out the entire page’s forms, images, links, scripts, stylesheets, metatags, header information etc. It also integrates Web services allowing you to perform a Whois (a query to find out the owner of the domain of the site you are currently browsing) and DNS (IP address of the server) along with a host of other customizable services like MarkUp validation and site optimization.

As if that’s not enough, it even installs a toolbar in both IE and Mozilla which allows you to access some of these features straight from the Web browser and adds extra features like page resizing (to see what the webpage looks like in different resolutions), zooming, highlighting of tables and DIVs, and a grid with dragable rulers. It really is that amazing and did I mention it’s *free* so check it out!

Another brilliant programme that I’ve been using for a while and thought I should share with everyone is EverNote, which describes itself as “note management” software. I’ve found it to be the best thing for keeping track of all kinds of notes, to do lists, reminders, messages etc. Not only is it lightweight and looks very pretty, but it also allows you to import whole websites into its interface which it then archives, making it searchable by keyword and date — perfect for research and saving important content. It also supports handwritten notes which I haven’t tried yet but sounds pretty cool.

I hope you find one or more of these programmes as useful as I have!

19
Jul

India Bans Blogs in Response to Mumbai Bombings

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So what do you do if you’re the government of the world’s largest democracy and unknown terrorists have killed over 200 people in a spree of train bombings that occurred more than a week ago and you still don’t have any real leads? Ban the Blogosphere of course!!!

This was the Indian government’s knee-jerk response to the situation which has left more than just the families of the deceased up in arms. Angry bloggers and netizens are demanding an explanation to this rather bizarre response to a terrorist attack. Ok, so you, I and the authorities probably don’t need Kevin Mitnick to tell us that the suspected terrorists used the *Internet* and possibly even *Blogs* to plan and co-ordinate their attacks. So what? This comes as no surprise in the Internet Age where many channels of communication merge into one and are distributed via the Net and this doesn’t mean you get to poke it with a stick and vilify the blogging community every time it’s responsible for something you don’t like. Amongst the list of blogging sites that were banned include geocities.com, typepad.com and Blogspot, which collectively account for millions of legitimate blogs and millions more disappointed readers that were blocked in the process.

If the Indian government plans on using China, Iran and Saudi Arabia in setting a precedent for how democracy and online liberties really ought to exist, we might see a new meaning of those terms make way for a social firewall which only switches off when the World Bank or IMF says so…

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who is youngBLOOD?

I am currently Head of Digital for the South African division of the Trader Media Group where, amongst other things, I manage a digital department and am responsible for the commercial success of several digital products and services » more

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