Actor and comedian Robin Williams has an impressive beard. He also has a daughter named after a video game character. Robin and his daughter, Zelda, were employed by Nintendo to promote the latest installment in its Zelda series. You’ll find the resulting video attached to this post.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D is essentially a remake of a game released in the 90s. It’s also the debut of Zelda on Nintendo’s new 3DS portable gaming platform.

No reviews here, just the quirky video featuring Robin and his daughter, which was released exclusively to selected blogs around the world, including this one.

Besides, you don’t need me to expound on the awesomeness of Zelda (both the person and the games).

On (tech)5 this week we pretended to air an interview with Phillip de Wet from The Daily Maverick and iMaverick – alas, some technical shit got in the way and the interview was cut short on air. As promised, however, here it is on the web for your listening pleasure. So push play below and find out more about South Africa’s first, ever, serious daily iPad newspaper…

The FIFA World Cup 2010 in South Africa has been featured solidly on Twitter since kickoff on Friday 11 June with trending topics related to the tournament featuring daily. Twitter has a dedicated site for the event and has added icons that appear on the Twitter website in tweets with specific hashtags relating to the event.

These hashtags include #worldcup that generates a little soccer-ball icon and flags for each of the 32 countries at the cup, such as #rsa for South Africa and #bra for Brazil.

Below is a table with all of the country codes for the event that Twitter will pick up and convert into icons.

Prize categories range from software, hardware and science to innovations in support of community, the environment and gaming. There are only three weeks left, so submit your entry today if you haven’t already.

From now until 15 August 2009 we’ll accept text, photos, and videos documenting projects from young people around the world who want to contribute to the growing free and open technology community.

But the Digital Open is more than an online competition. By submitting a project, you’ll become a valuable member of a community of creative young innovators working in the exciting world of free and open technology.

Collaboration is encouraged. In addition to a variety of prizes and achievements you can earn through community participation, the top project in each category will earn a fantastic prize pack and be featured on Boing Boing Video.

The Digital Open will lay the groundwork for a new generation of open innovators, setting ideas free for the benefit of people and the planet. I’m honoured to be a judge in this year’s competition and hope we’ll see some awesome entries coming from South Africa.

The future is yours to make. Get started at http://digitalopen.org

• Bandwidth upgrade to the West African Cable System (WACS).
• Quantifying Africa’s international bandwidth projects.
• The local loop.
• Geographic number portability.
• The Facebook land-grab.
• Stickiness of social networks.
• Microsoft’s online advertising rally in the wake of Bing.
• Sony Ericsson’s comeback.
• Consumer animosity levelled at Core, again.
• Doom Resurrection.
• Smartphone wars.

And more.

Direct file download (32MB)

Anyone with a WordPress blog, for example, will know the ‘Incoming Links’ section on their dashboard that displays information on who is linking to your blog. I checked the dashboard on one of my sites today and noticed a link that was quite obviously spam.

What the spammer does is create a page with a link to your site on it. If you visit that page it displays momentarily before redirecting to the spammer’s target site.

The in-between site displays for just a moment. It’s too quick for me to even get a screen grab of.

I haven’t seen this before, but perhaps I’m alone in that. Has anyone else been a victim of Incoming link spam? I guess the race is now on to develop a WordPress plugin that filters it out. Of course, not many people follow all their incoming links, which shows exactly how desperate spammers are getting. WordPress isn’t the only CMS with the abusable functionality, I’m just using it as an example because all my sites are powered by it.

Some will say that this is a global problem and I would agree to an extent, but my commitments lie in South Africa, hence my focus on the local situation.

A side-effect of being involved in a medium such as live radio, as I am, means that you are constantly aware of criticism. At the talk radio station where I host my shows we have an SMS line that runs 24 hours a day where listeners can send their messages to add to the on-air conversation. This channel is more regularly used to abuse presenters, however.

On the SMS line I have been called everything from useless to racist. Black listeners have called me a ‘euro pest’ and white listeners have called me an ‘armchair liberal’. The abuse is unrelenting and flows throughout the show. On the flip side, other listeners compliment me. Fortunately the good outweighs the bad. But the bad is very, very bad and often includes personal attacks adorned with expletives.

Now I could let the negative criticism I receive get to me. I have on occasion. And it has dragged my whole being down, along with my show. But I prefer to try seeing it as something positive. My view on life is that negativity is self-perpetuating and unproductive. I have never seen a negative person solve any form of problem. So I’ll have no part of it. Instead I look for the positive in any situation. As such, I see criticism as a seed I am being given by someone. I can swallow it and choke on it, or plant it and unlock the energy it contains. Criticism is fuel. The more I receive, the greater my incentive becomes to improve, to prove the criticisers wrong, to show that I am not shaken. I see my ambition as a fire; there is good fuel and bad fuel but they both help the fire to grow.

A colleague of mine in talk radio, Udo Carelse, has a good take on this. He says that he goes into shows with his “core” and a commitment that it won’t be shaken. I like this description and I am continuously amazed at how Udo manages to remain positive and upbeat at 4 in the morning – even when I know he has had the kakkest of days.

But I digress. My point is that South Africans need to learn to both give and take criticism. And to see it for what it is and accept it from whence it came. And don’t refrain from labeling something as banal, mediocre crap if that’s what you think it is. Alternatively, when criticism aimed at you comes from a drunk moron mouthing-off at 3 in the morning, merely toss it on the fire. But don’t engage. As my friend Daniela always says, “When you wrestle with a pig you both get full of mud – but the pig enjoys it.”

Without criticism creatives in South Africa will continue to be just OK with the few odd exceptions, when they could be great if pushed – or stop what they’re doing if they really are hopeless at it, which would be a desirable outcome too.

Some of our music groups are poop, our official political opposition party is a joke while our governing party is beyond adjective description in its inabilities, and our blogosphere is full of link-loving morons who love marking their own homework. Are you going to sit back and say, “well, at least they’re doing it” or are you going to mouth off? If you aren’t going to target your criticism at individuals, then you can’t whine about the collective.

But make it constructive and try to execute your criticism in a way that encourages the target to grow and improve. Unless that target really needs to be stopped in its tracks.

And give credit where it’s due. We have some good politicians in South Africa. Not many, but some. There are some excellent bloggers in South Africa and musicians that are world-class, to say the least. South Africa has given the world its most expensive female artist and the greatest revolutionary leader of modern times. We are not short on talent, but it needs encouragement. And sometimes it needs to be guided in the right direction with some positive crit.

Post your criticism below

The following video from the WordPress development blog outlines the new features including easy content sharing, gallery ordering and support for Gears. I’ll be upgrading all of my sites today.