Posted via email from Simon’s posterous

I’m hoping this will be the first of many more podcasts to be added to our growing content network. We have a strategy for eventually transforming these podcasts into something more and I will reveal details about this at a later stage.

Please check out ZA Car Show. And I’d love to hear what you think of the podcast. It aims to be edgy, call it like it is and offer petrol heads and motoring enthusiasts something outside of bland old motoring media. It is also being served from a local (South African) server that resides in IS’ data centre. IS is our bandwidth sponsor for the ZA Network and has been fantastic in coming to the party, more than covering our needs and helping us get the server up and running. Special thanks goes to Charles Leaver at IS who has been beyond legendary in helping me get our server configured and secured. Without him the move to local bandwidth would simply not have been possible.

And, of course, ZA Tech Show continues as always. Six months in and we now have a new look for the show, thanks to the design rock stars at Infiltrate Media who developed the logos for both ZA Tech and ZA Car.

I’ve had a ball developing the sites for both podcasts, wrangling CSS and knocking our server into shape, while strategising with my business partners in Split Infinitive – the company that has been formed to bring the ZA Network to life. This new organisation encapsulates a vision I had when I first formed Deathcard Media in 2004; and I intend to keep Deathcard Media going as my own, personal creative space where I plan to develop a web comic, god blog and some other ideas I’ve had, including resurrecting Seedcast.

The South African market is entering the next phase in terms of new media in much the same way that the American market matured two to three years ago. This will escalate as bandwidth becomes more abundant and affordable in South Africa. The ZA Network is working to provide quality, gratis content to the local market, allowing content creators to focus on what they do best, while we take care of business on their behalf. I can’t wait to get going on our next project…

Well, go to the ‘Noxious Nigel’ website today and all the previous stories and offers to pay for dirt have been removed, and replaced with a post that claims the whole thing was a social engineering hack to get access to local multinationals’ computing environments. Apparently by getting them to run a file… don’t remember seeing anything like that in the original site.

The top banner, that suggested that ‘Noxious Nigel’ was really a certain Tony B has also been removed.

What I think really happened is that ‘Noxious Nigel’ got some serious traffic after the commotion of last week, followed by wet feet (and possibly a skrik at the fact that some people had figured out who he was) and a retraction of the Digital Planet / HP story. If not, then some system administrators have got their work cut out for them today! Either way, Noxious Nigel makes headlines in the blogosphere, again.

EDIT: Today the site is home to ‘Merriweather, Ives and Taylor’ – a corporate risk company. This gets more ridiculous by the second. I still have a grab of the original Digital Planet / HP story though, and I will put this up on my site later – it smacks of personal vendetta. And if a corporate risk company thinks that personally attacking and insulting people is a good way to build business then I honestly hope they sink in the market. Pathetic.

Laying some of the sarcasm aside, I am regularly asked genuine questions from business people who want to know more about the new wave of the Web and how it applies to their business. They get approached by “new media strategists” and “Web 2.0 visionaries” or they’ve simply heard about ‘Web 2.0’ and they want to know what everyone is on about. My intention with this post is to partially answer their questions, and also to vent my spleen at the people taking them for a ride. I may sound condescending to the latter, in which case… good.

First things first – “Web 2.0” is a farce. “Web” is short for ‘World
Wide Web’ – a layer of functionality on the Internet that makes websites possible. It uses a system called hypertext to serve content and facilitate file transfer. On a technological level it hasn’t changed much since the early nineties. The naming convention hinted at by the “2.0” part of the farce suggests that a second release or revision of the system has since been implemented, which is bollocks.

The term “Web 2.0” was coined by Irish media mogul Tim O’Reilly in an attempt to explain the next wave of usage of the Web. Mr. O’Reilly’s strange nomenclature is an inaccurate description but has been cast in popular use and, as such, is no big deal. But those in the know usually don’t bother giving new Web usage a name, because there isn’t anything special about it and they don’t want to mislead you. The Web is still just the Web.

Since the beginning of the Web in 1989 it has been possible to make your own website, build online social networks and embed supported media – it just hasn’t always been easy. What Myspace, Youtube, Facebook, Blogger and other new Web services do is make it possible for anyone to achieve things that nerds have known how to do for ages. Blogging is a prime example of this and only hit the big time as soon as it became easy for your average Joe to do it. Nerds have had weblogs (‘blogs) for decades.

Of course bandwidth constraints made it difficult to transfer video in the old days, for example, but at a technological level the Web wasn’t really that different in 1992 from what it is today. Protocols have been progressed, mark-up languages have been revised and improved, new programming languages have been introduced – but the Web remains. We’re just doing things with it that haven’t been done before.

So what does this mean for business? As with any new methodology or opportunity, businesses need to assess the developments, decide as to whether or not it is possible to derive value, and implement the required bits and pieces when and where it makes sense to do so. And when choosing partners to help them unlock the potential value from new Web related solutions, I would recommend speaking to the same nerds who have been doing this stuff for over a decade… or at least someone who has achieved more in the arena than running their own blog and knowing how to install basic web-server software for you.

You’ll find a lot of the nerds who really can offer you value from ‘Web 2.0′ working at IBM, for one. Ask them about Lotus Mashups, Connections and Quickr. There are also many open source tools available from wiki software to content management systems that offer a low barrier to entry, so long as you’re working with someone who can offer your business effective post-deployment support and perhaps also certification that suggests that they know what they’re doing.

Lets drill deeper and move away from the ‘Web 2.0′ name and refer to corporate blogging, collaboration, team facilitation, service orientated architecture, software as a service and other modular components of the new Web wave with names that actually make sense and that can be combined into effective solutions. If we’re going to formulate an effective strategy, then lets talk about what these mean for your business and how they can be used to drive goals. Corporate blogging may or may not make sense for your business depending on what you’re trying to achieve, just as a hosted CRM solution may make more sense than an out-sourced SaaS environment.

An easy way to identify a member of the ‘Web 2.0 Brigade’ is that all they want to talk about is deployment, and they ignore the strategy discussion. Have they asked you about your business and the differentiators that drive it? Do they even know what more conventional methodologies such as enterprise resource planning or customer relationship management entail and how these need to be incorporated into any solution going forward? Really?

Of course there are mere bloggers and casual fans of the new Web phenomenon out there who do get this stuff in the context of business – but as a business owner myself I like going with tried and tested expertise, only applying risk when I need to. And I won’t work with a consultant who doesn’t understand my business and what makes it tick, because technology isn’t worth anything unless it is aligned to business imperatives. This is as true for corporate blogging, social networking and collaboration tools as it has been for CRM and ERP.

So the next time the ‘Web 2.0 Brigade’ come calling ask them about their track-record in the industry, how they know what they know and why they do what they do. The ‘brigade’ will talk your ear off about “Web 2.0″ but won’t be able to tell you much else. You’ll soon realise that the same things that made consultants good ten years ago still makes them good today; a genuine understanding not just of the solutions, but also of your business and how the two can come together effectively. They probably won’t use the term “Web 2.0” much either…

For more info on the video and its creators visit their site.

It must be mentioned, however, that I am playing the game in campaign, or ‘single-player’ mode and am yet to experience the online fun I am promised awaits me on Xbox Live. But I wanted to get my initial impression of the game out in the interim and will perhaps do a more comprehensive review later on, should my opinion change.

The game begins with a video that is a little too long, introducing us to the main protagonist Niko – who has just arrived in Liberty City aboard a boat from an unnamed Eastern European country. The story is immediately tedious to me but the game does reward you 5 gamer points for pretty much just watching the intro, which I felt was apt for stealing precious minutes of my life I could have spent playing Half Life 2 – which remains the king of games.

After getting your character and its bad accent (couldn’t they find any real Bosnian voice artists?) off the boat you are hurled into a series of yawn-inducing missions that can thankfully be put on hold. You meet people in the game and can take them out on dates… and buy clothes for your character to wear… I’m not interested in playing Barbie-dress-up or The Sims, I thought that you mindlessly killed people in creative ways in this game. And to be fair, the two fights I experienced in my first half-hour with the title were amusing, but not worth all the extreme poofness of creating a wardrobe for my character, and taking it out on dates with piles of pixels before and after the killing. Your in-game girlfriends also don’t mind you deliberately driving over people on your way to the bowling alley, which disturbs me.

I’m told that the game gets better later on and that multiplayer is awesome, but the thing is that I have a life. I can go out and buy cheap jeans at Woolworths if that’s my thing. What I want from a game is instant gratification – turn it on, shoot the living bejesus out of anything that moves and then hit the power button and go spend time with my wife and kids or on doing something constructive. Not phoning computer-controlled characters on my play-pretend mobile to arrange dates with them that I then have to dress “Niko” up for.

GTA IV is definitely for people with more time on their hands. I’ll stick it out for a little longer and come back for some humble pie if things do improve. Perhaps I’m just impatient… or lucky enough to have grown up in an era where video games rose and fell by their game-play, not the sheer amount of pointless extras that the developers have managed to pack in.

To give credit where it is due; the artwork and models in GTA IV are amazing and ‘Liberty City’ where the storyline is set is an awesome piece of work, despite its daft name. The amount of vehicles and weapons on offer are also rad and a lot of effort has gone into developing mini-games and other entertaining activities that can be experienced in the virtual world, if you really must spend time doing so.

When I get back to my console and give this title another spin I’ll be putting the storyline, if you can call it that, on hold so that I can aimlessly run around the city and beat the crap out of its inhabitants; a pass-time I’m sure I will grow tired of soon and probably not an activity worth buying the entire game for.

- ISO ratifying OOXML as a standard
- Google Gears allowing you to work on Google Docs offline
- Douglas Merrill resigning as CIO of Google and going to EMI
- Telkom Media’s troubles
- Broadcast regulation in SA
- SA Blog Awards
- Firefox 3 beta 5
- The PWN to OWN awards
- WordPress 2.5 and web app security
- The promises of Intel Atom and mobile computin
- SA Cricket entering the blogosphere

Click here to visit the site!

She came up with that herself. I think it’s brilliant

My blog (and the photo gallery) have been suffering greatly for the last few months, but will be receiving way more attention from me now. The fact that I’ve stopped playing World of Warcraft for the time being will contribute to my productivity too, no doubt.

I’m not quite done with the theme yet, just the basics are in place. The photo gallery has been fully integrated, but I need to tackle the very elaborate CSS layout to get it looking more inline with the rest of the site.

As always, I’m sticking with WordPress as a content management system for my blog and Gallery 2 for media management.

Gallery 2 handles movies pretty well and I seem to have it playing nice with Mpeg 4 video now, so you can look forward to videos of the Gabe showing up in the gallery once I have it all figured out.

Nice.