Social networking in working hours

I read an interesting factoid on the KMTalk website today:

Workers who spend time on social networking web sites such as Facebook could be costing UK firms over US $250 million a day, a study has calculated. According to employment law firm Peninsula, 233 million hours are lost every month as a result of employees “wasting time” on social networking.

Fascinating when we are in the midst of the “social media bubble” / moving downward on the Gartner hype curve (see The social media paradox: success & time for an interesting read in this regard).

Tags: cost, Facebook, Gartner, social media, social networking       29 views

D as in duh…

I am feeling more than a little foolish right now and the reason is simple… I’m kicking myself for completely forgetting a lesson I learnt not so long ago.

I have been in between computers using both my acer laptop and macbook (it’s a long story). When on the windows-based machine I like to use Windows Live Writer (WLW) to blog as I don’t have to be online to do so and it is pretty easy to save a draft when I’m unable to complete a post in one sitting. So I decide to set up an account in WLW for this blog. All goes well until I need to submit the remote posting url for Wordpress 2.2+. I hit a snag.

“The server reported that the following URL can not be found: http://victoire.za.net/onmydesk/xmlrpc.php. Please ensure you have a valid URL”.

I struggle with the same error for 2 days. I search the net and come across some very helpful sites. Finally I remember that I had the same problem the last time I used this machine, and even blogged the solution on the now defunct victoire.za.net! What was the solution? Uncheck the proxy setting in Internet Explorer… Voila… I’m posting this post from WLW.

Tags: desktop publishing, error, fix, proxy, remote blogging, windows live writer       117 views

Macbook Screen capture

This one puzzled me this morning, when I had to capture an image of a map, and had no idea how to do so on my MacBook! Thankfully there are loads of helpful hints available via Google. I got this one off My Journey to Macintosh:

“I knew that I could take a screenshot of the whole screen with Shift + Command + 3 and that I could grab a lasso with Shift + Command + 4 but I didn’t know how to just grab the contents of one window. Anyway, it turns out if you press Shift + Command + 4 and then hit Space, your cursor turns to a camera icon and you can grab just the contents of one window.”

As macnewbie states in the blog article, the image is saved to your Desktop for easy access.

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mac’lueless

My tech world has been turned upside down - I bit the bullet, or the forbidden apple in this case, and bought a shiny new MacBook a week ago. Since then I have been fumbling around like a complete newbie trying to figure out the basics of operating this stylishly sexy machine. The learning curve is gigantic when almost all you’ve known is Microsoft’s Windows (I had a brief stint with Ubuntu a few years ago)… yes, really.

What do you do if nothing seems to work the way it should? You spend lots of quality time with your new best friend, Google. “There must be others who have gone through similar situations and have documented their findings” you mutter under your breath as you scour Google’s proffering. Well yes, there are, all you need is patience and time. Don’t have either? Here are a few simple yet essential things I’ve learnt…

Keyboard shortcuts don’t work the same on a MacBook
Whether you want to copy and paste, move your cursor a word at a time, or delete instead of backspacing it’s just different.

The basics
Cut: cmd x
Copy: cmd c
Paste: cmd v
Delete: fn backspace
More: Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts

A bit more adventurous
Move one word left or right: alt arrow
Move to the beginning or end of the line: cmd arrow
Select one word left or right: shift alt arrow
Select to the beginning or end of the line: shift cmd arrow
More: Table of keyboard shortcuts, Default Mac OS X System Key Bindings

Now to reprogram my fingers into the correct positioning for the new shortcuts!

Still to come is a look at some blogging tools I’ve discovered, with the next blog post published from one of the blogging applications.

Tags: Google, Keyboard shortcut, MacBook, OSX       31 views

The evolving nature of commentary

The New York Times published a “Diagram of a Blog” this week, which maps out the natural evolution of commentary on a blog post from the posting of the “original thesis” through the “initial deferential comments”, “point of ultimate repudiation”, “point of ultimate contrition”, and “the end” of discussion. The diagram infers that a pattern exists in the discussion of blog articles. I would argue that this pattern is only ever truly observable on posts where many comments are made, forming some sort of discourse, and where there are more than 2 or 3 participants.

Have you noticed this pattern in commentary on your blog?

Upon closer inspection this diagram is as easily attributable to many forms of group discussion (mailing list, forum, debate, etc.), and is therefore also a study of human communication / interaction tendencies to me. Being prepared is key in any situation, and in the largely volatile matter of reader participation, having an idea of the conversations one may be faced with is of great value.

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CT 27 Dinner - April 2007

The “Gauties” (i.e. Aquila and I) trekked to the Mother City for 27-4, Cape Town’s 2nd 27 Dinner, this Thursday amidst rain and winter temperatures. Inevitably this meant a day of shopping for warm clothes, a cloud enshrouded Table Mountain, and many reassurances that “the weather is not always like this”!

The event itself was hosted at the Cape Town Hotel School, which is on the Cape coastline in Mouille Point. The school has a stunning view of the bay, especially from the parking lot, which afforded us our first view of the ocean on Friday.

As for the dinner, it was rather different to the Jo’burg events, and seemed very much more laid-back - more of a social event than the usual frenzied networking feeding pool I’ve become accustomed to back in the City of Gold. As with Jo’burg, the speakers were all very entertaining and provided alluring food for thought to accompany the delicious three-course dinner and now obligatory Stormhoek.

The scheduled speakers were:

And on the soap box:

It was great meeting up with a number of the CT bloggers including Dave Duarte (the energetic hip and happening MC for the evening), Martin Hattingh, Max Kaizen (as vivacious as she is online), Nikki Friedman, Henk Kleynhans, Neil Blakey-Milner, Jacques Marneweck, Kevin Tucker, Nico and Marelize de Wet, and Miguel dos Santos. I hope to catch up with some of the others that I never got around to chatting to (including those fab zoopy people) as well as the bloggers who were deterred by the weather (surely you guys aren’t afraid of a little rain?! ) at another 27 Dinner!

Technorati tags: 27dinner, 27-4, cape town, aquila, victoire

This is a repost of a post I originally published on chilibean, a blog I co-author on.

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chilipod episode 6: Web 2.0 Shifts

In this episode of chilipod, we take a look at the following topics:

• Web 2.0 Reality Bytes: Now that the honeymoon is over, is Web 2.0 a fad or here to stay?
• The shift away from email to instant messaging

References:

Reality Bytes
• Weak Web 2.0 participation
• Web 2.0 wave starts to take hold
• The blog graveyard

Email to IM

• Email is Antiquated
• imified

As always, this episode is available in two formats:

• Enhanced chilipod (AAC/iTunes format); and
• Normal chilipod (mp3 format).

This is a repost of a post I originally published on chilibean, a blog I co-author on.

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Tyler Reed - podcasting proud

Tyler Reed, who recenly joined (yesterday in fact!) the podcaster in-crowd, has another achievement to be proud of… That of winning first place in the Apple ipodcast Comedy & Standup Category (Week 3) with his podcast, Jannie’s GPS System!

Well done Tyler! We can’t wait to hear more of it!

This is a repost of a post I originally published on chilibean, a blog I co-author on.

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Feeds that go bump in the night

RSS feeds are a great way of staying in touch with conversations on one’s favourite blogs. I have been subscribing to many different feeds in Feedreader lately simply because I don’t have time to browse immediately, but often read a post or two whenever I get the chance. There is just one (slight) problem I have encountered… There seem to be an increasing number of sites with RSS url’s that look something like this:

This is a problem because Firefox does not recognise the url as a feed url at all (neither does Feedreader) and gives me an error message, as can be seen below, instead of automatically inserting the feed into my Feedreader.

The work around is to simply edit the url, deleting the “feed://” part, and inserting a semi-colon between the http’s p and the first forward slash (/) like so:

http:/

and then copy the new url into Feedreader. Note: You can also do the editing within Feedreader.

My question is however, why are some feeds represented like this in the first place?

At the WebPR+ conference Sally Falkow expounded on a variety of means one can draw on to make it easier for blog visitors to syndicate and access one’s content. This is certainly not one of them.

Case in point: even though I am comfortably net-savvy, when faced with this error the first few times I actually thought the feed was broken and immediately browsed away without the syndicated content. What will a first-time RSS user do?

I hope that there is a really simple solution and explanation for this phenomenon! Until then, some of the RSS feeds I want to subscribe to will continue to go *bump* in the night…

This is a repost of a post I originally published on chilibean, a blog I co-author on.

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One month of chili luvin’

Hooray! Today is the one month anniversary of our “big announcement” - chilibean media’s launch! What a month it has been.

To start off, we launched with a video, which gave you - our readers - an insight into who we - the chilibeaners - are. Paul talks alot, I laugh alot. Hopefully you feel like you could wander over to either of us and have a chat, now that you could recognise us from a mile away.

The video was also an introduction into this medium for us, one we found rather fun to dabble in (however time consuming the post production may be). I am sure that you will see more of chilibean on video sometime in the future, but for now we’re keeping our “made for podcasting” faces just there… on the chilipods!

The launch video, subsequent feedback from the general blogging community, and a rather official chilibean meeting lead to us formulating the chilibean manifesto, which Paul introduced on Episode 2 of chilipod, and which I will be putting up on the site this week. We were given an opportunity to tone down on the jargon and to express what we have in our hearts regarding chilibean’s offering… in plain English even we can understand.

Talking of podcasting, chilibean got to podcast the Quirk eMarketing WebPR+ conference in this month too. We met Sally Falkow and a whole wack of Quirk people, including Rob Stokes and the Sarah’s. We learnt tons about Marketing and PR, and got a great insight into where New Media can be implemented in this industry… right now!

I’ve also been rather busy in another venture - the SA Blog Awards 2007 - where chilibean has been nominated as a finalist in two categories!

I was invited to be a part of the judging panel. This has been an awesome chance to get to know the bloggers behind the blogs we read, as well as an opportunity to scrutinise the SA blogs themselves… There is a wealth of talent out there, if only there were more hours in the day to just explore the SA blogosphere! With the enormous responsibility of having a hand in choosing the best of the best comes much learning - The judging process is a complex one, and the Cherryflava team really put much effort into making it better every year. Having been a part of that process this year, I can see that there is a gap for the local blogging community to add real value by stepping in and giving their constructive feedback. As a passionately SA blogger I will definitely be helping out wherever I can.

And in between all of this we’ve continued to deliver quality blogging content to your screens! Here’s to another month of chilibean fun and excitement…

This is a repost of a post I originally published on chilibean, a blog I co-author on.

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