Quickie: One of the properties in my blog network, SA Rugby Blog, now sports a new theme. We have implemented the ‘blog network’ theme Adii and myself designed a while back for Car Blog (and later used on Bandwidth Blog). Malan helped apply the theme as always and I think it came out great.

LeWeb’08 is the #1 Web conference in Europe with 1500 participants from 40 Countries hosted over Dec 9-10th in Paris. I’m excited to announce that I have cracked the nod for a blogger invite. LeWeb is all about internet technology and (this year) the people that use it. Attending this conference will be a real eye opener for me about international internet business and I look forward to meeting some real big players. If you wish to attend register here.

What LeWeb is really about is…

…people
Extending the success of last year’s networking venue, this year’s LeWeb expands the space with several spaces adjacent to the plenary stage. We want attendees to get the opportunity to meet the speakers, entrepreneurs to meet investors to share ideas, open new opportunities.

…entrepreneurs
The StarUp Competition is an event in the event. We dedicate a space for this competition which is a great opportunity for rising stars to get more visibility in front of business leaders, investors and technology influencers.

…partnership
LeWeb is an event that could not be achieve without the trust of our partners and we really work hard to build this on a long term relationship.

During the 2 days of conference, the speakers will be interviewed on stage by the following reporters, bloggers:

• Michael Arrington, Co-Founder & Editor, TechCrunch
• Dan Farber, Editor-in-Chief, CNET News
• Steve Gillmor, The Gillmor Gang
• Om Malik, Editor in Chief GigaOm
• Jennifer L. Schenker, Correspondent, BusinessWeek
• Robert Scoble, Video Blogger, Fast Company
• Kara Swisher, Co-Executive Editor, AllThingsD.com; Blogger, Boomtown; Co-Executive Producer, D: All Things Digital

Video announcement of the daily program by conference founder Loic le Meur.

With the launch of the iPhone 3G in South Africa and witnessing the hype first hand, I was thinking iPhone-only social networks have a serious chance at generating traction internationally and even in our local market.

iPhone owners, like most users of Apple products, are a fairly obsessed, elitist group of people. An iPhone-only social network, if it had the right set of features, would be a huge hit with iPhone users. Sort of an exclusive network for the select users who are privileged enough to own an iPhone.

Vodacom, who has sole distribution rights for the iPhone in South Africa, should have built a social network for iPhone users and pre-installed the application onto all their iPhone stock. So when a new iPhone user fires up his new iPhone 3G for the first time he/she would be one click (touch) away from enabling their account on this exclusive social network. Imagine being able to share photos, music and broadcast your location to all iPhone users in SA.

They did this very well with their ‘Vodafone Live” presence which was installed on all phones sold by Vodacom with huge success. Although, I think Apple only allows their unit in China to open and work on the iPhone behind the covers.

Some international developers have built social applications for the iPhone. Here is a list of iPhone social networks built using the freely available iPhone SDK -

Fon 11 – Fon11 is a social, phone utility that lets you connect with the people you would normally call, SMS, or IM. Using Fon11 you can tell your friends whether or not you are busy, out of town, or dying to meet up. You can share your whereabouts and see who is in your neighborhood.

iPhoneColony — A full social network for the iPhone crowd with all of the usual features and allows you to create communities. You can’t access iPhonecolony unless you are on a iPhone

iRovr — A social network developed specifically for users of the iPhone. Has all the normal bells and whistles … just iPhone sized.

Coverage of Wordcamp 2008 can be found here on Zoopy and here on Twitter. Talking schedule here.

I’ve just arrived at Wordcamp South Africa 2008. The place is buzzing – everything seems to be setup well – Tyler Reed just did his intro speech and the Rockstar himself, Adii, is on taking about this premium WordPress themes business.

09:45AM

Adii just introduced himself and elaborated on how he got started with his career (I even got a name drop in there).

The difference between free themes and his paid themes is good support and feature rich back ends to easily manage your WordPress install. Adii and his partners plan to release up to two themes per month for their paying customers (themes club). They plan to engage talented Wordpess engineers to create themes under the Woo Themes banner. Releasing free themes and code snippets is also on the cards within the next few weeks. Adii shares that if it wasn’t for WordPress he would likely be at a corporate desk (he has a degree).

Internet down

We back Skyrove New York hot spot

Vincent Maher was on earlier and noted that their leader network of blogs has millions of rands worth of content already.

11:20AM

Justin Hartman is on now showing off some of the stuff they did around WordPress at Avusa (iLab). Open source tech allows them to roll out new products quicker and R&D costs are down.

WordPress powers a multimedia portal by Avusa which they use to upload trailers and other media.

WordPress is out of the box SEO‘d – this has helped generate organic traffic for Avusa.

Image credit

11:58AM

Matt, WordPress creator is on – “Is there any WordPress users here today?” We all laugh..

“Im glad to be here in San Fran.. oh.. doh! .. Its been a long flight!” – Matt mixes us up with San Fran (we wish)!

WordPress.com had over 700k visits from South Africa in the last month. WordPress went from 2.6 million downloads in 2007 to 11 mil + in 2008. 6 billion posts, 11 billion pageviews… 2.8 mil wordpress.org blogs to date – 3.8 mil client installs – so 6.7 mil WordPress blogs in total..

Matt makes a statement – “Selling software is dead.”

Matt explains why they don’t have a WordPress Pro version – paid software – “The problem is that you have to keep bloating the pro version to justify a paid version.”

Matt shows us the pun in Automattic – “I put my name in everything” .. he notes smiling.

Henk: Skyrove (bandwidth sponsor) tweets – “geekrebel: Okay, have set up a 2nd hotspot at #wordcamp . The geeks here managed to bring down the first Skyrove Hotspot, the IS WiFi AND Vodacom 3G!”

Matt shares that an old competitor iBlog used to have more WordPress MU installs then WordPress.org. “They were kicking our butt with our own software” and “This was when I started doubting open source”.

Automattic makes money by selling premium services on WordPress.org – Upgrade – buy custom css, buy domains – Although, not a lot of users upgrade.. Matt deals a blow to Typepad “Once you cut your teeth with blogging you normally upgrade to WordPress from something like Typepad”

This is the second way we make money – Ads on WP.com – “I personally don’t like ads”

Here’s our model for advertising – If you are logged in theres no ads, no homepage ads, you won’t see ads if you are using Firefox (haaaa.. everyone laughs)… you only see ads if you come from a search engine straight to a permalink page.

We use adsense to monetize WP.com “Adsense is the only ads I ever click on” although, Google is still the competition – Blogger is the only global blogging engine thats still bigger than WP.com

Third – VIP hosting – We provide hosting for huge blogs – Scoble, Lindin labs (second life), LOLCATS

Tip – If you add ?random after any WP.com blog you can see a random post – “I use this to cheer me up by going to random LOLCATZ posts – ICANHASCHEESEBURGER”

Paid licenses of Akismet is another revenue model for WordPress. “This has been a great business model for us”

I created a service a while back called PING-0-Matic – It was exploited by spammers, and used a ton so resources which became very expensive to run. It pings blog aggregators that you have updated your blog.

Rafiq just threw a JAIL4BAIL tshirt at Matt (Like Microsoft execs getting pie’d) it hit him in the face… he looks confused. Some peeps not happy. “put a leash on Rafiq”

“Software sales is dead – open source is coming”

“Vote with your wallet”

Donate to open source developers instead of paid vendors. Matt donates to open source projects e.g. Apache.

“Who all has kids here?” No one really puts their name up “Jeez get busy!! We need more bloggers” says Matt.. everyone laughs

Matt ends off – sharing his email and website “I actually do check my email” ..

Tyler comes up and asks the first question – “What do you think of Drupal?” Matt: “I’m not really into Pokemon” everyone laughs .. “totally kidding, I love Drupal!”

Tyler asks another question – What do you think of Microblogging – “I totally didn’t see twitter coming, its great.”

Glen from ZASHOW asks “is 4 your unlucky number cuz you skipped it out of the ver releases?”

Matt: “We skipped it because we did a major overhaul” (short version of his answer)

Matt forces everyone to punt their blog before delivering their question to him..

Matt ends off.. its lunch time! Next up Dave Duarte and Rafiq Phillips

I’ve left the conference in favour of watching the Springboks play.. (and we got trashed – shouldve stayed) check out Twitter to follow the remaining action.

Well done to YOUNIQUE and sponsors for hosting a great event.

Who knew attending geeky events would be such a link driver. My 27 Dinner review post generated a ton of traffic and links to my blog. Then last week I attended the Blogeratti event hosted by our local web guru’s Matt and Vince. Once again introducing myself (or even just rocking up) has led to a ton of back links and a traffic spike. To round it all off it’s always good measure to write about the event afterwards and link to all the other blogger’s posts. This generates comment ping backs on the blogger’s comments (sort of legit comment spam). If the blog doesn’t have the ‘no follow‘ tag setup it’s a free back link and helps you get noticed by the blogger and his audience (thats a whole different post).

We all know lists are great to get your blog noticed by the masses but try some offline marketing and attend some geeky events especially blogger ones.

It was great to meet up again with some of my blogging buds and put faces to some of my online friends.

Here’s a list of blogs covering the event -

Bloggerati – awesome party and thanks for coming

Just got back from the Bloggerati

The Bloggerati aftermath

The Bloggerati was fantastic. yay for Sa bloggers

From Bloggerati to Bronx

Gathering of the Bloggerati