Charl Norman is a web entrepreneur behind local social networks 
Elan Lohmann is part of the Blueworld team and has spent the last week in Palo Alto rubbing shoulders with some of the Silicon Valley’s tech elite - he even managed to squeeze in a visit to Facebook! Read more on his blog and some photos below -
Category Archives: Web 2.0
Tech Leader post is up
June 13, 2008 – 10:18 am
My first Tech Leader post is up - Twitter downtime - Could Google help Twitter scale? - read the full article here.
I had a thought on Twitter a few days ago: Could a Google acquisition of Twitter help the service scale? Or is it not an infrastructure issue but more a platform issue? Twitter has suffered from serious downtime over the last few weeks, trying to keep their service live during peak usage periods. They managed a 97% uptime during the WWDC keynote, which is’good’ by Twitters standards.
Would a Google acquisition be healthy for Twitter? One can’t help but to think about what has happened to other startups gobbled up by the search giant. Since the acquisition of similar life streaming service Jaiku, the community has suffered from negligence on Google’s behalf, much like the Dodgeball acquisition, an acquisition Google made in 2005 and never really did anything with. Some Jaiku users have even revolted and moved over to Twitter. Google’s strategy to gobble up small startups and then do nothing with them is an interesting one.
Friend Feed
May 31, 2008 – 10:56 pm
Really enjoying Friend Feed and the services they allow you to aggregate - subscribe to my friend feed
I’m aggregating my shared items on google reader, my tweets, delicious bookmarks, youtube favourites, diggs and a few others.
Afrigator beta 2
May 14, 2008 – 9:45 pm
Bandwidth Blog posted breaking news today about the Afrigator beta 2 launch. CEO Justin Hartman was kind enough to give us the scoop. Congrats once again to the entire team - Mark, Stii, Justin and Mike. Read it here
Muti clean sweep?
February 5, 2008 – 9:02 pm
Thank you Facebook
January 30, 2008 – 11:10 pm
Why did it take so long? I get hundreds of application, event and group invites daily. It’s the downside of whoring using Facebook.
Ignore all requests -
Suggesting friends to newly accepted friends -
Also found this on Delicious yesterday - The shy Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook
My Facebook profile, add me!
Bandwidth Blog continues to rise
December 17, 2007 – 9:08 pm
The referal traffic to Bandwidth Blog after my successfull Digg post (500 Diggs) has continued to rise. All the Digg traffic came and went after a few days but the referal ripple effects are still being felt. Many bloggers have picked up on the post and linked to it. Traffic from other social media aggregators have also been good e.g. Del.icio.us (47 saves), Techmeme and Twitter.
Some blogs that blogged my post over the last two days
Betshopboy.net, Peek Inside Offices of Leading Internet Companies, The offices of today’s leading internet companies, JohnChow, A peak into the offices of web 2.0 companies, Matt Cutts, Internet Companies, Entrepreneurs and Search, Offices of leading internet companies - DesignersTalk,
The Alexa traffic chart for Bandwidth Blog - spikey!
My Google analytics chart - indicating good growth after Digg effect
Office photos
December 10, 2007 – 8:24 pm
Update 2 - BandwidthBlog suffered at the hands of Digg and was down for 2 hours. I finally got it back up around 3am. Exciting hitting the front page - the digg count flies - 55, 59, 67, 87, 110, 150 .. in a matter of secondsÂ
UPDATE - My article made it to the front page of Digg - it smashed my server to pieces - trying to get it back up now - 01:55am. Did all the prepping I could, just not enough. Lesson learnt!
I just published a post on Bandwidth Blog about office photos from hot internet companies. The post was my shot at creating a link bait list to submit to delicious, digg and muti. Please Digg the post here if you think it’s worthy.
How the Digg algoritm works
November 30, 2007 – 8:42 pm
Some tips and info on how to go about getting your blog posts featured on the Digg homepage
- Digg’s algorithm accounts for recent participation rank of user and followers.
- Frequent success makes subsequent success more difficult. Take a few days off sometimes.
- Get a quick succession of diggs from “high-value” users.
- The number of diggs needed to reach the homepage correlates to the number of diggs being cast at any given time, and how your story compares to the average.
- Competition in categories Technology, World and Business is fiercer than in Sports or Entertainment. 50 diggs will get a story promoted if it is tops in its category.
- The faster a story gets votes, the lower the vote count has to be at which it is promoted. But diversity is important. Stories dugg by “voting rings” will sit at the top of the queue for hours.
- Too many buries and your story will be removed from the queue.
- Comments can help push a story over the edge. Not fake ones, though.
- Wrong: An absolute number of votes is required.
- Wrong: You’re doomed if your story isn’t submitted by a top user.
- Wrong: Number of friends is important. Digg looks for is diversity in the Diggs a story receives.
- Wrong: There is a 24-hour window for success.
[Via: Valleywag]
Its been a good week
November 30, 2007 – 7:12 pm
I’ve had a good week with attending my first 27 geek dinner which led to me writing the Afrigator Beta launch post on Bandwidth Blog. The post was picked up my bloggers and news publishers across the web and resulted in a healthy chunk of traffic for Bandwidth.
Here is some of the sites I found mentioning Afrigator, myself and Bandwidth blog. Thanks to the Afri guys for building such a hot beta application which made it easy for me to write a good review.
Highest praise for Afrigator by top global tech blog
Afrigator: The Best of African Social Media, in Real Time
International blogs: Afrigator covers Africa
Measuring the African Blogosphere | White African
Now with all the buzz around Afrigator and my blog post doing the rounds on other blogs I made it onto Techmeme which showcases blog posts that other bloggers are talking about and linking to - this resulted in more traffic, huge traffic in fact.
I appeared on channel MK TV's new hip hop and car show WOELAG. They interviewed me on our automotive social network Zoopedup.
I have been nominated for ICT Young Entrepreneur of Africa 2008. Now to even be nominated is a great honour for me seeing as last years winner of the award is internationally renowned Vinny Lingham.
