Charl Norman » Writing

From the Couch

Charl Norman — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 20:00:38 +0000

I appeared on the couch this past week with brothers Marc and David Perel -

Today we interview one of South Africa’s most respected social network gurus.

He owns & runs multiple social networks and recently one of those sites got acquired by one of the biggest companies in the world.

His name is Charl Norman, and today he is on the Couch.

Fellow Blueworld’er visits Facebook HQ

Charl Norman — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 10:54:58 +0000

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 -

Tech Leader post is up

Charl Norman — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 08:18:04 +0000

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 isâ€™goodâ€™ by Twitters standards.

Would a Google acquisition be healthy for Twitter? One canâ€™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 Googleâ€™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. Googleâ€™s strategy to gobble up small startups and then do nothing with them is an interesting one.

Office photos from 24 dot com

Charl Norman — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 12:13:24 +0000

I just published a post on Bandwidth Blog about 24.com and photos of their offices. They have a really stylish office space -

The best stuff I wrote on Bandwidth Blog

Charl Norman — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 21:05:59 +0000

Here are some of the most popular posts I published on Bandwidth blog since its launch one year ago.

South Africaâ€™s top startups to watch (Was published in print)

Afrigator beta launched (Was picked up by ReadWriteWeb)

24.com launch Laaik.it social media aggregator (Breaking news)

The offices of todays internet companies (Reached the Digg homepage)

Microsoft wants Yahoo – $50 Bil (Bandwidth Blog’s best rumour published of 2007)

Bandwidth Blog continues to rise

Charl Norman — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 19:08:52 +0000

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 todayâ€™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

Charl Norman — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 18:24:16 +0000

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.

Its been a good week

Charl Norman — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 17:12:34 +0000

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.