An old school mate, Symone, passed away suddenly yesterday. I would not have known about her death had it not been for Facebook and other friends writing about the death in their status updates. In fact, if it were not for Facebook I would not have had any contact with this old school mate as we lost contact after we matriculated.

I've always wondered what happens to your account on Facebook, or any other Web 2.0 site for that matter, when you die? The beauty of Web 2.0 (as I understand the phenomenon) is that it allows you to have a personal presence on the web - a virtual "second life" if you like, that is a real-time life-like representation of your state of being, moods, actions and thoughts. It pretty much mirrors your real life (if you're as obsessed with it as I am:)). Unlike your life though, your web presence does not dissapear like your last breath does.

This hit home today, barely 24 hours after Symone's death, when I noticed that she had a stauts update. It reads ...  read more »

I had the pleasure of spending a few minutes last night being interviewed by long-time mate Mike Stopforth for his social media and marketing podcast, Amplitude .

You can find it and listen to it here .

I've been a part of the South African blogosphere for about 2 years now. It is still a very young blogosphere by global standards and is fighting hard to establish itself. There are some insanely clever people playing in this space and I am proud to be playing amongst them. As I look back on the last two years it seems to be me that the SA blogging movement has been moving in the same direction - towards establishing a significant presence in the global blogosphere boosted by innovative thinking and relevant content.

Within the past few months, pretty much since 2007 began, I have however begun noticing a change in this story. There is now a level of dissent within the SA blogging community that I have not seen before - and it has revolved mainly around the annual SA blog awards, and to some extent around the "lets-meet" gatherings that have been organized by some prominent bloggers (to read some what this looks like click here, here, here and finally, here)

There are three observations/recommendations that I have about this situation:  read more »

I've just listened to Mike and Dave interview Neville Newey on Amplitude about his social bookmarking site www.Muti.co.za. Inspired by legendary social bookmarking sites like Digg, Muti is aiming to be the South African equivalent that punts African and South African content. One of the first questions that came to mind was Why the name? Muti? In South African culture, muti has two meanings, one relatively formal and another that is driven by perception. In the formal sense muti is the term for traditional medicine in South Africa. In the perception sense, muti has been linked with murder and mutilation in stories of "muti killings" where sangomas (traditional doctors) have harvested human body parts for the composition of certain remedies (mutis).

Having listened to Neville, and having checked out the site, it is not clear to me why he has chosen this hot-potato of a name. It seems fairly random - except for the African link - and careless.  read more »