You can also read the blog which contains profiles on all the speakers at http://gsbexecedblog.uct.ac.za/

Lester

The previous posts about MXit have become so popular that I thought I’d give you a little more info. So you want to Access MXit from you computer? What is the use of sitting at the PC and having the screen blurr when you cell (mobile) phone’s GPRS is active?

Ok, You’ll need 2 things to run MXit on you PC:

1. Firstly you’ll need Java, which you can get at http://www.java.com. You’ll see a big green “Free Java Download” button on the homepage. Just click it and follow the instructions to install Java.

2. Next you’ll need to install MXitPC, which you can get at http://www.mxit.com/mxitpc. Same story, you’ll see on the homepage a blue “Free Download” button near the bottom of the page. Just click it and wait for it to automatically download and install.

Once those 2 things are installed, you open the mpowerplayer application and search for mxit in the provided search box. Click on the MXit logo that was returned in the search results and bingo, you have MXit on your PC.

Try it out – your thumbs will thank you

Lester Hein

Designing your site with particular user personas in mind

Personas allow us to imagine and customise different paths through a website for different user types, based on an understanding of their goals for the site visit. I came across some interesting ideas in this regard in a video called “How to Use Personas to Improve Sales with Brian Eisenberg”.

Building a Persona
Eisenberg makes a few suggestions about how one can build a persona in the clip. He suggests that you “create snapshots of types of website visitors modeled by modes of buying behavior”.

You can do this by having a look at the key phrases that lead people to your site in order to understand user intent. The example he uses is “perfect diamond” vs “learn about diamonds”. The other suggestion he makes is that you interview your sales people, as they’ve had personal contact with your customers.

Go to the Source
What these suggestions highlight is that, even though there will be a certain level of interpretation, you should base it on information that is as accurate as possible. This means that you might have to find innovative ways to get to know your customer. A quick poll on the site might be the way to do this (I came across an interesting initiative in this regard that you might want to check out here).

Focus on Motivations
Dr. Lene Nielsen, a usability expert who did her doctorate in using personas, points out “that the whole purpose of personas is not to describe users as such, but to create solutions that take the needs of the persona as a starting point.” Focusing on the motivations and intentions of your user should stop you from thinking in terms of stereotypes, and help you to find the solutions you need for better navigation.

A Simple Solution
Go2Africa.com is a good example of using personas. The site uses navigation options based on what kind of holiday the site visitor wants (luxurious, romantic or adventurous to name a few). While these may seem like very simple options, the point is that they do represent user segment intentions.

While you may not have the resources to do endless research into user segments, thinking about your site in terms of personas is a great way to challenge your own ideas and develop your site’s usability.

Here’s the short version of what the band did

On 1 October 2007, Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood announced in a brief post on Dead Air Space (the band’s blog)  “Well, the new album is finished, and it’s coming out in 10 days . . . We’ve called it In Rainbows”. Bypassing a traditional physical release in stores, Radiohead released the album as a download available for order from inrainbows.com on 10 October 2007. In a Wired interview, Yorke explained that “every record for the last four—including my solo record—has been leaked. So the idea was like, we’ll leak it, then. Radiohead’

The download, packaged as a ZIP file, included the ten album tracks encoded in 160 kbps DRM-free MP3 format. Upon purchase, the buyer was prompted to type in their desired price. The staggered online release of the album began at about 5:30 GMT on 10 October, but on 10 December 2007, the official digital download was no longer made available. A special made-to-order “discbox”, available for pre-order through inrainbows.com, was released on 3 December 2007.

(source – www.wikipedia.com)

One of the questions that was raised in the lecture was whether this business model was a viable one for bands, or whether it only worked for Radiohead because they were Radiohead. On the other hand, to quote Colin – “if the album was crap, this wouldn’t have worked.” Madonna soon followed suit by making digital downloads of her album available on line to similar success, and in his lecture on New Media Law Paul Jacobson also pointed me to the Nine Inch Nails free download case study which was also a success for the band.

Now it seems that we have the first South African take on this give-your-work-away-for-free model. Jet Black and the Multi Colours have decided to distribute their new seemingly untitles EP for free on the net with their overtone record label. When I first saw the post up on www.muti.co.za, I dismissed it without realising what it actually was -  a record label collaborating with a local band to make their music freely available online. This goes some way to validate something that Rafiq Philips mentioned on the WebAddiCT blog a while back: “We’re seeing the shift from the commoditisation of music to the commoditisation of attention in the music industry (…)”

I for one think that he’s right and will be keeping my eyes on JetBlack to see a) whether their attempt at the new community focussed business model yields positive results and b)whether they will follow Radiohead’s lead a step further and make the album available for purchase as a CD if the download campaign is a success. If this model does yield positive results, I think that we’ll see many more local bands and artists following suit, especially in Cape Town where there’s a wealth of musical talent with no real form of monetizing their gift (anti Joburg flame suit on,lol)

If anyone from the band or from overtone is reading this, drop me a comment and let me know how things are going.

Lester
P.S.  – I’m downloading the EP now and will post a review up here in the next day or two.

So, after joining Muti (a digg type service for South Africa) on Wednesday, one of the first things that I noticed was that each of my submissions had a score attached to it. Immediately my sense of curiousity was sparked, and so was my competitive nature – what was this score jobbie, and how could i get mine to be higher than everyone else’s?

After scrounging around the muti site and reading all the support docs I could find, I finally realized that the answer was not on the muti site. At first this hacked me off a teensy bit (the inner OCD me coming out) but now I see why it’s not up there.  Following the futile site digging i sent out a tweet with a #muti hashtag hoping that a) this hashtag existed and b)someone would be able to help.

As luck would have it, thakadu had just started following hashtags and we started conversing on tweet. Here’s the low down on muti scores:

(Oh, before i start – these scores will be removed from the muti site soon, and that’s why there’s no lit on them available anywhere.Take it away Thakadu)

Muti Scores

That score is a composite of “clicks” and votes. It is a holdover from the very early days of muti when I needed a way to differentiate posts before there were many voters. Its basically a weighted value for votes (right now I think its 15 points per vote) and “clicks” (I think its 9 points per click)

I say “clicks” in quotes because its not as simple as just plain clicks for the following reasons:

1. Only the first 5 clicks at the same ip address are counted, this is so that you cant just repeatedly click on an item to raise its score.
2. Many people (more than 60%) don’t use the muti site to read muti (They use rss, twitter, jaiku, jabber etc etc) ie its only clicks from the site (In the early days muti did not yet have all these alternate means of reading so it was more reflective)
3. Some browsers quite simply don’t report the click accurately, most notably some versions of IE. (The click is an ajax call and some browsers simply ignore ajax when clicking away)

So as you can see its a very rough score it worked well in the early days but its pretty much obsolete now and one of these days I will probably remove it, most people look at the votes and not the score.

</end muti goodness>

Thanks for taking the time to give me the lowdown thakadu! After less than one week as a part of the muti community, I think I can already say that I really like it here. Now if I could only get a t-shit out of them (nudge’s rafiq)

I don’t have stats to go on, but my common sense tells me that surely there’s no one there. So why the hell are all those lights on? I’m sure that even the fat cats in charge must have heard a word or two about ‘this load shedding business’ the rest of us have to deal with? How many homes could run off the power being wasted on lighting up an empty mall at 3am? This especially pisses me off when I drive by the neon city only to get home and find the my own neighbourhood has been load shed.

My gut feeling is that malls should have some sense of social responsibility and turn their bloody lights off when the day is done. Even if they don’t turn them all off, every light helps. And if the malls don’t step up to the plate of their own accord, local government should be getting involved. Honestly, I can’t see why Canal Walk hasn’t come to the party on this issue – surely in today’s green friendly society this is a perfect opportunity for them to turn a negative into a positive by position the mall’s brand as one that cares not only about the environment, but about the surrounding communities.

So, I’m going to start a petition and pass it around and see how many people feel the same way I do, which is very, very upset annoyed angry -you pick one. If I can find them, I’ll be taking the result to the shopping mall management. For now, take a second and cast your vote on the issue here

 http://www.polldaddy.com/p/535408/

 Lester

I was chatting to Dave Duarte about this today and I started wondering about whether google indexes the comments posted on my blog. The reason I ask is that if someone is taking the time to reply to something of mine, I think that it’s fair that they should get a bit of love for that in the way of a link. Yes, I realise that the potential for spammers to take advantage of this fact exists, but hey – that’s why we moderate comments right? My question is specifically for wordpress.com and wordpress.org posts but if you know the answer for blogger, well then don’t let me stop you…

I realise that Ias with most questions on the net) this was probably dealt with before, but if anyone knows the answer to this, or can point me in the direction of a site where I can find some guidance, please let me know in the comment section, which may or may not be indexed by google.

Cheers,

Lester

P.S – before you think I’m a lazy bugger, I did try and google it first, but didn’t find anything that answered the question.

Here’s a sample of the type of information that you can glean from this paper:

“In Jeremiah Owyang’s Dow Jones White Paper on ‘Tracking the Influence of Conversation’, a meme was defined as: “an idea or discussion that grows and spreads from individual to individual into a lengthy commentary”.

(Jeff Jarvis) strongly believed that for someone to be influential they will likely be either a meme starter or a meme spreader:

1. The meme starter (Who? When? Where? Why? How) This person typically is creative, forms opinions and articulates them well. They have the ability to state a view at the right time. Their readership is not necessarily large but views the individual as trustworthy.
2. The meme spreader (Who? How fast? How long? Where? Why? How?) This person thrives by sharing opinions and wants to do it first. They are trusted and have a large readership. However, following the roundtable, I believe that there are a further three types of influencer that should be taken into consideration. They may not be as strong an influencer but they still have a high impact in the community. These people are:
3. The meme adapter This person reads what is going on outside their traditional sphere of knowledge. They take the opinions of others and reform them so that it is tailored to their bespoke niche group. This information is then published and spread to a smaller but highly targeted audience.
4. The meme commentator This person does not create content but reads the views and opinions of others and takes part in conversation via adding Starters and spreaders of memes are the most influential people – Jeff Jarviscomments. They are far more likely to share the knowledge of this topic with their peers through offline discussion rather than published content.
5. The meme reader This person does not create any online content. However, they tend to be a vociferous consumer of information to which they read, learn and share with their peers in the offline world. Although not having the same reach as the meme spreader, their views are trusted and are able to promote these ideas in an alternative method.”

“Much of what has been discussed in this White Paper focused on people who create and shape ideas that become influential. However, these are just passing moments in time. The higher order bit is the influence these events have on the longer term through search. This can be illustrated by showing how influential blogs, Twitter posts are indexed very highly in Google. For example, a Google search on Dell technical support will bring a negative blog post by Jeremy Zawodny
as the third choice. “

P.S – I originally tried to embed the pdf off scribd, but wordpress.com won’t allow me to add scripts hencet the direct download

How i wound up @ technomadic.

It’s all @magictim’s fault, really it is. I got on to twitter about two weeks ago. Sure i’d heard and read about it, but i though ‘what the hell good is a 140 character blog? I talk far too much for that to be of any use to me.’ And oh how I wrong I was.

I met Tim very briefly at Quirk eMarketing‘s staff bash a while back (the promise of free beer and pizza on a Friday night was more than enough to lure me there…) After baffling him about how i knew his name (i saw his pic on facebook) and chatting over a beer, I next met him online in the twittersphere (is that a word yet?). After watching Tim tweet to some of his contacts, I started following @simonebiz. That still sounds weird when I say it out loud. Anyway, I started following simone and one of her tweets read something along the lines of ‘Simone is looking forward to Nomadic Marketing.’ So me being me i busted in and asked about what exactly Nomadic Marketing was all about, since the name sounded really cool. She explained it all to me and then informed that sadly, registrations for the course had closed 2 weeks earlier

Simone then recommended that I follow @daveduarte, who was hosting the course. So i did just that. Dave put me in contact with someone at the GSB and before you could say comfy geek slippers I was registered as a delegate at Nomadic Marketing. I’m sure that if they’d told me they’d be calling me a ‘delegate’ I would have signed up just so I could pretend to be Kofi Anan.

Anyway, I thought that it was really cool that I was able to get a tangible real world benefit from thus ‘new’ social network which is slowly taking a beakhold in South Africa. a clear indication on that power that these networks offer. UCT likes it too, since they now have my money.

As soon as I figure out how to add twitter feeds to wordpress.com‘s widgets, I’ll do just that.

Till then, a little birdie told me that you can follow me @here

@lesterhein