A few events have got me thinking about the direction of the Web over the next twenty years or so. The first was a conversation I had with Matthew Buckland about whether Facebook, or something like it, would become a type of operating system in the ...
Views: 131 | 1 Comment » | posted on Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 | Tags: none
Before we launched Thought Leader, its management team got together to discuss the invitation process. All three of us would have been classified as "white" by the National Party government and, indeed, we have benefited from the fact our parents we...
The reason social theorists that could be classified as postmodernists have failed to deal with the changes brought about by the newer trends in digital media usage is simple -- these changes represent, materially, what they have been thinking about ...
I read with interest a few posts on the local blogosphere about how South Africans whinge and whine about the crime rate, so I became curious whether this is true on the local blogosphere.
I did some digging into the statistical data I have on A...
In my life, I have a sense that a lot of pwnage has happened but I never really knew what it meant or even how to say "me & the l337 pwned you n00bz" properly. Today I decided it was time to get my facts straight about the origins of the words "pwn"...
For the past 10 years I have been trying to read Umberto Eco’s The Island of the Day Before and, although it is not a particularly long book, reading it from cover to cover has been a bitter struggle.
First, some context: Eco is my favourite aut...
The mainstream media have been reporting lately that Facebook, the popular social networking application that lets you swap digital "secreta" with your long-lost friends, is being banned by more and more businesses in South Africa.
The banks are s...
Since early 2005, when I started working with Colin Daniels at the New Media Lab, my thinking about the web has been saturated by the language, principles and ideals of Web 2.0 and specifically the sub-set of uses we call "social media". So I had to...
A group of American and Iraqi reporters has launched a blog, website and YouTube video channel called Alive in Baghdad that "formed to counter the sound-bite-driven, ‘live from’ news model".
The videos on YouTube, predictably, have inspi...
I doubt that I am completely wrong when I say web development companies in South Africa have missed the Web 2.0 boat and are watching us steam away as we break out the caviar on deck. Can someone please show me where this caviar is exactly, when I'm...
Vincent Maher is the Mail & Guardian Online's digital strategist. He has worked in the web industry for 12 years, was the head of the New Media Lab at the Rhodes University School of Journalism and Media Studies and writes columns for Enjin and Intelligence magazines. He is a judge of the Telkom ICT Journalist of the Year Awards and the developer of Amatomu.com.
His current area of focus is Web 2.0 and social media strategy for the traditional media.
