It’s no secret but SA users are predominantly pretty switched off to technology.

While I am proud that I was at the healm when News24 achieved 1 000 000 domestic users (now 1.25 million by the way) - but I am not proud that 47% of News24 readers out of quite a decent sample do not know what Firefox is???

You really have to live under a cyber-rock to be that switched off? And this my friends is why web2.0 projects in SA are so unrewarded. The HARSH REALITY is that besides this community (the blogosphere) and a tiny % of the market that is switched on - the SA market is largely lagging in user-savyness (if that’s a word)

We saw that when the greater part of our audience did not know what to do with a product like laaik.it.

It reminds me of when I diligently tutored my mom to use windows. I love her - but it was hell!!

This is a response to *cheeky* tweets made by Slojo and Rafiq stirring the pot asking why I am not using 24.com blogs to write my personal blog - which is a very good question. And to Mandy de Waal who said in a comment on my blog about 24.com blogs- “But the blogging content is by and large tragic. You have to wade through reams and reams of tripe, cut & paste etc to get to good writers. If there was a better content filtering system that would separate the wheat from the chaff (like M&G have done with Thought Leader / Amagama) that would be great.”

So here is my response: >> Warning - it is long but worth a read.
I believe that there is a major success story going on with 24.com Blogs and I will try and give some of the highlights and reasoning here: ( you will need to suspend all your Wordpress and tech elitism and have an open mind as you read on)

As a starting point on a cursory level blogging is about self-publishing - and blogs offer the tools to do just that.

But blogging is about more than that. Community is an important aspect and “community of interest” even more so. At 24.com we have built a great community.

You need to understand that the blogging community of SA AKA -the Bloggerati - which is tiny in size is a very specific segment of people - tech-savvy, interested in a certain type of content which is generally web focussed and are in itself a community of interest.

Some people are interested in slice-of- life, “my cat does not like her pellets” type of conversation. People find common ground and interest and so the 24.com bloggers are an intirely a different community. In fact it is a number of communities because we have created niches such as http://womenblogs.24.com, http://foodblogs.24.com, http://sportblogs.24.com and many more. So everyday Joe-soaps get to share their views on these topics.

They are the so-called “Mass-market”, while most WP users are not. 24.com focusses on mass market because that is hopefully where the numbers and money eventually will be. Our community is very active indeed with 1350 active bloggers generating 101 000 comments in May 2008- so 75 comments on average per blogger. There are a nucleus of people who participate more than that as our core users. 92 000 unique readers consumed this “trite” content and generated over 1 million page impressions of advertising inventory which we have monetised very nicely with Perdeberg Wines - our current partner in blogs.

If you cite Thoughtleader then I am sorry to say that even though they do not freely release their stats I doubt very much that Thoughtleader has anything close to 92 000 readers?

Mandy, I have to be direct and say that your opinion is quite elitist- and typical of print journalists who think the “unwashed masses” are not worthy of an opinion. I don’t mean to attack you but you did make some superficial comments about one of my “babies”. People in the mass market have proved time and time again that they love the frivolous. Same reason more people read tabloids over publications like the MG.

PLUS as a web-adopter I am surprised at your opinions. Web2.0’s ethos is about sharing and the democracy of the web - every man has a voice and all those good things. The more voices the merrier in the conversation.

Basic principles of Business and entrepreneurship is not about elitism - but about finding and building a market.

In fact some of the content is very good, here are a few bios on some of our top bloggers: (These exerts are courtesy of Alistair Fairweather, our “blog-father”, killer product manager and my right hand).

Madmom

An always topical and lively blogger with a real sense of humour and style. She’s coming up for two years on the platform, and is still as spunky as ever. She reads and comments a lot, and this attracts both readers and fans.

Hutton of Only the Lonely

She’s a bit of an obsessive who’s been around since the year dot, but is also a quite a good writer. Her real strength is that she reads EVERYONE’s blogs – quite literally. She also holds fun impromptu competitions, like “caption this image” and such.

MP3

Very much a personal journal, MP3’s blog catalogue’s everything in the world that irritates or amuses him on a daily basis. Not afraid to voice his opinion, MP3 is foul mouthed at times, and normally also quite funny. He frequently helps out other bloggers with tech issues and is actually a very nice guy under the thorny exterior.

DT of DT Sticks

Another real live wire – DT shares everything online (and I mean everything) – including her recently discovered pregnancy. She’s candid, witty and more than a little naughty but with a real social agenda. She runs a drug testing business and is vehemently anti-narcotics. She is another social butterfly – commenting on dozens of blogs a day.

Colonialist of Settler’s Perspective

One of our many animal lovers, she’s another comment queen, with an eye on hundreds of blogs. She and a couple of other bloggers spontaneously started the KlubKittyKat to home abandoned cats. She’s quite a fun writer, and spends most of her time “responding” via posts rather than making points. Hers is a very “interactive” blog.

Some thoughts on the topic from Alistair :

“Our blogs are much more about communication and response than pure “publishing”. The comments are often more important than the post – since it’s the way that the community reacts to the post that determines it’s “success” or “failure”. Bloggers are forever holding raging debates, with both of them posting “open letters” to one another. Most of our top bloggers spend a significant amount of time reading and participating – usually more than they spend actually posting. We will soon release profiles and communication tools that will let them take it to the next level.

So our blogs aren’t as much about good content as they are about good conversations. They are more about community activity and action and less about high minded ideals of journalism. Our bloggers want to meet each other in real life – they want to make a difference in their real life communities. They don’t care if what they write is trite or silly – they just want to be heard (and to hear). In that way our blogs are more about self expression, and much less about self promotion.”

One of the things I am most proud of that is that we manage our bloggers and communicates with them on a daily basis about new developments and their problems. We are very close to the pulse of the personalities in our community and it’s agreat case study in community management. The difference is that we do not write public blog posts proclaiming it. So these gems are little known.

Proof in the numbers:

Arthur Goldstuck released his independent study into the Blogosphere in Jan 2008 (Blogging as a fad is over; serious blogging arrives).

In that he talked about 3 789 active SA blogs in December 2007. We had over 14oo in April 2008 - which means that roughly I would estimate at least 1/3 of the total active SA blogosphere. Not to shabby for a ‘crappy’ platform with “tragic” content?

Why do I use WP and not 24.com blogs?

For the reasons I have mentioned 24.com blogs is a community who would not be interested in the content I while post on my professional blog which is industry specific. The community I would like to access and participate with are in the WP ecosystem whereas 24.com blogs are essentially a walled off community. I do in fact have a personal blog on 24 where I can post pictures of my slice of life stuff. >> http://blogs.24.com/entropy

YES - we are aware that 24 blogs are “crappy” tech stacked up against a Wordpress ecosystem with all the amazing plugins and features that the open source community offers but consider this:

- We peaked too soon, - when we launched 24.com WP was not on the map in these parts
- Our Tech management insisted that the business only use .Net - which we have managed to put pressure on them and change this, this year.
- We have a serious integration strategy (something Yahoo have failed to do so far) that is still underway - which means that all our platforms need to talk to one another around authentication and profiling. Using WP would be a quick solution but to integrate into our other products according to the strategy we are building out - in effect a technical nightmare.
- We own the platform - which seemed important at the time.
- We have a deeper community product planned. Mybloglog is a hack to provide community which you do not own and Buddypress was not an option even though we are waiting to see where that goes.

So there is a method to the madness. Comments made about our platform seem to imply that we are ignorant and we do not know what we are doing. Working in a corporate with a multitude of constraints does often force the business in certain directions. But there is always a good reason.

Also WP is perfect for self-branding and personalisation as well as hot plugins. There is no denying that. If we did it again I would have looked at WP and an Open source system. But - that’s life.

While you mentioned Thoughtleader:

Full Credit and fair play to Matt and Vin at the MG - but I am sorry to say that Thoughtleader is a columnist/opinion product. Yes - it cleverly uses blogging technology as a CMS to provide better functionality, dynamism and community interaction. It is sexy I admit, but do not regard it as a web2.0 landmark. So it is a great use of technology and positioning - but essentially comparing Thoughtleader to 24.com blogs is like comparing the 8′0clock News with a soap opera.

Blogs are not a homogenous concept. Just like Rugby and cricket are different sports. Many people out there also mistakenly regard Social Networking as a homogeneous concept (which I will write about another time).

They are different sports. The only commonality is the one buzzword - blog.

Check out this cool thing our bloggers are doing. They organised on their own accord a 24.com initiative called 24.com Cares which will involve a family day planned by them. That’s what the web is about. Self-organising.

It’s so cool I do not even mind that they have butchered our brand : )

That’s it for now but I have much more to say on this and related topics.

Rafiq, Mandy - hope that addresses your questions?

Peace.

Wheels24 just relaunched their site last night. So why is it hot? You might not like the design or the content but the magic here is that it is the first 24.com site to be launched on the new content management system (CMS) that we built in-house. That’s the sexy part.

Major systems like CMS’s that can handle our editorial processes and scale to our load are hardcore. Many people are boisterous about writing a CMS but writing one for a small site and writing a system to power a multitude of content sites with over 2.5 million domestic visitors is another kettle of cows and not for the faint-hearted. But writing an unstable CMS can put your entire business at risk - so it’s not small potatoes!

Matt Buckland highlights some of the issues in his post about technology choices

I asked our head 24.com architect geek (Mike Needham) for three lines on why he thinks it’s so hot and I got a little more than 3 lines : ) …..

”

The new CMS is a hybrid of .Net, AJAX and Linux based technology. It’s a result of 6 months worth of development with a core team of .Net/Web developers (a total of 5.5 person years of dev work)

Some key technical features for the geeks out there:

• An advanced pure AJAX based administration tool connecting to C# service layer running over Microsoft SQL in a master slave configuration. The Ajax admin tools means we can administer our CMS from anywhere in the world from machines running various browsers and operating systems. With the great functionality that an AJAX interface affords us the editors are able to move articles around the CMS with technologies like drag and drop, multi-tabbed interfaces etc.
• The front end site that the customers connect to is purely written in .Net and also makes use of AJAX technology to dynamically populate menus etc
• We’ve applied some pretty advanced URL re-writing techniques to support all legacy format URL’s from previous CMS systems going back as far as 1999
• The search is powered by our in house search engine which is some of the leading technology in the world right now.
• We’ve also improved our SEO relevance with the inclusion of Title and date in our new URL format.
• Our caching system is one of the more complex architectural pieces of the new CMS. We run 6 layers of caching which are expired in real-time off events from the admin system. So the latency in getting new content to the site from the moment of publishing could be brought down to near real time where required (thi is configured on a per widget basis). The caching is actually so extensive that most parts of the system can be taken down for maintenance without stopping the site. This is largely thanks to memcache - our middle tier distributed cache (the same one Facebook uses).
• In terms of scale the system is only limited by physical servers. All layers scale out (even the database layer which can be load balanced).
• We run compression across all pages which puts our home page down to sizes of +-22k (original content sitting at +-90k)
• Wheels24 falls in to one of the heavy trafficked sites in the country. With the switch over we are barely putting our servers above 2% CPU. No doubt we will come across the odd glitch over the next week or so but so far so good. Hope you all find it responsive and stable.”

”

So WELL DONE to the CMS Crew! They did a shithot job on a hardcore piece of tech.

Laaik.it is/was my baby - so I guess I am wholly biased on this one. But I still do have good instincts and I have a good feeling about this one. I have always viewed the web as a marathon and not a sprint. All it takes is a little spark in the right places. Even Facebook is a case in point. People refer to Facebook as though it came out of nowhere in a strike of blinding light. Not so. It’s been a few long years since Zuckerberg hatched it in Feb 2004. It spread from dorm - to campus - to other campuses to the world - and that took a while - and some doing.

When you look at the Facebook architecture it looks so simple on the surface but the engineering is masterful. That took a long time to achieve and ultimately with investment and an army of coding kings.

My point? - Laaik.it is a long way from the shelf.

We know that the product sorelyneeds RSS feeds, e-mail alerts and a leaderboard (which are both working fantastically) on Answerit .

After that - Wordpress plugins, a useful facebook app and widgets for our editorial products like News24 to leverage for us.

I never really thought that competitors like IOL, iafrica etc would add Laaik.it onto their pages - but it was worth a shot. It’s not easy when you are the big player in the market. Everyone views you as the enemy. That’s the reason Muti can get everywhere we cannot. They have a great product but importantly they are not tagged as a threat.

On that point I have never thought of Muti as a competitor. They talk to a very specific niche of tech-elite and I am looking at a product focussed on Entertainment, celebrity, sport and far more mainstream.

We will keep on marching and hopefully get along to the dev once we have a few more very exciting projects off the plate at 24.com.

I blogged this a while back when we hit the milestone but here is the link to the official press release. We are also running a campaign to celebrate the achievement on Radio, online and in Newspapers.

Press release here

Connected South Africans spend 27 percent of their time on websites created by 24.com.

This equates to slightly more than one in every four minutes online – at least 16 percent more than any other local digital publisher and double that of the largest digital publisher in the UK.

Read the report here