The SA blog awards is a showcase of the very best of South African blogs. They endeavour to bring South African bloggers to the forefront of people’s attention, both locally and internationally, increasing exposure for South Africa’s great bloggers.

Please vote for BandwidthBlog for the Groupon Best Science and Technology blog award. Voting closes on the 9th November 2011.

To vote, click on the SA Blog Awards box on the right.

We really appreciate your support!

This map by XKCD might look like a child made it, but it is in fact based on actual traffic to these sites. Here is the description:

Communities rise and fall, and total membership numbers are no longer a good measure of a community’s current size and health.  This updated map uses sizes to represent total social activity in a community – that is, how much talking, playing, sharing or other socializing happens there.  This meant some comparing of apples and oranges, but I did my best and tried to be consistent.

Do yourself a favour and look at the large version of this file, it is pretty expansive. A few things took me by surprise – look at the size of QQ and Farmville. But these communities are not a patch compared to Email and the cellular cash cow called SMS.

Another very cool map was recently created for Web 2.0 Summit, called the Points of Control Map, which integrates a few other players, not only online communities. This map is actually interactive – so I recommend you go view the full version.

This is the very same map that recently came under criticism from Mark Zuckerburg, in which he mentioned that there is one missing part – “uncharted territory“…  This is probably where innovative products like Facebook’s new messaging system would want to explore.

Source: xkcd

The SA based wordpress design pros over at Obox have gone and made it easy for any wordpress site owner to go “mobile”. And I dont mean those standard iPhone plugins which just redact the posts and give them neat iPhone buttons. No, this is a plug and play solution that instantly makes sites look professional, as if they were made to run on a mobile phone. And its not iPhone only – its optimized for webkit browsers, so your Android and Nokia site visitors will be treated to the same effects. Current features that can be enabled in Obox Mobile include:

• Touch operated feature post slider
• Automatic orientation adjustment
• Menu management
• Search bar
• Commenting (including threaded comments)
• Logo uploader
• Background uploader
• Advert management for mobile
• Theme switcher
• Automatic upgrades

I tried out the site demo’s and I was pleasantly surprised – sliders loaded quickly and the effects were pretty great considering they were rendered inside a browser. I was especially impressed by the orientation changes – images rerender automatically to fit different widths, and resolutions. So whether you use iPhone (Retina display or not), or one of the many different Android resolutions out there, the orientation changes works without problems.   I patiently wait for the first sites to start using this, and this would probably be soon enough, seeing as it is merely a plug and play add on for wordpress.

As a bonus if you go ahead and purchase Obox Mobile over the next month you can be entered into a draw to win a brand new iPhone 4. What better way to demo your brand new mobile enabled site? It could not be any easier to enter: Once you’ve purchased your copy of the framework, you’ll automatically be taken to a “tweet this” screen. Push the button and BANG, you’re in with a chance.

Have a go and demo Obox Mobile, type this URL into your phone and watch the magic happen: demo.obox-design.com/oboxmobile

Currently content creators are sitting with a bit of a dillemma – the internet is not a place that necessarily likes paying for content, or at least thats the opinion of users. Any business case looking into news media will confirm this – people do not want to not want to pay for something that they can get free. Just ask Rupert Murdoch who recently decided to start asking people subscription charges to access the Times website. Early indicators show that its not neccesarily a big success. But this not because people do not want to pay for content, they hate the fragmented paywall system.

Solutions like iTunes for multimedia proves that people are willing to pay for content, provided its easy to do, and universal in terms of scope. And this is where Cred comes in, created by South Africans Saul Kropman, Jason Kramer and Toby Kurien. Instead of having to register at every content site (for example like The Times), users will use the Cred micropayment system to purchase credits to buy access to the relevant article. Cred is not only applicable to text based content like news, but multimedia sources as well.

At present, one Cred is worth one South African Rand, and publishers can charge up to a maximum of 20 Creds. At present  different denominations are available, starting from around R50 up to R150. In future users will be able to define their own amount. At present the system uses your credit card to pay for these, but Paypal support is coming in future.

For more info, here is the official press release:
As the developed world moves towards spending more online than on traditional media such as television and print, you’d assume that monetization of the Internet would come from advertising. With advertising revenue come massive expenses as journalists, technology and marketing come into play.  Internationally, media mogul Rupert Murdoch runs around calling everyone on the Internet a kleptomaniac for stealing his content and is aiming to lock down his online portals and go so far as to remove them from Google.

The fact remains that even with a full advertising complement, revenue simply cannot outweigh costs.

This is essentially where Cred comes in, we allow content providers to monetize their websites by charging users for content with individual micropayments or subscriptions. We at Cred love content; we personally create and consume content on a constant basis and it was this passion for excellent quality that led to the idea for Cred. With online text, audio and video being free there is little ascribed value and if there’s no value, what pressure is there for excellent content to be produced? Cred aims to preserve quality content by putting a value; we believe that the cream of content will then rise to the top.

Currently in the final stages of testing, we’re accepting sign ups from content providers looking to prove their content is worth charging for. Initially we’re available for the WordPress platform and eventually will expand to other platforms such as Drupal, Joomla as well as provide documentation that will allow developers to hook into their own niche content management systems.

The revenue model affords content providers 80% of all revenue without having to worry about fraud, payment gateways and are linked to a ubiquitous payment system thus allowing for easier access to your content by users with a Cred account. Cred scales perfectly for larger organisations as they can white label the Cred offering if desired.

Whether a small, niche publisher, band, photographer, author or massive media conglomerate anyone can start charging for their content with Cred.

Go to www.yourcred.com to sign up and follow us on twitter: @yourcred

If you’re a South African blogger, then chances are you’re familiar with the ups and downs that blog aggregator Amatomu has experienced over the past couple of years.

Once the darling of the SA blogging community, Amatomu began to show signs of strain after its original creators, Matthew Buckland and Vincent Maher, left the company that owned the site (Mail & Guardian Online). The repeated downtime eventually got so bad that many top bloggers in the country reluctantly removed the code from their blogs, as it was presumed to be causing errors and slowing down page-load times.

Registered Amatomu users this week received an email explaining that the site has now been taken over by Creative Spark Interactive. What makes this particularly good news is that Creative Spark is Matthew Buckland’s new project – so in a sense, Amatomu is going back home.

The Creative Spark team says, “We are passionate about amatomu.com and believe it has a bright future. We are aware of the stability issues the site has experienced, and we have made significant changes to improve uptime. We do monitor the site daily and respond to all technical complaints and issues. We will also be working on the core architecture of the site during the course of the year to increase stability.”

They’ve also called for any PHP developers interested in playing a role (either part-time or full-time) to make contact with them.

Let’s hope that this is the beginning of a new chapter in Amatomu’s story – a happier one this time.

Simply providing a place for African internet users to get on to the web is no longer good enough for South African based blogging platform Bundublog.com.

We’re a firm believer that African internet users still want to have their own little piece on the web, but we realised that Bundublog had to up its focus on becoming a destination website rather than just a freebie tool for bloggers.

With that in mind, the site has undergone a basic upgrade of its layout and its landing page now incorporates interviews with leading African tech experts as well as some lighter spirited social interviews.
The site can now also accommodate Bundublog aggregated podcasts, event listings and a section which will focus on giving South African entertainers – including comedians and music artists – the opportunity to show off their talent to the community.

On the marketing front, Bundublog has expanded its geo-targeting to include Zambia, Kenya, Nigeria and Egypt as it seeks to become a truly African platform.

Another shift in focus is working out ways to help bloggers monetise their offering. For many blogging is a labour of love with few financial rewards unless you are a small business using it as part of your marketing arsenal.

With that in mind we have collaborated with local pay-per-click network AD:Dynamo and will shortly be announcing a partnership with a local mobile advertising company which could potentially provide bloggers with some annuity income from their blogs.

There is a perception out there that blogging is “old school” in the face of various new social media channels – this is something we completely disagree with. The global recession has forced businesses of all shapes and sizes to re-look at how they market their products and target online communities.

A vibrant blogging community, not only provides a channel for entrepreneurs to gain exposure, but also offers some brilliant marketing opportunities for merchants.

How many Twitter users are there in South Africa? Fuseware just made available their latest SA Twitter report, which has some very interesting facts:

• Number of Active* SA Twitter users: 55000
• Monthly tweets from SA: 1.5 million
• Twitter web penetration: 4.5% of SA sites reference Twitter
• Twitter SA site popularity: 7th most visited website in SA
• Average Twitter followers for SA: 115
• Average friends for SA: 122
• Average total tweets per user for SA: 346
• Percent of protected accounts: 0.38%
• Percent of geo-location enabled accounts: 12.96%
• Percent of Twitter verified accounts: 0.014%
• People hardly use Twitter.com directly for posting tweets, with only 26% logging into the site to post updates.
• The most popular Twitter client is TweetDeck, with 10% of all SA tweeters using it.
• People hardly use Twitter.com directly for posting tweets, with only 26% logging into the site to post updates.The most popular Twitter client is TweetDeck, with 10% of all SA tweeters using it.
• SA mostly tweets at night, between 7 and 8 pm. Many also tweet first thing in the morning, and over lunch.
• Cape Town and Johannesburg are the most busy tweeters.

This is a pretty great report by the guys at Fuseware, with lots more info – so go download it here.

Obox Design, a premium theme studio based in Hout Bay, Cape Town, has joined up with popular micro-blogging service Posterous to supply their users with a selection of themes. The Obox themes will be included in the official Posterous theme directory, and will all be free. Three themes are already available, with two more in the pipeline.

Themes now available
My.List, a visual theme suited to designers or photographers:

Mad Men, formerly known as Smoke & Tumble:

Post Press, formerly known as Micro.Press:

The two themes currently in development are Minimal (simple design with a clear focus on the content), and Wired Inspired (includes some subtle grunge elements). Read more about the partnership on the Obox blog.