Ages ago I read about the different new and cool ways to shake hands and I was very impressed with the Drop Knee Handshake as done by Seth Rotherham and The Dude.

So I had this mulling around in the back of my head for a while, but last week I finally got the courage to do it in public. I was out on a gorgeous Monday evening at my favourite beachside bar, Doodles beachfront in Table View. I got the obligatory 4 tequilas down my throat and recruited my mate The Labour Broker to be my guinea pig.

I nervously sort of explained the whole concept to him and then went for it. Luckily Asstastic was on hand with her faithful Blackberry and the moment was captured on video.

So without further ado, I present to you, Joe Social and The Labour Broker doing the Drop Knee (big thanks to Seth and co), done in public, maybe for the first time?

Wouldn’t it be awesome if the guys at 2oceansvibe could let me know if this is a world first?

You can see the original Drop Knee Handshake as done by Seth Rotherham and The Dude here.

Well much to my dismay I’ve just read that the self proclaimed music maestro of South Africa, Randall Abrahams is going to be a judge on the new show.

How sad is that?! I can only imagine how Seth Rotherham over at 2oceansvibe.com is going to react to this disturbing latest development,what with his well known public humiliation spat with Randall here.

Seth 7 – Randall 0

We had a chance to do something different on this show and we blew it.

Tonight is carrying this article:

From a frumpy 40-something Scotswoman and a 16-year-old street dancer to a Texas-born ventriloquist and an insurance-selling male opera singer, the British and US versions of the Got Talent? franchise have proved to be a true testament to the natural gifts of “the everyman”.

But while the likes of Susan Boyle may suddenly find themselves thrust into the full glare of the showbiz spotlight, it’s the men and women seated at the judges’ desk who are ultimately responsible for a reality show’s make or break factor. So much so, the folks affording contestants the yay or nay verdict have been known to become celebrities in their own right.

Just ask Simon Cowell.

Thanks to his cutting (and often controversial) criticisms of contenders on American Idol and The X-Factor over the years, he of the man-boobs is now a recognised name the world over. Would that Cowell’s South African counterpart, Randall Abrahams, could someday find himself in a similar position.

Having only recently vacated his adjudicator’s seat on Idols V, we can exclusively reveal that Abrahams (with Ian von Memerty and Shado Twala) is again poised to offer up his trademark dead-pan expression as a judge on SA’s Got Talent.

You can read the rest of the article here.

Love the manboobs chirp. Nice!

The rest of the judges are pretty cool I guess. It’s nice that Anele Mdoda is compering, she has a sharp wit. Can’t say I know too much about the rest.

The UK took it upon themselves to show us the grace and beauty of Amanda Holden week in and week out.

We choose Randall.

Can’t say Im enjoying that vibe. Let’s Recap… and little liked judge, no eye candy, lack of wit… hmmm this is sure to be a winner! I hope I’m wrong!

Oh wait  I just remembered I only do DSTV, cos thats the way I like to roll.

I recently found out that this wonderful phenomenon is called the Dimples Of Venus.

I have to say that again, the Dimples Of Venus. This Venus musta been quite the babe. Anyway after learning all about it on the most informative show on Cape Town television Netvision (I made that up) 2oceansvibe Weather Girls, I decided to do a little research and find out some more.

First I stumbled across Backdimples.co.uk, a rather confusingly put together but well inspired website devoted solely to these wonderful depressions.The better put together but far less inspiring pictorially is Dimplegirls.

Wikipedia tells us more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimples_of_Venus

The dimples of Venus (also known as booty dimples, back dimples, or butt dimples) are sagittally symmetrical indentations sometimes visible on the human lower back, just superior to the gluteal cleft. They are directly superficial to the two sacroiliac joints, the sites where the sacrum attaches to the ilium of the pelvis.

The term “dimples of Venus,” while informal, is a historically accepted name within the medical profession for the superficial topography of the sacroiliac joints. The Latin name is fossae lumbales laterales (“lateral lumbar indentations”). These indentations are created by a short ligament stretching between the posterior superior iliac spine and the skin.[1]

Dimples of Venus are often considered a sexually desirable feature for women. The dimples are more common in women than men, but they are rare overall.

Well there’s a helluva lot of s alliteration there. What a wonderfully descriptive piece.

Now let’s move on to the money shot shall we?

Calm down please, thank you

None other than Jessica Biel has it…

Biel Back Dimples

I could wax lyrical about the advantages of having Jessica Biel on our screens but I’ll reserve that for another day…

This is exactly what social media is about, and I ALWAYS promote the public voicing their opinion. Good on you Seth.

I haven’t been to the store in question but I can imagine the total apathy, we see it everywhere.

I decided to check out this ‘core group’ so I went onto their website and the VERY FIRST thing I saw was the article posted on the front page. It starts with…

“AN FRANCISCO—January 6, 2009—Apple® today introduced iLife® ’09…”

They can’t even get the FIRST word on their website spelt correctly…

The tone has been set.

I’m a bit late on this episode this week. I had a fat party at Doodles last night where I was dodging the renovations to get my fill of the action. Thursday, two hours happy hour, you know the drill.

So as I always do this time of the week I checked out Seth Rotherhams 2oceansvibe ‘The Weather Girls’ episode. Not only is it a fuck load better than watching a SABC weather report, the girls are always smoking, the humour is great and the lifestyle part of it is fun.

I swear to God everyone is gonna be doing snap fisties soon. Other than that, my all time favourite now has a name. The Dimples of Venus. Geez this Venus chick musta been something else.

This weeks Weather Girl is none other than Tracy McGregor.

and Venus was her name.

Unfortunately the weather is a total dogs arse this weekend, but looking at Tracy grace the small screen (ok maybe not that small I have a bigscreen Laptop) was well worth my waking up early effort. The way she pulls off bikini tops with jeans bottoms is a rare super talent. Cape Town chicks hey, I love ‘em.

Well enough of me, more of Tracy McGregor.

I dunno about you but that mofarkin ‘Do the death test’ advert is gonna die!!

In another lifetime I sold advertising space, banner based, into high traffic websites in Europe. We talked CPM and user retention, click through rates and cost per click analysis. As we went on we found that we could measure and track the exact cost per user aquisition and even in some cases analyse the path that user would take to get to the sites we were advertising. We could track practically all of them once they were there and how they behaved thereafter. While this is still very interesting and relevant information, what we are seeing now is loyalty to news sources and user profiles based on an ageing local Internet user demographic.

We are not happy to be directed and driven to our destination anymore. Now we do the driving.

Why is this important? This shows us the path our Internet model will take and more importantly shows us what readers want and where they go to get their news ‘fix’. What sources they trust and what styles of delivery they are engaged by. No longer are we only simple ‘point and clickers’ enticed by rotating banners with snappy taglines conveniently placed via our ‘cookie footprint’ on the sites we frequent. Now we follow news sources via RSS email subscriptons and sites we have bookmarked. We are designing and digesting our news media the way we want to and media delivery giants like Google know this and are constantly tailoring their products based on what we subscribe to, what we choose to read rather than what we can have placed in front of us.

They are not replacing newspaper material, they are simply replacing the the raw material, the way the news is delivered.

So how does this affect us? Let’s take the South African news sites in this study as an example. News24 and The Times are gaining ground where sites like SABC news and iAfrica are losing it. Why? The answer is really simple. Blogging and the relevant multimedia. While multimedia is not neccesarily the easiest method to follow, and may not take over from the written word for some time yet, sites like The Times make a good fist of it. Bloggers take this onboard and comment on it. As readers, we are now deciding to follow bloggers and writers we instinctively ‘trust’ because they are not paid writers in the true sense.

Readers are repeaters, retweeters if you like. Joe Public has come to the party on these sites.

The pulse of our nations news is kept healthily beating by the sites I see at Afrigator and the musings of bloggers like Seth Rotherham at 2oceansvibe. I don’t particularly subscribe to everything Seth blogs about for example, but I get where he is coming from. He is the voice of Joe Public in the sense that he blogs about what he sees fit to blog about, things that have irked him, media he finds interesting and products he feels like endorsing. Furthermore he represents the man in the street who has used the Internet from inception in our market, and that is exactly why he has credibility. He has staying power.

Whilst a lot of what he writes about is general humour with a good dose of paid for article marketing, there is enough of a lifestyle and opinion based rhetoric, all delivered with great humour, to keep me interested over and above the product placement that I may or may not heed. I quite often find the things he blogs about at other sites before he writes about them, but to me whats important is what HE thinks about the goings on in our media and social landscape. This doesnt mean that if Seth has a bad experience at a particular store that I will be inclined to think the same, it just means that I know that someone else out there has the wherewithall to write about these experiences and thats what drives our collective consciousness as consumers.

Moving along to the guys at Afrigator and the content they uncover and deliver to us, via the excellent Afrigator website, the fledgling but wildy exciting Gatorpeeps application and the ever so interesting Adgator product. Why is this important to me? Well I can digest what ordinary south africans think, what ordinary South Africans feel it neccesary to ‘peep’ about, and be exposed to the brands and media around such discussion. A few short months ago I used to get my daily news fix from a multitude of South African news services. Not anymore. I get it from Aggregator sites like Afrigator, certain choice news sites such as News24, all opinionated on by blogs like 2oceansvibe, imod and the like. If you’re a publisher of any size, pontificating like me or simply making a running commentary (also like me) then ignore these sites at your peril.

When I decided to launch my personal opinion based personal news site here at Socialyz.com, my first thought was to extract interesting news and relay my opinion on such matters via a blogging platform which was slightly ‘magazinelike’. This would serve to a) dish up the content in a digest format where certain opics can be taken in channel by channel and b) allow for a less rigid, more opinion based type of article that readers can lap up, take apart and comment upon.

I found that making comment on certain popular media topics does stimulate debate on my site, and that is EXACTLY what I’m after. I’d like to know, hear and read what my readers think of the material I’m delivering. Give it a thumbs up or down, its your prerogative. Moreover, I find that by actually putting the thoughts out there on certain topics, they can be revisited and rehashed at a later date, to, amongst other things, guage what we liked, what we hated, when we liked it and when we hated it.

This open kind of communication spells one thing to me. User maturity. As we grow as an audience so we grow as commentators, as we grow as critics, so we grow as targets for other critics.

Put simply, we are on our soap boxes, mass broadcasting of the message from these soap boxes is sure to follow in other formats, whether via braodband episode based ‘bite sized’ programming a la from the couch, and 2oceansvibe.tv or via the comment such sites and episodes stimulate.

So whilst I have nothing against the back markers in this race, or the people working tirelessly at these organisations. That said, each race must be led by someone, and everyone loves a winner. Call me a media whore or a social media slut, but my money is behind the bloggers as the trend setters and race leaders.

I think its brilliant. Watch out girls this is one super cool super model. Reminds me of one of my all time fave films, Zoolander.

Yogi Sip should release this as an advert. Hmmm maybe they have?

Enjoy!

I’ve been working in the Internet and more and web based business arena for close on 12 years now, so this topic always interests me. It’s even more interesting for me having worked through the ‘dot bomb’ in the UK circa 2000/2001 and having seen all the fall out from that. An article such as this is a long time coming in my mind and what a shame it has been such a wait.

Ideas postulated around desks and in bars close on a decade ago have not found their place in South Africa’s Internet community simply because connectivity and penetration wouldn’t marrry for such a long time.

To be a blogger and Internet Entrepreneur can sometimes be a daunting thing. More so in South Africa.

Not being classically trained in any way and simply working from the seat of my pants, driven by a desire to fully explore media, thrash out ideas and see where this whole Internet / communication malarchy can take us is what it’s all about for me. Naturally, driving down cost, increasing revenue methodologies and a non traditional working environment are contributing factors to the attraction of this business arena. How else, other than using blogging and social communication methods, could anyone self taught, through the weight of sheer determination realise their dreams of contributing to the most exciting thing to happen to the South African media landscape in so very long?

We hear (and feel) how South Africa is currently experiencing strong broadband adoption and Internet usage growth – something expected so many years ago, but hampered by government interference, archaic regulations and a monopolistic fixed line environment. It’s with great pleasure I can read and deseminate such information that we now can proudly talk about. South African Bloggers and News Providers are finding their feet and the ground appears solid. Yes we have a throttled environment in most respects are are still in many areas subject to restrictions of various kinds, but we have options and that’s the important thing.

According to a recent research report by World Wide Works South, and I quote from the article posted above,

“…Africa’s Internet population is expected to grow as much in the next five years as it has in the 15 years since the Internet became commercially available in South Africa.”

The article goes on to relate how this research also shows we can expect double digit figure growth going forward, and this is expected for the next 5 years.

The summary of popular websites listed in this article serve to showcase the changing face of South Africa’s online media landscape. Google still dominates but is now joined by Facebook. Wikipedia and Blogger being up there shows we are finding our voice quite beautifully thanks, both in how we learn and how we discuss what we are learning. Internet banking now is the norm. Gumtree shows us that Newspaper classifieds sections will continue to get thinner by the quarter.

Our favourite sites are increasingly South African and increasing we use them as tools. This is the local content muttering I discussed with my peers a decade ago off Tottenham Court Road while we planned our move back home and how we would make our way boldly forward with LAMP architecture lighting our way. We talked about how local would be lekker.

Our favourite sites are blogs now. We clearly want to see and hear real people doing real things. We want Internet Heroes to get the next decade underway. I’d hazard a guess you’ll find them at Afrigator where we can hear them daily, unadulterated and uncensored.

Our favourite bloggers now have followings in the thousands. Seth Rotherham at 2oceansvibe encourages us to live the holiday, has taught us ‘slap, snap, fisties’, and how to slice an Avo, and all this in glorious full colour streaming broadband with a smile. This is happening in my city not in some multiplex somewhere in California with gourmet chefs and sleeping pods. This is the beginning of the next generation. Blogs are the new TV channels and we don’t need a licence for them and that suits me just fine.