Nur Ahmad Furlong

Category: Blogging

  • Web Guru Spotlight 4: Matthew Buckland GM of the M&G

    webguruspotlight-mattbuckla

    Today we will be speaking to Matthew Buckland, General Manager of the Mail & Guardian Online and co-founder of award-winning blog aggregator amatomu.com. I had the pleasure of working with Matthew years ago at iafrica.com in the early days when I just stepped into the new media space. Back then Matthew was an online editor. I can imagine it was the beginnings of what now is a real passionate relationship with digital media.

    Matthew regularly speaks at media events both locally and internationally and is at the forefront of new media developments in the new media industry & the blogosphere in South Africa.

    Hi Matthew. Firstly, let me say it’s great chatting to you again after all this time and I’m impressed with the way you’ve moved since those days back at iafrica.com.

    So tell me, what’s your current job description?

    As the GM I am responsible for the overall business and strategy of the Mail & Guardian Online. A large part of my role is conceptualising and building new sites that attract audience and provide a service to users. It’s what I’m passionate about, so I am pretty hands on when it comes to development, design and interface issues.

    Here I work closely with our Strategist Vincent Maher, who I have known since my student days at Rhodes (We did the same new media course). Our brainstorming sessions can be pretty out there sometimes. We seem to be on the same wavelength so have been a great team.

    I also had to get involved in business and sales side about three years ago, because I realised it was the only way M&G Online was going to expand and I would be able to bring onboard the fabulous talent we have working for our division: start bringing in the revenues.

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  • A few new tools in my belt

    Testing, testing, windows live writer blog post no.1. I’ve just connected my blog to Windows Live Writer, a desktop application which allows you to write & posts from the comfort of your PC’s desktop. I’ve experienced problems writing and editing posts at times when my Internet connection is unreliable so I hope this little app will solve some of those problems and make it easier to work on drafts and stuff like that.

    The cool thing about this little app is it plug into your blog software’s API and allows you to create posts while viewing your post styles. You can upload pictures and add them to your post. It’s got a nice spell checker for spelling baddies like myself and makes writing a post extremely quick and easy.

    livewriter

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  • Web Guru Spotlight 3: nomad-one meets adii for coffee

    Yesterday met with Adii(Adriaan Pienaar) of www.adii.co.za for a coffee and a chat. Adii is someone making quite a bit of noise in the South African & International wordpress community. He’s a self styled WordPress Rockstar and online entrepreneur of note. Though I’ve interacted with Adii digitally through his website, facebook and email, meeting someone in person still is the only way to get a real sense of the personality on the other side.

    Web Guru Spotlight: nomad-one meets adii for coffee

    So who is Adii (Adriaan Pienaar)

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  • I won twice in constructive criticism blog commenting

    I’m ecstatic at the moment after receiving word from 2 online commenting competitions that I’ve been nominated as a winner. Woohoo!

    Firstly on www.adii.co.za I’ve won a copy of adii’s new premium magazine style wordpress theme which is one of the best magazine style themes I’ve come across so far. The competition entailed commenting on some preliminary designs and giving adii some constructive criticism on how he could improve certain areas. So myself and another person were tied first place and have both been awarded a copy of this excellent Premium News theme. I’m hoping to use this theme which I’m going to modify graphically for my www.one-project.org site.

    The second prize i was just notified of is from Cerebra.co.za “South Africa’s leading dedicated social and mobile media company” who ran a comments competition toget some constructive criticism on their website which was recently redesigned. Guess what, I’ve won an iPod Nano Woohoo!!! I’ve wanted one of these for ages but just couldn’t afford to spend money on some thing like this. Thanks cerebra, you guys rock.

    I’m gonna try to track down my comments which won me these 2 cool prizes and post them here for your viewing pleasure.

    Constructive Criticism

    The name of the game is constructive criticism and in many cases your viewers are the best source of advice for what you may be doing right or wrong as they’re the people you’re trying to please. Many times there are things we miss because we are caught seeing things from only our own perspective so asking others is a great way to get good feedback. The trick however is to know what is good feedback and what is not. The way these 2 competitions were structured is they rewarded readers for the best, most constructive feedback and because of this incentive the comments were purposely written to be as thoughtful as possible.

    It gives me some great insight into my first competition I’ve just launched last night in my Logo Design Q & A section. The basic principle is, you need something others have and you reward them for giving it to you, their clicks, their feedback, their thoughts are valuable to them so if they’re not getting anything from giving these to you they won’t offer what is valuable to them.

    Commenting is one of the areas of web 2.0 which has really changed the dynamic completely. If you don’t get it right you could be in for some heavy criticism, if you don’t allow comments you’re cutting off an important aspect of your interaction with your site visitors, but get the recipe right and your site could experience phenomenal growth and popularity. A plugin release recently by Web Addi(CT)s rewards readers for commenting by displaying commenters names in a commenters cloud with the names weighted according to number of comments. It’s an interesting way to stimulate a mutually beneficial relationship between blogger & commenter.

    Engage your readers and the general community and you’ll have valuable partners and business supporters by default.

  • Lessons I have learnt going from 0 – 1000 in 1 month

    I’m so excited about the progress of my humble little site and though in many people’s eyes my few achievements might seem minuscule, I’m over the moon at the results I have achieved in a very short space of time that I had to share it with you.

    First things first lets go to the numbers. Using the wp-stats plugin has been so much fun for me being able to see where all my visitors are coming from and what they’re up to when they visit my site. I went from a personal blog with not much direction and little idea of what I was trying to achieve to 1000 visitors in one month.

    Nomad-one WordPress visitor statistics September - October 2007

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  • The South African new media scene is hotting up

    The last few weeks have been an amazing experience for me as a blogger, designer and new media strategist though it’s been one steep learning curve. It all started when I quit my day job a little short of 2 months ago. I had been blogging for a while experimentally and on more of a personal level just writing about my own stuff, anything that interested me really. I never paid any attention to visitors, to rankings, search engines, all of that stuff just made little difference to me.

    I think it started when I first installed the stats plugin in my wordpress and started noticing some activity based on my posting. It was all pretty tame and just a few trickles of curious onlookers. When I decided to become a true nomad and take the plunge into solo uncertainty I knew I had to start doing something more serious with my site and had to start getting serious about networking as well. That was just less than 2 months ago, so I started clicking & reading, adding plugins, modding my blog, adding facebook friends, signing up for linked in & my genius, started linking all my social networks to each other, subscribed to a whole batch of RSS Feeds, set up my own feed, wrote more content for my site, designed my new logo … Wow. I can’t actually believe I did all this stuff in such a short space of time.

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