Month: April 2008

Categories
Biking

The Fuckers Stole My Bike

Sorry folks, no apologies for that headline. On Friday 4 April at around noon, some criminal fuckheads loaded my bike into a van or a truck and drove off with it. This occurred inside the “secure” complex where our offices are in Centurion. I happened to look out the window at 2pm and my bike was no longer where I had parked it, and it turned out that this was no prank.

There’s a couple things that make this event such a shock:

  1. I can’t believe nobody saw this happening. There’s always someone smoking out there.
  2. I can’t believe the security guards at the entrance saw nothing.
  3. I can’t believe they’d do it in the middle of the day.
  4. I can’t believe criminals think that seeing something means you can take it.
  5. I can’t believe someone would buy that stolen bike from the thieves, but I can’t believe they’ll make any money selling it for parts either.
  6. I can’t believe I only take the bike to work very rarely, based on a whim and on the weather, and the criminals “just happened to see it”.
  7. I can’t believe it was my bike that was taken, and not one of the other two parked two spaces away.
  8. I can’t believe I have to go hunting for a bike again, when I’d found the perfect deal on the perfect bike for me.
  9. I can’t believe I’ve managed to control my burning anger and not punch holes through walls, but then again, I suppose that control is one of the reasons I’ve been such a successful biker thus far.

And in case you happen to see something, here are the bike details:

Black 2007 model CBR 1000 Fireblade
Standard exhaust, standard windshield
Immaculate condition
VNV924GP
Right hand side crash bobbin is missing.
Stolen in Central Park, Esdoring Street, Highveld Techno Park, Centurion

Technorati Tags: bike, theft, stolen, fireblade, cbr1000, anger

Springleap shares the Vernon Koekemoer fun…

Eric from springleap has generously offered to give away a few t-shirts to the loyal fans of Vernon Koekemoer. This is such a great example of how startups need to be piggybacking off one another to bootstrap themselves forward. Thanks Eric.

For all the details click here.

Technorati Tags: springleap, vernonkoekemoer, vernon, tshirt, free, fun

Categories
Featured

Is the SA blogosphere really “arriving”?

This is a bit of a rant and a moderated comment combined, but you’ll get the idea:

Mr Goldstuck proclaims Blogging as a fad is over; serious blogging arrives.

He basis this assumption around the emergence of two aggregator and tracking type sites last year, along with a bunch of thinly strung together blogging platforms developed by media houses with very little technical expertise, all coated in a healthy dose of banner ads.

To further state his claims he then crunches together a few numbers in a chart, et voila, blogging has matured.

Um, ja. A time for serious blogging indeed. No space for Vernon Koekemoer jokes in this here blogosphere… 😛

In a little over two weeks vernonkoekemoer.co.za has soared to number 4 overall on the amatomu blog rankings. That says a hell of a lot about the performance and seriousness of the SA blogosphere. Or lack thereof. I’m privy to the number of visits taking place on this new site, and it is nowhere near what I thought it would need to be to achieve that top ranking. In a real blogosphere, the fight to the head of the long tail is tough but rewarding.

Screw hiding figures. Let me give it to you straight:
If you want to top amatomu you need around 2000 unique visitors a day with about 10000 pageviews. Probably more as time goes on.

Blogging in South Africa is nowhere near the maturity or professionalism that is present overseas. Some solid examples that absolutely blow away everything we offer blog-wise from South Africa: BoingBoing.net, Lifehacker.com, Gizmodo.com, Make: Blog, Pitchfork. In contrast we have, well, Cherryflava and Thought Leader, that maybe cut close to that rank. Attention is finite, which means we are competing against the best in the world. Lets not pretend we’re not. When top ranked SA sites such as MyDigitalLife, Tectonic, and even ThoughtLeader itself hardly gain traction locally on the interwebs, you can’t exactly claim the “serious blogs have arrived”.

In an age when blogs can be thrown together in fifteen minutes or less, and visits rise and fall on the viral whims of an audience, I’d take a pinch of salt before looking at Mr Goldstuck’s numbers with any sort of conviction.

Technorati Tags: blog, fad, serious, SouthAfrica, blogging, measurement, top, best, amatomu, thoughtleader, boingboing, statistics, arthurgoldstuck