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The next two weeks are going to be pretty busy.  On Sunday the 3rd Digital Citizens Indaba takes place at Rhodes Univerisity, Grahamstown.  The DCI started while I was teaching at Rhodes and contributed to significant volumes of grey hair for myself and Colin Daniels, the organiser.  The event is one of the few pan-African citizen media forums that focus on blogging and activism and is always a lot of fun.  I’ll be speaking at the closing of the event and giving a brief wrap-up of the key issues dring the day.

On Sunday night the Highway Africa conference opens, and I can’t wait for this.  The conference has been running for more than ten years and I have been to many of them.  Around 500 media people from all over Africa gather to discuss the trends affecting their businesses, the way they do journalism and new media in general.  This year the focus is on citizen journalism, a little belatedly, I think.  I will be speaking in a plenary session with Dan Gillmor and Georgina Popplewell and this session is going to be full of fire.

The following week I speak at Tony Koenderman’s Cracking the Digital Code about the uses of social media for marketing.  My main focus will be on mobile location-based services and how these add an extra level of richness to campaign planning, audience targeting and generally enhancing the relevance of marketing messages.  Stafford Masie from Google SA will be starting that discussion.

In light of all the discussion about social media and education over the past month on the local blogosphere I have decided to put my money where my mouth is and start working more closely with local universities to introduce young people to the concepts, theories and tools that fall under broad classification of “social” media.  I’ll be doing a short course with Univeristy of Pretoria journalism students dealing with media mtheory and how it is applied to social media, specifically focussing on the points where the theory and the practice disconnects, followed by a practical assignment in which students do location-based journalism combining GIS data and cellular network location services - we’ll be using the Grid for that.  In a nutshell students will spend 24 hours in Pretoria shooting video, pictures and writing stories on their mobile phones and using maps and the networks ability to poistion where they capture the content to tell the story.  Its probably the first journalism project in the world to use this exact combination of technology although the idea has been out there for a long time.

I am also presenting an academic paper about User-Generated Content and counter-public spheres at SACOMM this year with Michelle Atagana, though it looks like I have a diary clash and will be driving from Pta to Joburg at 180km/h between 10 and 11AM, or preparing a cardboard cut-out of myself.

All in all its a busy 2 weeks and my day job is keeping me occupied too.  The Grid launched its new Java chat application recently and we have another update coming up next week so things are starting to happen very quickly.

After using Google Chrome, Google’s new web browser, I set it to be my default browser.  Here are the reasons why:

1. It renders pages incredibly quickly (as does Safari, which uses the same rendering engine) and the browser itself loads fast
2. It does AJAX/CSS as expected
3. It is Open-Source
4. It has this cool application shortcut feature so you can double click on things like Gmail from your desktop (I know you can do this with other browsers but its not as cool)
5. This page works perfectly
6. Hopefully extensions are on their way - see Matt Cutts giant FAQ

I haven’t written a stupid list for a while.  If a meteor hit the planet and wiped everything else out except me, these are the things I’d miss the most (in no particular order):

1. My Xbox 360 Elite and 32″ LDC LCD screen
2. The internet
   Ice cream
3. My Simmonds mattress
4. Restaurants
5. DVDs
6. Books
7. Petrol and a car to drive
8. Horses, seeing as there are no cars
9. Coffee
10. Beer

As you can clearly see, there is no good case for being the last person alive on the planet and everything else turned to ash.  The above list is a minimum requirement I think.  And come to think of it the internet will be pretty useless if there are no books to buy or people to tweet about anymore.

The next 48 hours are jam-packed with geekiness. Tomorrow morning Tyler Reed and I fly to Cape Town and the crack, literally, of dawn to do all manner of cool things.

I get to spend the morning at the Cow Africa offices discussing the conceptual specs for the new Grid web site and the upcoming launch of our Java application. We’re also working on the final production of the first location-aware mobile documentary about black youth culture in South Africa, which will be launching on the Grid soonish.

Then the afternoon is Open Everything, with Mark Surman from the Shuttleworth Foundation, Philipp Schmidt from UWC and a panel of speedgeekers including Matthew Buckland, Steve Song and Rob Stokes.

That evening Mike Stopforth and Stii Pretorius (the legend) have organised a geek party at the beautiful Asoka bar. Click here to attend the event.

Then on Saturday I speak at WordCamp, with some local luminaries including Justin Hartman and Matt Mullenweg, the creator of WordPress and Warwick Poole, an old friend from VWV days who now works at Automattic. With Matt at the event this is going to be one of the most exciting social media events of the year.

I travel long distances reasonably frequently and I consistently find the journey itself is unremarkable because my attention is always filled with media. I do my utmost to make sure that every long flight I take, or even the short ones, I have enough media with me to forget I am sitting still for way too long. So I have a bag with a PSP, Nintendo DS, a book, a magazine, my laptop, my phone and sometimes a newspaper. Sometimes, serendipitously, there will also be a good movie or something interesting in the in-flight magazine. When I drive, I make phone calls. Most of my productivity happens in the car, when I am away from the Internet and the social space.

The result is a sense of the physical world as a series of islands separated by a placeless space. For me, the inside of an aeroplane is all that exists between Johannesburg and London, because that is all I have experienced. Of course, objectively, I know this is not true but I can’t really prove it except by hearsay and the media, or exploring for myself. Regardless of how insane that may sound, it got me thinking about how much information we are expected to trust every day that we cannot verify except by comparing it to other similar information, and how much we never question.

We don’t think about where the water goes when you flush a toilet; where the electricity comes from, or what it even is, that we plug into; how our cars work when we turn the key; why people obey the rules of the road, or whether they might have changed during the night without you realising it. Most of the things that happen around us, things that our lives depend on, operate according to a set of rules we don’t know or understand.

So it requires surprisingly little actual verifiable knowledge for a person to remain functional in society. It is also not surprising then, that religion and ideology are making a strong comeback in the East and the West, or that the media seem to have lost some of their authority, or that girls no longer faint and scream at rock concerts.

A good part of what I have been doing at Vodacom over the past month-and-a-half is thinking about how location-based storytelling changes the physical environment permanently once you get started.

When you walk around cities like Rome, you might have experienced a sense of immense gravity that comes from the awareness that so much history exists below and around you. It’s almost as if time crystallises around you in the form of a lingering significance.

My experience, more recently, has been the polar opposite. While using the Grid (one of the products I am focussed on at Vodacom right now), I have started to feel a type of lightness as I move from place to place, a sense that above me there are layers and layers of private data attached to that place, like a wind blowing into the sky. It’s a strange sensation, that there is something invisible around me, and yet liberating at the same time because my experience can always, only be seen in relation to those other invisible dots.

The reading of a map has always been a two-way decoding – on the one hand you decode the map to locate yourself in the physical environment, on the other hand you decode the landscape to locate yourself on the map. As maps become richer and offer more information, the second type of interaction is becoming more prevalent.

The physical world is becoming a map of a deeper and more complex digital world. It has been flattened by high-speed travel, global communications networks and the instantaneity of the media. It is both private and public, synchronous and asynchronous.

The obvious question, I suppose, is whether this is a good or bad thing for those who find themselves existing in this way. I can only speak from personal experience, and my personal experience tells me that it becomes increasingly difficult to know yourself when all you are is a mirage of data. Tied to that the curiosity of unfolding never-ending layers of information about the place you are or the thing you are doing or the people you are doing it with means you miss most of the experience itself. What you have then are false memories of a presence not fully occupied, and this will leave you feeling empty if you pry under the veneer.

On the other hand, if memories are fleeting, does it really even matter whether you had full presence or not, as long as you have the tweets, photos, blog posts, video clips and other records of it. I think it does for the simple reason that we learn from experiences, so it follows that we would learn less from experiences in which we were only partially there.

I often find myself in a conversation I’m not listening to because I’m having several on my computer, or my phone at the same time. In the past two years I have started to find it harder to have a conversation that feels ‘real’, and I have started to seem more and more aloof when actually, I think I am suffering from the consequences of using the Internet so much for every single thing I do. The reason I found this out is because a few months ago, for some reason I can’t quite explain, I had a conversation that did feel real. It was an afternoon with my family, but what was different was that I felt like I was giving so more attention and presence to the people around me and I felt like I was myself again, for a few fleeting hours.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m saying I feel like have to be different person all the time, its more like I only feel like I’m 50% there. To feel real you have to be generous with your presence.

The solution I have come up with, not that I actually do it, though I plan to very soon, is to divide my time between the real and the virtual. More specifically, to allocate time for experiences that I give my full attention to, like playing with my son, talking to my wife and family, looking at things again, like art or architecture or the colour of leaves.

As Mike Stopforth mentioned yesterday, we spent some quality time together yesterday discussing the future of the Design Indaba and the state of the social media industry in South Africa and the consequences of the flurry of corporate hires over the past few months.  I feel quite strongly that there needs to be a strong entrepeneurial base for social media to take off in South Africa and there is a general sense that this might be being eroded.

We are headed for a major crisis, if we’re not already in one.

The education system in South Africa is hopelessly myopic when it comes to equipping students with direction as far as their careers are concerned and this needs to change.  I have not met anyone in the Web and social media industry who has not lamented the lack of skills in the country.  This is even more visible in areas like mobile application development skills and I just can’t understand why people would spend so much time educating students in one area that has a glut of skills when there are other massive gaps.  I’ll give you a simple example - you can study information systems or something similar, graduate and struggle to find a good job.  The same person could learn a little Java programming and start earning 40k a month from their first day or start a business at the age of 22 and have more work than they can accomodate from day 1.  I just don’t get that.

As Mike mentioned on his blog, we’re thinking about setting up a co-ordinated roadshow to universities to raise awareness and provide some direction for students in technical, media, marketing, journalism and advertising courses.  So far several people have indicated that they are interested in getting involved, so I suggest we create groups in each region and tackle the local institutions locally and see how that goes.

My disclaimer: I didn’t write this post as quickly as Mike because my nerves were shot following a high-speed race through Cape Town only to miss my flight, get transferred to the next one, have that delayed by a further 2 hours because, wait for it, improperly sealed human remains contaminated one of the SAA flights yesterday.

I’m in Cape Town on Tuesday night so lets have a bloggers party!  Same venue as always: Long Street Cafe from 7:30PM, everyone is invited, looking forward to seeing everyone again, it’s been too long. Arm your livers.

RSVP or join the Facebook event here

I thought this was pretty obvious but obviously I was pretty wrong.  Since I left the Mail & Guardian last month I have not been involved in the Amatomu.com site.  I do still take support queries but I forward them on to the M&G team and they should be getting back to people.

Right now there are two major bugs: user nicks are called Please Update and the proper embed code is not being show to users who register new blogs.  Both of these things are being fixed by Jason Norwood-Young, my very competent replacement.  The problem is he started today, so solutions may require a bit of patience.

Yesterday I spoke to a group of communications specialists within the Department of Defence about social media and how they can leverage it across their different operations.  What I said was necessarily a high-level overview of military uses of social media and some of the problems currently faced by the US army stemming from blogging and vlogging.  These issues are fairly well-documented and very interesting.

On the one hand there is a security risk posed by bloggers exposing troop locations etc, but on the other hand there are great recruitment and PR opportuinities presented by the technologies.  The digitisation of communications also offers the possiblitities for new types of intelligence work because the opposite side may experience the same issues regarding the control of information flow.  The key issue is who can control the information better and monitor enemy communications/leaks.  In the case of the US vs Al-Queda the cultural heritage of the US regarding freedom of expression may put them at a slight disadvantage because their troops are more likely to want to express themselves publically and outside the chain of command.  On the other hand they have access to better technology to control and monitor information.

Aty the end of the session I was asked a few questions pertaining to control and I really think there needs to be a balance - outlawing something does not make it go away, it simply gives you a mechanism to punish after the fact and makes people more careful about covering their tracks.

The real opportunity though, is in communication and PR, especially in times of crisis when the traditional media are not fast enough to get a message out.