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I've just joined Amatomu. Their motto: "The South African blogosphere, sorted."

Look down my sidebar and you'll see the little link.

Localness is all the rage. Even though we revel in the huge, all-encompassingness of the Internet, there are still plenty of times when we want a smaller, closer space to play in.

Amatomu was received with joy and sighs of "about time" from the South African blogging community when it launched earlier this year. There are probably many other communities waiting for a smaller space to call their own.

Google/yahoo groups  are nice, but it's even better to have something with an "official" feeling to really make you feel like you're part of something important.

The guide I referred to in ysterday's post is here in their archive.

It's very short, funny and easy to read. Give it two minutes.

For example:

15. It might go terribly wrong, but that might actually be a good thing. So people read your blog, tried your wine and hated it. And now Google and Yahoo are awash with people laughing at you. Yeah, there's always that risk. The upside is, they probably slammed you for a reason. Look on the bright side. At least now you know the truth, so you can move on to better things. Beats spending the next 5-10 years of your life flogging a dead horse.

I bumped into a chap called Chris Rawlinson who is one of the guys who runs runs the www.stormhoek.com site.

Stormhoek is a winery down here in the Western Cape that is taking the world by storm. And all its marketing has been done by blogging. Nothing else. It's now stocked in major UK and US supermarkets and is a smash hit. The supermarkets called Stormhoek to make deals because people kept asking them for the wine! Stormhoek operates about 10 vineyards because the demand is so high.

The technique: They offered a prize of a free bottle of wine to the first 100 people who posted a comment on the blog, and who agreed to write a blog posting about the wine when they received it. Since the blog was quite new, it was the most active members of the blogosphere who found the offer and took him up on it. And from there, the power of the network allowed them to reach a very broad market.

They have won fabulous prizes and accolades already. It's old news, really. (Chris tells me they've even done a guidebook to exactly how to run a successful blog marketing campaign if you rummage around).

But the point is this:

They are running another promo now and you can get free wine (well actually a free Tesco's voucher).

Go to Tesco. Buy a bottle of Stormhoek win (optional). Take a photo of yourself holding it in Tesco. Send in the pic to Stormhoek. Voila! The first 500 people to do it get a £5.00 voucher.

I would advise them to spend it on Stormhoek. It's excellent wine. But it's not just the wine, it's the principle.

Says BBC News... 

Mobile phone analyst Lawrence Harris said Motorola was also handicapped by a weak range of phones.

I've got 107 unread items in my RSS reader (down from 197).
I've got my mum Skyping me, while I exchange files with a colleague via a different skype window to complete a rush job.
I've got a cornucopia of posts to schmaak on Amatomu.
54 unread e-mails.
IRC running in the (semi-transparent, always on top) window in the corner.
I've got several customer centric organisations who want me to contribute ideas and feedback so they can shape their service around my needs. And there are a couple of sites that want to "apply the power of self selecting communities to monetise enhanced product discovery."

And then for some reason I went and joined facebook. It's forcing me to meet old friends, update my status and generally participate in a non-stop stream of bonhomie.
My question to you all is this:

How am I supposed to find time to have all these conversations?

Recently, there's been lots of talk about the fabulous "breaking up with advertising" movie. It's really witty and wonderful, and in some ways very true: the consumer doesn't want to be talked at these days, we want to be talked with.

But do we? When one of my quota of 4000 advertisers a day talks at me, I can choose to ignore them. If they all start having a conversation with me, that's a whole lot harder. And a whole lot more time consuming.

Linda Stone has been here already. She anticipates, or even sees evidence of, a shift in behaviour. We need to make different choices, she tells us:

Does this product, service, feature, message—enhance and improve our quality of life? Does it help us protect, filter, create a meaningful connection? Discern? Use our attention as well and as wisely as we possibly can?

And I agree. That's a wise way to go forward. But I'm not sure we're doing it. Or capable of doing it.

In the new conversation economy, there's always another tempting conversation to be had - another marketer or entrepreneur dangling a new and interesting communication carrot. Or should I say pizza, rather than carrot? Because I think I'm rapidly becoming conversation obese, and I don't think Linda Stone's motivational diet plan is going to help me. I'll keep on taking on more conversations until I'm sick.

Anyone want to comment about this? Could be the start of an interesting conversation

Yesterday I met Gary Marsden, from the University of Capetown's Computer Science department. Gary is one of the conference organisers for DIS 2008, which will be taking place in Cape Town just before Design Indaba, next February. The whole thing promises to be a really interesting chance to think about design in the context of tighter constraints than we're used to in the western world.

Gary has been doing all sorts of interaction design experiments at UCT - some more successful than others. He's also done a fair amount of ethnography about how technology is being used in rural Africa at the moment. Some of it has showed up on his blog and there's a chapter about his ethno trip to Zambia at the end of his recent book. The theme of what he's found: big expensive technology is no use at all in many parts of Africa. It's small pieces of practical technology, carefully designed to fit in with the way people live and work, that end up being a success.

What follows is a very dramatic illustration of this.

Gary was kind enough to take me up to the university campus and show me round a bit. Gary's department put together a rather cool VR ROOM - an experiment in building an immersive VR environment on something approaching an African budget. It's in a very small, windowless room that was once, perhaps, a storage room. It's been painted up and given nice lighting and carpet so it doesn't feel like a closet. The room is divided completely in two by a giant perspex screen. The screen twists on a central hinge. When it's "open," you can see a collection of tech goodies hiding behind it. There's a pair of ordinary data projectors, each with a hand-cut polarising filter bolted on, a nice hi-fi system, a plain-looking PC with a 3D graphics card or two in it and a fair few wires. Gary fires it up, you put on the ludicrous polarised specs and hey presto, you're looking at a life size, 3D environment that almost fills your field of vision. I like it!

What do they use it for? Gary showed me two examples. The first was a virtual cave - an exact copy of one somewhere in Botswana. A particular tribe held this cave sacred and could only tell certain stories from their culture when standing inside it. The tribe have been relocated because of diamonds or tourism or some other excuse, so they no longer have access to the cave their culture is dying. The VR cave was intended to preserve their culture in the 21st Century.

The second example was an interactive walkthough of a virtual house, intended to help educate people with HIV (and there are LOT in South Africa) about how to stay healthy and deal with the challenges the disease brings. The intention was to install this in AIDS clinics to help with education. You can have conversations with digital avatars that many people would find too embarrassing to have with a real person.

So. The Vrroom closet is a heap of fun and a really ingenious piece of technology. Gary's team have learned a lot about creating a feeling of presence on a budget. But have the applications themselves have really been a hit? No. The pilot installation in an AIDS clinic was dismantled by thieves. And how can someone from Botswana who has never used a computer or even watched TV relate to a 3D virtual cave? They can't. The technology is way too big - it doesn't fit into your life, it wants to take over your life. And most of us aren't quite ready for that grade of technological impact.

Gary is the first to discuss the failures, and like any good designer to extract the important lessons from them. He stresses the value of ethnography as a driver for successful innovation. To design for people in developing countries you have to understand how the culture works, what people do, how they communicate and what they really need. Don't try to change people's lives, try to fit in and make a small but important improvements. Ease of use is surprisingly unimportant in these contexts - usefulness is everything. People will adopt technologies if and only if they really make life better.

Gary is involved in growing the field of ICT for developing countries. It's a small field now, but everyone tells us that the market is there for technology in the developing world, so it may grow in importance. Gary's more recent projects are making big differences in small ways. Using mobile phones with picture messaging to help remote clinics diagnose difficult cases? A smash hit.

In developing countries, innovations that succeed match user needs and behaviours, and deliver real improvement to people's quality of life. Is that so different from design in the Western World? No. It's just the same. Only more so.

This from Bruce Nussbaum...

Carl Icahn, who is constantly called "the corporate raider turned shareholder activist" is battling Motorola CEO Ed Zander to get a seat on the board of directors and use the company's cash to buy back stock--including his own Motorola stock. Zander and Motorola are vulnerable to this squeeze because of the sharp decline in the profits derived from the great selling Razr cellphone. Motorola has been cutting its price all year, especially in emerging markets, and is losing market share to rivals Nokia and Samsung. All this before Apple launches its iPhone.

And then...

But the Razr turns out to be bad design, really bad design, because it has an awful user-interface. I personally know nearly a dozen people who truly hate their Razrs, including a number of top designers. People have a very hard time with just the basic features, such as phone numbers, texting, sending photos, even hearing well. There are lots of consumer complaints. The truth is, despite its terrific outside, the Razr runs on an old, homeground operating system that Motorola is only now updating.

So the Razr, in the end, reflects old-fashioned design--form over function. The resulting poor consumer experiences for a huge number of people may make it harder for Motorola than it anticipates to recoup in the marketplace. In a competitive environment where people can easily buy Nokia or Samsung phones, and now Apple iPhones, memories of bad expiences with the Razr may make them very reluctant to try another Motorola cell.

See?! See!!!? The stories of the the bad UI on the RAZR are legendary. The UI community knew it would get them in the end. And now it has. (Somewhat).
Good design is a long term bet.

Interestingly, though, it's now time to market that's plaguing Motorola. By all accounts, they've got people working on a new and genuinely usable product range (I even met one of them a while back and I can certify that he was cool). But because it hasn't come to market quickly enough, they're left in a jam.  Of course, if they'd done it right first time, they wouldn't have got into the jam in the first place.

Anyway, there's more detail chez M. Nussbaum so have a read.

If you never had the experience of travelling Delta, count yourself lucky. It was austere and souless as only an old american corporation can be.

They've rebranded with a natty, new, all red, 3D logo. And their new site welcomes suggestions and tips from travellers in an effort to collect ‘easy-win’ ideas such as onboard multi-player gaming, buzzers to alert tell you when to go to your gate, SMS to update you about flight disruptions and a book swap at the gate. See the press release for a mix of suspicious, cheesy nonsense. Or see the delta site.

For many large organisations, even considering this kind of user involvement would be to terrifying. "What if we couldn't implement any of the suggestions our customer gave us? What if I customers suggested something subversive? Do we really have to listen to our customers anyway?!"

So kudos to Delta for getting this far.

But at the same time, it's still a cheesy effort. There's an "air-punching" promotional video. And everything is very sanitised.

I don't really know what to think. Except this. Would this new effort make me consider flying with Delta?

Answer: Yes. I'd give them one shot. If the experience really does live up to the new brand promise, then they'd have succeassfuly bought themsleves a new customer. So I suppose that means they've achieved something.
But it's a big if. And I'm not holding my breath.

Thanks to Flowsters Simon Hatch and Kelsey Smith for pointing me to this.

I was thinking the other day about the similarities between the blogosphere and the stock market. Back in the 17th century, people were pretty excited about the radical new concept of stockmarkets - and rightly so. They are fascinating things and present all sorts of opportunity to everyone. (Read Niel Stephenson's Quicksilver, if you've got the biceps). Right now, we're all pretty excited about the democratisation of media that the blgosphere offers - and it's for the same reasons.

But the stock market and the blogosphere are complicated and time-consuming places to hang out. So I'm interested in the various ways that the stock market has been made more user friendly. I want to see if we're using them all to ease people's experience of the blogosphere.

To find a good stock to invest in, you need to do research and rummage around. For the layman this can be too much like hard work, and a big drain on time. That's why we often rely on others for help finding the right stocks.

Who helps us...?

• Newspapers and magazines that offer stock tips
• Financial advisors - some sophisticated, some not
• Fund managers, via the funds they create
• Indexes, like the FTSE100
• Algorithms. A lot of the trading that happens on the stock market today is actually done by computers.
• And the market itself - shares that regularly yield good dividends, get a higher value. That's the whole point.

It looks like the blogosphere equivalent of an index is something like Nine Rules. The FTSE index is a selection of the biggest hitting corporations on the London Stock Exchange. Nine rules is a bit like that - the creme de la blogosphere get to be in the club.

Funds, and investment trusts in particular, are worth a look. An investment trust is a share in its own right - traded on the market just like any other. But it is a share in a company that does nothing else but buy and sell shares in other companies. The lazier or less expert investor can get the benefit of playing in the market, with much of the risk and effort taken out. They trust the fund manager, who has done well in the past, to continue to select the best stocks and deliver the best return. Interestingly, an investment trust share can trade at a discount or a premium. That means that the market can value a trust *more* (or less) than the total of the shares the trust actually owns. The trust itself can add value, by being well managed, I suppose.

The analogy works for me on the blogosphere. I am interested in investing (my attention) in shares (blogs) that are actively managed (edited) collections of the best shares (blogs) out there. I'm after someone who selects the best blogs in my sector on an active basis. And I want to rely on market ratings to make sure that the manager is doing a good job. If he's losing readers and rankings on the open blog market, I might switch away from him to another, better managed blog instead.

Anything we can really learn from this? Well - there's more than one way to navigate a complex market. And there's probably plenty of opportunity left for organisations and individuals out there who want to help us.

And that begs the question: can people make money being blog fund managers? Or do they do it for love?