One of the primary goals of any serious journalist is to take whatever they are writing about, and cover it in plain, simple English so that anyone, regardless of prior knowledge, can understand the story. Journalists are, after all, communicators, and if we write long, unwieldy sentences full of big words and waffle, we’re not […]
Samantha Perry
Samantha Perry is an ICT journalist based in Johannesburg. She has been covering the ICT industry for the last nine years, and believes she's nearly due for a long-service award, and possibly a medal. She has worked in a permanent capacity for the likes of Computerweek, CRN and Computing SA (Editor), and on a freelance basis for BMI-TechKnowledge, Telkom and the Corporate Research Foundation amongst others. She is currently the Features Editor for ITWeb Brainstorm and ITWeb Online. In her spare time she attempts to be a nice, cheerful, people-person.
The Facebook parent phenomenon
Facebook, bless it, has (dare I say it? ) revolutionised the online world for many people. Parents in particular. In addition to worrying about what their offspring get up to when they’re supposed to be at school, en route to and from school, hanging at the mall at weekends or Mxiing it up to the […]
The rise of the information consumer
So here we are, 2008. We have Google, Flickr and Facebook. We have YouTube, MySpace and Twitter. We have more IM clients than you can shake a stick at, and enough Web content to sink a flotilla or two. How, I ask you, is anyone expected to cope? If your cell phone isn’t ringing, your […]
The papertrail problem
Most corporates have terabytes of unstructured data floating around, which they do not know they have. New legislation is about to make life very interesting in this sphere. The Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA or the Privacy Act as it is more commonly known), aims to ensure that consumers’ rights to privacy of data […]
Tech will eat itself
I’ve been covering IT, and its newer acronym, ICT, for nearly ten years. In that time I’ve had the joy of watching the trends go around, and around. I’ve watched hype become reality, usually in a far longer time period than the vendors would like, and I’ve watched marketing fizz become dot–com failure, or Y2K […]