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Vincent Maher
Vincent Maher was the Mail & Guardian Online's digital strategist. He has worked in the web industry for 12 years, was the head of the New Media Lab at the Rhodes University School of Journalism and Media Studies and writes columns for Enjin and Intelligence magazines. He is a judge of the Telkom ICT Journalist of the Year Awards and the developer of Amatomu.com.
His current area of focus is Web 2.0 and social media strategy for the traditional media.
Posted inGeneral
The future of the web
A few events have got me thinking about the direction of the Web over the next twenty years or so. The first was a conversation I had with Matthew Buckland about whether Facebook, or something like it, would become a type of operating system in the future, and the second was Google’s announcement of OpenSocial […]
Posted inMedia, News/Politics
The racism is in the reading
The “firing” of David Bullard has kept my mind busy all weekend because I have an uncomfortable sense that something is very wrong with the situation and its various interpretations. Aside from these concerns, something that concerns me even more is that I don’t feel safe writing this post because I suspect the same mindset […]
Posted inGeneral
Thought Leader and racial/gender representation
Before we launched Thought Leader, its management team got together to discuss the invitation process. All three of us would have been classified as “white” by the National Party government and, indeed, we have benefited from the fact our parents were white through our access to education during the transition phase from apartheid to our […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Zuma sings Umshini Wami at the ANC conference
The Mail & Guardian Online team just got back from Polokwane and Thembelihle Tshabalala had this video on her camera of ANC president Jacob Zuma singing Umshini Wami with the delegates after his first address. For those who weren’t there, or didn’t watch it on television, this clip gives you an idea of the power […]
Posted inMedia
There is no such thing as Truth, only degrees of culpability
The reason social theorists that could be classified as postmodernists have failed to deal with the changes brought about by the newer trends in digital media usage is simple — these changes represent, materially, what they have been thinking about for close to 40 years. Proclaiming the advent of postmodernism is no longer radical, but […]
Posted inMedia, News/Politics
Forget the quality of journalism, let’s talk about the audience
Time and time again I hear it said that the quality of journalism is deteriorating in South Africa. Frankly this is rubbish — what is declining is the quality of the audience. The source of this criticism is a society that has become a carcass of fat and bone with very little meat. The sad […]
Posted inNews/Politics
South African bloggers don’t whine about crime
I read with interest a few posts on the local blogosphere about how South Africans whinge and whine about the crime rate, so I became curious whether this is true on the local blogosphere. I did some digging into the statistical data I have on Amatomu.com and found the following that only 0,3% of the […]
Posted inGeneral
South African bloggers don’t whine about crime
I read with interest a few posts on the local blogosphere about how South Africans whinge and whine about the crime rate, so I became curious whether this is true on the local blogosphere. I did some digging into the statistical data I have on Amatomu.com and found the following that only 0,3% of the […]
Posted inTech
Drink a galon of jin, die, get in a tomb and relaaaaax (sic)
In my life, I have a sense that a lot of pwnage has happened but I never really knew what it meant or even how to say “me & the l337 pwned you n00bz” properly. Today I decided it was time to get my facts straight about the origins of the words “pwn”, “l337” and […]
Posted inLifestyle
There is no painless way to murder a book, but it must be done
For the past 10 years I have been trying to read Umberto Eco’s The Island of the Day Before and, although it is not a particularly long book, reading it from cover to cover has been a bitter struggle. First, some context: Eco is my favourite author, regardless of how pretentious that makes me sound. […]
Posted inTech
The Facebook business scorecard: F-
The mainstream media have been reporting lately that Facebook, the popular social networking application that lets you swap digital “secreta” with your long-lost friends, is being banned by more and more businesses in South Africa. The banks are some of the first — Standard Bank, Absa and a few others have added the site to […]