The blogging Player of the Week

After four weeks of excuses masquerading as blogs on “related topics”, the first blogging Player of the Week can be announced. The choice will not be a popular one among the blogging elite, but then this exercise is about recognition, not affirmation.

First a recap: the original idea behind the Amablogoblogo is to recognise special contributions to social media and social networking. It harks back to the early days of the web in South Africa, when my Web Feet column on the Mail & Guardian Online used to announce annual awards for the best and worst websites in various categories.

The Amablogoblogo is far less formal, and leaves the presentation of golden gongs to the South African Blogging Awards. Instead, once a week, when I can’t come up with an excuse to procrastinate, this blog will announce the blogging equivalent of a Player of the Week, to recognise effort, dedication, innovation, spirit of fun and community spirit. Traffic is not the criterion, nor is level of comment, nor Technorati-bestowed authority, Amatomu-blessed ranking, number of backtracks or length of sidetracks. Once selected, the thus selected blogger, developer or team will be named Blogger of the Week, and elected to the Amablogoblogo.

The first Blogger of the Week is not an individual, but rather a team of individuals that has jointly dragged the blog kicking and bleating into the mainstream. Many a veteran blogger has gnashed his (strangely, it’s not usually a her) teeth about the way they have removed the mystique from blogging — and that is precisely why they earn a place in the Amablogoblogo.

The Blogger of the Week is the team at the Times, which this blog has previously cited as the first mainstream newspaper to embrace blogs and the social media and social networking environment in general in its print pages. While the Mail & Guardian Online team are emerging as key thought leaders — no pun intended — for Web 2.0, the print edition barely gives a nod to the phenomenon.

The Times, on the other hand, serves almost as a manual for social media. It gives bloggers a print platform to flex their blogging muscles as “blogumists” and expand their audiences dramatically. It also pays them for it, bringing greater viability to blogging as a career path than does the (for now) vague promise of advertising revenue.

The audience, of course, is the key. By giving readers an unthreatening entrée to the blogosphere, the Times is demystifying the term and the concept of blogging, saving readers from the alienation that Web 2.0 often engenders in non-adherents, and preparing them for the mystifying and maddening new wave of online media. It goes beyond blogs, though. The Times has integrated news video and podcasts in a way that makes sense, and makes print content interactive.

This is not a blanket endorsement of the Times. I groan in despair every time they run another pic of the idiot hotel heiress. What’s with that, guys? A cane-rat fetish or something?

Coincidentally, I recently interviewed Times strategist Colin Daniels for The Media magazine, and was given a fascinating insight into the way Times publisher Johnnic Communications has been fundamentally altered by Web 2.0. Here are two short excerpts:

“We as an established information provider that is part of a large media company no longer hold the same power over people that we’ve grown accustomed to, and the command-control structure that most media companies have enjoyed globally is a declining trend. Globalisation and the net have changed the way humans communicate and consume media and we need to harness our strongest asset, ‘trust’, and an understanding of the changing media landscape to ensure we are successful going forward.

“There have been quite a few expected and unexpected benefits of our current strategy. One of them has been a complete image makeover for the way the public has perceived the Sunday Times and Johncom, which has raised some serious eyebrows, and I believe this is part of a broader group strategy and vision.”

In conclusion, Amablogoblogo caps go to the following members of the team at the Times. Bear in mind that this does not exclude them from being acknowledged again for their roles in other Web 2.0 projects:

Ray Hartley: Editor and ultimately responsible for content (even though he has previously revealed appalling content judgement in giving one of my books a bad review, lo, those decades ago);
Colin Daniels and Justin Hartman: Online strategists at the Times (and other places, but that’s another blog for another day);
Carly Ritz (multimedia editor) and Gregor Rohrig: Responsible for multimedia content (meaning they are the traitors who have been humanising Web 2.0 and allowing the plebs in without so much as a geek passport).

If I’ve left off anyone, please forgive me, and send a protest letter to Sunday Times editor Mondli Makhanya. After all, everyone else does.

Please submit your nominations for the Amablogoblogo here or e-mail me on [email protected].