Hi and welcome to my blog! If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting and do come back.

I’m beginning to believe that I like to be restricted. And in fact I am begining to think that it’s not just me but a lot of people online, tweeting, blogging, evangelising, guru-ing and the rest also like a bit of a restrictive challenge.

I have a newfound theory that I actually like to get told what to do and how to do it within certain perameters. Yes you could say that I am actually searching for guidance to lead me to my expressive peak. But I could also argue that I like to be restricted.

Bloggers like limits, like challenges and inherently might like to be restricted. It’s a challenge and it’s a limitation that we think we can try to exploit. Let’s be honest, every twitterer loves the feeling of writing a full and comprehensive tweet in exactly 140 characters. I know I do. But what does that actually mean?

The explosion of Twitter (What is twitter?) has really made me think about what I do, what I like to do and how I like to do it. I used to write very expansive posts, in depth analysis on a wide variety of topics. With the advent of Twitter and its subsequent success I’ve realised that keeping it short works. This, whether coincidental or directly relative, is restricting my post lengths, my thoughts and the angle of my approach.

Maybe this movement towards tweets and restricted 140 character posts is a step back, a calm before the storm, the time where we all gain a little bit of restrictive perspective and realise that our verbose and pedantic ramblings aren’t always what we think they are - effective.

Maybe I need to go back to the basics and realise that most people in our country have never used the internet, let alone know what twitter is, 140 characters mean in the “bigger picture”, what a blog is or who’s poking who on which social network.

What I am getting at (cause I am now rambling) is that maybe restrictions are good because they allow us to expirement within the constraints of a predermined rule. One that we are then able to work within and break out of.

At some point we have all followed the Godins, Scobles, crunches, readwrites and the like. But they have no clue what our market is looking for. We are not restricting ourselves enough to one specific focus. This is just a fleeting thought, not a steadfast opinion that I have. But surely if we began to tailor-make our products, blog posts, startups, ideas, ideals and innovations to 140 characters (don’t be literal) then maybe we would see more success.

Spam is everywhere, it’s mass, it’s personal, it’s viral and now it’s on Twitter. Twam is really baffling me and consuming a fair amount of my strategic thought.

I am trying to understand a few things:

1. How do these twammers choose who they are going to follow to make up the 20 000th follower.
2. What value does it offer them? If I don’t follow them I can’t see what they tweet.
3. Are they real people who have actually clicked “Follow” 20 000 times?
4. Why would you follow and receive updates from twammers?

Let me explain; a twammer by my definition is someone who insists on following thousands of people and in return hopefully get a percentage of those people following them.

Example:

This person

And this person

Another form of Twam is the constant links that are posted from people promoting their blogs. Mass twammers who follow thousands of people are the worst sort of link-twam posters. It’s frustrating.

I am all for posting links to your blogs if they relate to the current discussion or if you genuinely feel that people will find it of interest, but don’t twam me with every post. I have been trying out twitlink-something-or-other (there are too many apps nowaday to rememeber all their names). I don’t like it and will be removing it soon as I can remember where it is!

Basically I just don’t know how it is that I am lucky enough to be chosen by people like the two above as someone worth twamming. Is it when you reach a certain number of followers? Is it location driven, can they possibly be following your content and think you have a common ground? Surely not. Whichever it is, leave me alone.

Twitter is a terrible thing. I was about to leave work when I entered in to a debate with Zoopedup, ChristopherM, Unodewaal, adii and SimoneBiz. And that was me. Writing another blog post.

BrandsEye (thanks for the sneak peak Rafiq) was launched a few days ago. Online Reputation Management is the name of their game. Sounds great and I was interested immediately.

However after going through the site I found nowhere for me to register. Duh. Obviously, Quirk doesn’t chase cents and rands. This is what I was told on Twitter. Now that’s all well and good and makes sense to me but at the end of the day, as adii noted, Technorati can manage your online rep. This is very basic, but it can be done. Then throw in basic Google searches and Google notifications for your brand or name and you are pretty good. And guess what? The services I’ve just mentioned are free.

I do understand that Quirk is targeting larger business. Let’s be honest no-one else online is going to pay US$750 for the service. So they are targeting a specific market and i grasp and respect that.

But let’s compare this service to other major services online.

News: Many newspapers used to charge for their services (the content). That faded quickly because people can get the service elsewhere either cheaper or for free.

E-mail: Gmail is free. Hotmail, free. Yahoo mail, free. All major and important services to businesses. I know of many, many larger business who use Gmail as their primary e-mail service. I also know many who forward on their paid-for e-mail to their Gmail account for simplicity reasons. Again, not a paid service.

Service is currently being rendered as public property. Facebook, YouTube, Flickr (pro account costs +-US$25) are all major online sites offering great services that are free or extremely cheap for a pro account.

Why hasn’t BrandsEye opened with various entry level? Big Business packages all the way through to small-time bloggers looking for some brand awareness?

This might be in the pipeline, but as SimoneBiz stated with such ease, don’t worry they will roll out a “Lite” version for individuals in the future. Why? Why would they have to make it a “Lite” version? Why can’t it be fully locked and loaded with all the bells and whistles that high-paying customers would receive?

Because that’s not capitalism. And if they do that then their high-paying customers would get pissed off. So basically if Quirk is planning to expand BrandsEye in to lower-end markets they will never make it a free service and if you aren’t willing to pay top-dollar (yes, dollar) then you wont really be able to get the most of their services ever.

Instead I am going to sit with my Google Alerts, Technorati searches, Twitter alerts and word of mouth (or sight of finger/typed word) to keep abreast of my brand online.

It has for me.

Strange to think but it’s true. Through twitter and my followers I’ve noticed whose interested in what I have to say (my twitter “followers”). For whatever reason the people following me are interested in my movements and my thoughts. The reasons are up to them and for them to know I suppose.

But what I have noticed coming out of twitter and tweets\ is that topics of interest spark a lot more, people are more open and receptive to reading what you have to say. Even if it is only 140 characters. On many occasions recently I have been approached in private IM (instant message) chats to continue a discussion or debate that I posted or commented on via twitter.

This is extremely interesting and I think might lend towards some people’s thoughts about twitter being the next big thing. Let’s all be honest for a second, and it’s been said before, Facebook is great, MySpace did well but are people really still looking for mass communication all the time? I think not. I think something deeper is sought after. People are inherently looking for people. People to engage with, to talk to and debate with. This can take place one-on-one and that’s why we have blogs, forums and social networks. But at the end of the day nothing beats one-on-one conversation, even if it is over IM.

For me first prize involves a debate that launches on my blog and carries over to the “offline world”. I enjoy it when i meet people in person and they comment on and discuss something that I’ve blogged about or tweeted.

Simply put, personal recognition outweighs mass “Digg effect” sort of recognition, at least in my world. I like to know that SA Rocks has affected one person’s perception of things. I like it when one person can discuss something I blogged or commented on. I like to know that my opinion matters for longer than one day and 60+ comments.

Twitter has enhanced my integration with people on a personal level not a mass level. What do you think?

I am not sure why but lost night I decided to try my hand at Twitter, again.

Things might not have changed much since I lambasted the use of Twitter as an ignorant abuse of time and technology available to one. I still feel the same but think that there might, maybe, be some advantages to using the services via IM.

I am still not sure what they are but hopefully will find out. As I was told last night via Twitter, “Twitter has become a new sort of IRC”.

Or something.

Pownce seems to me like much of a twitter-ish sort of site. I don’t know much about this sort of stuff cause I think it’s rubbish and life-sapping technology.

Anyways, back to the point and the title of this post. I understand that what makes Pownce cool is that you can download a desktop client for the software and use the service on your pc. Kiff. So what? I think it’s just another mechanism to get and keep people addicted to intel 100% of the time.

Now I thought I would shut up and get down to it so I toddled off to the Pownce page where you can download the software. To my surprise you need to download two pieces of software for this all to work. The first is some Adobe thing or another AIR or something like that. It’s an 8Mb file. Unfortunately for me that is just too much for me to handle. I know that NO ONE caters for the SA market and thus 8Mb files are regarded as normal downloads in under a minute in most first world countries. But here, that is too many minutes for me to wait to have to download the first pack then download another one, install both and then get things working. Please. Do me a favour and let it all go. Just let is slide.

No one needs to know that I am sitting at my pc doing this, that and the next thing. If I am using the desktop software, it means I am sitting at my pc. Simple, finished, kla.