DISQUS

Baratunde, got a way to donate besides Tipjoy?

Also, nice petty comment by the "anon"ymous coward above. Seriously?

My main browser is still Firefox, but I test Chrome out on my desktop from time-to-time. It's okay, but nothing blows me away, plus the extensions I really use aren't available. In other words, I don't see a reason to switch from FF to Chrome as my main browser yet.

hash's last blog post..Maker Faire Africa Logo: Win $250

Fred, people who don't get around Africa don't realize the breadth of penetration of mobile phones. More importantly than that though is they don't understand how Africans are really using them.

Here's an interesting example... Yahoo, for the last 10-12 years has had a complete monopoly on the email boxes of East Africans. However, they have paid no attention to that region. Africans still need email for business and some communications, but they don't use it for messaging, that's what their mobile phone is for. Yahoo is missing out on two opportunities for penetration in this market; they're losing email market share to Google at an alarming rate, and they're not even in the mobile chat game which is an even bigger potential market (and loss).

Seems like this is the perfect opportunity for a bidding engine (once there are enough ad buyers in a region). Have it transparent too, where you can see the "going rate" for a zip code, county or city and decide to bid it up or down for the next month.

What I think every ad buyer wants though is a one-stop-shop for their real estate ads. Who is going to be the nexus that allows you to buy across the networks? It's a real drag on agents/brokers already stretched time to have to manage 3-5 different site's ads. All with different requirements...

Reminds me of Geoffrey Moore's "Crossing the Chasm", with a twist.

Hey Joel. I'd argue that the success will be determined not by who gets the most publishers to sign up (I think that's the easy part), but by who has the best sales team and can get the most advertisers on board.

Congrats. Great to see more of your work getting international attention. By the way, I just met Matt at the WP 5th birthday party too. I wish I had known about this and been able to plug it for you.

Worked well for me, and it was fast too. Nice little app.

Apple's Keynote makes things look so good... Nice data here too Justin.

I wonder how fast SA will cap out on FB? How many potential FB users are there in SA anyway?

Mark, this is a good post from an unexpected quarter.

I think there's a much bigger tech story behind what's going on right now. In fact, the problems in Kenya serve to outline some really big tech opportunities available in Africa involving communications and connectivity. I'll be posting some thoughts on that shortly, and plan to hightlight this at DEMO.

This explains why Macs started to get good again about 2003... :)

Yep, welcome to the splogs, where your content is plastered all over spam blogs in hopes that they'll make a few cents off of some poor sod clicking on a Google link...

It sucks, but I haven't really found a solution for it.

Nice, I'll start using it instead of TinyURL then.

I can't believe you left out InstantDomainSearch.com It's the most useful tool in my arsenal for finding good, available domains.

Outstanding Justin! All those late nights are finally paying off. :)

What I think is most interesting about this is how I hear people saying, "do something original" and "what's happening overseas". That kind of stuff. Yet, these same people aren't coming up with any new groundbreaking ideas of their own.

I believe something like Scribd could come straight out of SA. There's a great deal of talent in the SA region of the continent. The reasons why it wasn't made there is what I think Eric talks about - and he's right to an extent. However, this isn't a zero-sum game, there can be local "copies" of great ideas that are useful and make money.

However, when something good does get created especially for this market it seems there are a lot of critics. Sure, Zoopy and Muti might not be completely new and different, but they still serve a purpose.

Let's see some great kick-ass SA sites that go international (Eric, bring out your best). Let's also support the ones that are there. In this I need to eat my own dogfood and start using an African video-hosting site for African Signals.

Damn, the more I think about this, the more I think there's about 10 blog posts worth of content stored up in the ideas in this blog post and discussion alone.

What I think is most interesting about this is how I hear people saying, "do something original" and "what's happening overseas". That kind of stuff. Yet, these same people aren't coming up with any new groundbreaking ideas of their own.

I believe something like Scribd could come straight out of SA. There's a great deal of talent in the SA region of the continent. The reasons why it wasn't made there is what I think Eric talks about - and he's right to an extent. However, this isn't a zero-sum game, there can be local "copies" of great ideas that are useful and make money.

However, when something good does get created especially for this market it seems there are a lot of critics. Sure, Zoopy and Muti might not be completely new and different, but they still serve a purpose.

Let's see some great kick-ass SA sites that go international (Eric, bring out your best). Let's also support the ones that are there. In this I need to eat my own dogfood and start using an African video-hosting site for African Signals.

Damn, the more I think about this, the more I think there's about 10 blog posts worth of content stored up in the ideas in this blog post and discussion alone.

Wow, coming out fast and furious! That's a great release.

"Amatomutigator!" LOL, that's hilarious. :)

Justin, you're doing great work, keep it up. Both Grabble and Afrigator are very impressive.

Mine

Hey Justin, I thought you might enjoy this video that someone I work with put together. It's 7 minutes, but does a fair job of humorously explaining why web standards and proper XHTML are important.

Growing and Learning Video

Congrats Vinny, that was a smart choice by Mark's team. Best of luck!

Good idea and great execution! It's particularly useful when you have a couple hundred articles in your archive too.

I think you're missing one of the bigger advantages of a PayPerPost campaign here - SEO (search engine optimization).

Leaving aside any debate over how ethical it is to pay someone to write about your product/service, you really can't begin to think that you'll get a ton of buzz and generate a lot of consumer interaction with this service (yet) because the bloggers who pick up the stories aren't generally that well read. They're not popular enough to send your visits sky high.

What you do get out of it is a link with a targeted keyword phrase that is worth it's weight in gold. For a couple hundred bucks you can put your website on the first page of Google results for your chosen keyword phrase.

THAT is why this is so important for marketers to realize. For no other reason than that, I would consider running a campaign or two on PPP.

Am I a lazy marketer because of it? No more so than the "hard working" marketer that hires an SEO firm to launch them to higher search engine rankings.