• GI Food List
  A GI and GL index of South African foods.
  (tags: food health diet gi)

• ZA Tech Show
  Big time geeking going on at the ZA Tech Show podcast. “South African tech journos indulging in beer and opinion”.
  Should be well worth a listen. Nice current, and locally (SA) relevant topics.
  (tags: podcast)

• DOTHETEST
  Great campaign..
  (tags: advertising communication psychology)

• YouTube lets developers build their own YouTubes | Technology | Internet | Reuters
  YouTube, Google Inc’s popular video sharing site, is giving away tools that let Web developers tap the underlying database functions of YouTube, in effect allowing users to build their own YouTubes.
  (tags: google video youtube)

• Defining The Online Marketing Suite by Suresh Vittal - Forrester Research
• Twitter is The New Facebook - The Praized Blog » Blog Archive
  Twitter certainly has started to grow noticably in the ZA context. Will be very interesting to see where it goes in the coming months. I do think however that the unreliable service from Twitter will need to be sorted out asap.
  (tags: facebook socialnetworking socialmedia twitter)
• Twitter Fan Wiki / Hashtags
  Adding further depth, meaning, and context to your twitter messages.
  (tags: reference socialmedia tagging twitter tags hashtags)
• Stormhoek Stolen! | GottaQuirk
  Stormhoek’s “demise”, an interesting viewpoint from fellow geeks Quirk.
  (tags: stormhoek wine)
• Digital Photography Tutorials
  Below are tutorials on how to acquire, interpret and process digital photographs using a visually-oriented approach that emphasizes concept over procedure.
  (tags: cheatsheet digital graphics photography howto)
• Mybroadband.co.za: Reviews of Hardware, Software, Gaming, Cellular and Telecoms
  (tags: tech reviews)

One of my favourite local acts Desmond & The Tutus have released their first music video “Peter” (i think it’s their first). They took the opportunity to team up with another favourite kidofdoom and make use of the same venue etc for their own shoot. So it’s two for the price of one here on scott.za.net..

First up, Desmond & The Tutus - Peter:

And kidofdoom - Minor Disagreements:

• The Uganda Skateboard Union - www.ugandaskateboardunion.org
  The Uganda Skateboard Union is setting out to combat idleness and boredom among the youth of Uganda by providing a new, positive and fun outlet for them.
  (tags: skateboarding uganda africa sports)
• Slashdot | NIN’s Music Experiment Sells Big Numbers
  “Among the various options he gave fans, the most expensive was the $300 Limited Edition Ultra Deluxe Package. It took just over a day for that package to completely sell out, earning Reznor $750,000 in revenue from just that option alone.”
  (tags: music)
• Download The Charlatans’ New Album For Free!
  WooHoo! More free music!
  (tags: mp3 music free)

I’d like to get some thoughts from the search optimisation community about this latest attempt from Ananzi to drum up some business…

My initial questions:
1 - What the hell is Ananzi doing?
2 - Are Ananzi REALLY the largest search engine in Africa?
3 - Not really a question, but I’d like to say that I consider this type of email to be SPAM, especially without any kind of unsubscribe link etc. It’s kind of sad really..

Here’s the email:

Attention : Scott

Ananzi Search Engine has created a package for you to optimise your search ranking to a very favourable position on 4 of the major Search Engines, namely,
Google - www.google.co.za ; MSN - www.msn.com ; Yahoo - www.yahoo.com ; Ananzi - www.ananzi.co.za . If this is done by you or your search engine optimiser it could take 6 - 12 months BUT with Ananzi you would be able to view your favourable ranking on these search engines within 6 weeks. This is due to the fact that Ananzi is South Africas largest Search Engine and we already have a high ranking on Google other search engines.

Ananzi Quick Pages - What do you get ?

2 Pages of content that would be written by our SEO (Search Engine Optimiser). This content would be exclusively written for the Quick Pages feature and this content would be monitored by our SEO. If the SEO notices your company going down the ranking on any of the Search Engines then he would update your content to keep you in a favourable ranking. The pages consist of the write-up and contact details of your company. It also provides a link direct to your website.
You would also have a Banner ; button and Skyscraper advert on the page that would allow you to promote your companies Products / Services. This Banner / Skyscraper or button can be sold by you to one of your clients and can generate revenue for you. These adverts will be changed on a monthly basis as it would help in optimising the company across the Search Engines.

2 Keywords plus company name that would be featured on www.ananzi.co.za , search result pages on the extreme right.

20 meta keywords on Google, MSN and Yahoo.

To promote the Quick Page link we would serve your link on the Home Page of Ananzi which is receiving over 15 million page impressions per month. This link would feature the brand name / product name.

The above package would be at an investment of R1881.00 per month incl vat for 12 months. This would cost much more if done by yourself up to R5000 or more.

Payment can go off on an easy payment debit order on the 8 or last day of every month.

Please let me know if I must send through an insertion order.

I look forward to a favourable response.

Kind Regards

Vim Reddy
www.ananzi.co.za
Tel: 031 717 4031
Fax: 031 717 4217
vimlar@brabys.co.za

• Practice What You Preach: Nine Inch Nails Gives Away New Album
  NIN’s new album “Ghosts” takes the creative commons route.
  (tags: music)

Hello,

You created a Page that has violated our Terms of Use, and this Page has been removed. Facebook Pages are special profiles used solely for commercial, political, or charitable purposes. Among other things, Pages that are hateful, threatening, or obscene are not allowed. We also take down Pages that attack an individual or group, or that are set up by an unauthorized individual. Continued misuse of Facebook’s features could result in your account being disabled.

If you have any questions or concerns, you can visit the Terms applicable to Facebook Pages at http://www.facebook.com/terms_pages.php.

The Facebook Team

This is the message that greeted me the other day. They have shut down the BMW South Africa Facebook page. No specific reasons given, no chance given to rectify the situation, just a one-way command. And a link to see if you can work it out yourself.

After going through the Terms pages I couldn’t find anything that looks like a fair reason for the page deletion. The only thing left to do is to scratch through facebook.com looking for an email address or some kind of contact channel, which i eventually find (a small contact form box).

After a day wait the response arrives:

Hi Scott,

We can enable your Page for you, but we will need to confirm that you are the authorized representative of BMW. To help us verify this, please write us an email from an email address associated with this company. Please be sure to include all of our previous correspondence. Once we receive this email, we can continue assisting you with enabling your Facebook Page.

Thanks for contacting Facebook,

Reece
Customer Operations Representative
Facebook

As this happens on the weekend, I can only access work email 2 days later, sending them proof of my bmw.co.za address. Today I receive another message with further steps to rectify the situation. With Facebook being on the west coast of the USA, our responses only arrive the next day.

A word of warning to those thinking about using this platform: when there’s only one partner in the “relationship” that can do as it pleases, you need to be sure that whatever you’re doing should not rely 100% on it. Facebook encourages you to set up pages and run campaigns from it, but will shut you down without even giving you a chance to respond. When you are reaching a critical mass of members and community momentum is starting to pick up, this is a terrible thing to happen.

Are Facebook putting the consumer/customer first? i think not. To me they’re just another corporation that have grown to the point where they can dictate the terms whether you like it or not. And it has left a bitter taste.