ABSA is still offering connectivity to their clients. I remember in the past they had a free dial-up connectivity deal going (that was before broadband) and are still trying to add value to their services. Only problem is, there is NOTHING good about their offering! Why do it if offered as a value added service? I’m sure their aim is not making a lot of money from it. Its not their core business anyway!
Compare ABSA’s offering for 6 GB bandwidth @ R448.00 to Web Africa’s 10 GB bandwidth @ R490.00. For R42.00 more you get 4 GB more bandwidth if you go with Web Africa! I’d say ABSA is giving a raw deal… It would be interesting to know how many people fall for their deal just because they do not know of any better? Shape up or get lost ABSA!
Absa’s pricing matrix:
Web Africa’s deal
Sharing is caring:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
Recently (on the 4th of September), Inside the box, a Lenovo blog, announced that they are planning to ship with a Linux Distro as the default OS installed on their system. In true Open Source fashion, they decided to run a poll so that people can vote for which Distro they would like to see shipping on a Lenovo. The results are astounding! At the moment Ubuntu is by far the distro of choice!
They have 5883 votes with Debian as a close second on 1089 results.
You have to admit, Ubuntu being a South African produce, it makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside when something like this happens!
Is Telkom joing the 2.0 scene? At first I thought so… I think they might be trying, but is busy failing dismally… They should really stop and maybe talk to the Cerebra boys before they consider doing so. Anyway, I came across this new “portal” Telom launched. (Thank you Digital Pilgrim!) Its a nice looking huge bandwidth munching flash animation. It is Telkom telling us how lucky we are having broadband and being able to do all sorts of stuff to generate them more money. Lets face it, everytime you watch a Youtube video, Telkom makes money. Every song you download from iTunes or wherever, Telkom makes money. They now went as far as actually encouraging you to do so, so they can make more money…
As much as I hate giving them any sort of publicity, I hate it more to keep quiet! So here goes:
Telkom launched its “do” portal. Its a portal mainly promoting Telkom products and how good they are and what all you can do with them. It totally sucks! Apparently you can register and download music and movies and what-not. I’m not even going to bother registering…
I feel like a conspiracy theorist saying this, but it all seems like they are now promoting that you should “kill your cap” so they can benefit a bit more…
Then another thing that bothers the crap out of me is those ads down the right-hand side. Is it paid for ads? If so, then I would appeal that we boicot iTunes, Youtube, Computicket, EA Gaming, Aardvark (not that I think boicotting aardvark is worth abything since nobody prolly uses them!), and a few others. How the hell can these companies support this evil monopoly?! Dissappointed I am… If it is not paid for advertising, I would like to urge these companies to sue the crap out of Telkom for the bad association they have caused!
Max, my friend, I’m with you on whatever you want to do to Telkom.
I feel sorry for our local ISP’s. How can they compete with their international counterparts when it comes to hosting of sites? It simply does not make sense! SA web sites are jumping ship (and we are following soon!) and moving to international hosts, and who can blame them? It makes zero business sense to host locally for R4000.00 when you can do so for more features and bandwidth internationally at R400.00! That is: You get more for 10% of the price. Either my maths sucks or ISP’s are being ripped off / is ripping us off.
Lets face it, ISP’s HAVE to charge what they do in order to simply SURVIVE.Hellkom makes it damn difficult for these guys to stay competitive! Bulk of our huge hosting fees goes for bandwidth and that they have to pay over to Hellkom again.
Paul over at Wired Gecko and Max is talking action against the monopoly that is Hellkom… I guess the best starting point is to rally up all the local ISP’s since they are the ones that is getting the smallest of the hind tits (at least when you talk hosting!). They are being forced to offer completely uncompetitive hosting fees, while you can get 10 x of what they offer for 10% of the prices they charge!
For connectivity we all pay dearly. We do not have many choices. For hosting we do have choices, and most of us do choose to exercise our freedom of choice by hosting on overseas servers. All-in-all, we are all getting screwed one way or another! I hate feeling screwed…
Its been a loooong time coming and is finally here! Our latest project is in a final Alpha stage ready to go beta! And since everybody else launches at this time more or less, We though “Why the hell NOT?”. So here is one of the reasons for my lack of blogging…
Go2sa.co.za is a community driven tourism portal. By that I mean that content is generated by the members. The members is all tourism related service providers like accommodation establishments, activity providers, restaurants, etc… everyone that service the tourists.
One thing you have to remember is that most our clients are not necessarily as “internet confident” as you are. They are people that download emails and pay accounts using internet banking and that is as far as it goes. So in order to make the process of submitting content to the site a little less painful we’ve developed a Windows application in C# and dotNet for 1) creating content offline (a lot of these guys are still on dial-up) and 2) to resize photos before they hit the web site in order to save them time and confusion.
The main drive and reason for this portal was to give the actual tourism providers the opportunity and platform to promote not only themselves, but also the town and region they are in. They can also promote places of interest that do not have any commercial value. For example a lookout point or a mountain hike or trail. Anything that is of value for tourism, but not operated for profit. It is really up to the community. In return for advertising these non-commercial places of interest we give them free advertising in the form that their listing is displayed with every item they submit.
It is not a free model. We would have loved to do that, but there is a fair amount of training and support needed and because it is so different from normal listing sites, we absolutely HAD to go sell the idea and concept to the clients. So far everyonewe’ve approached (well, accept maybe one or two) in the Garden Route signed up.
However, if you have your own blog and should you wish to contribute to this awesome system, we’ve made it extremely easy! *Nic Haralambous*was so kind to allow us to aggregate the 10 latest feeds from SA Rocks! to our blogs page and the 5 latest to the front page! Thank you very much Nic! So to contribute is easy! Contribute to SA Rocks! and you would contribute to us in indirectly.
So go to the site and tell us what you think! And if you see bugs, even better! Let us knowPLEAAAASE!!!
Here is the opening batsman for South Africa in the 2023 World cup cricket. He is an orthodox left hander who seems to be strong down the third man area. He is also quite the versatile batsman in that he can bat right handed and in effect confuse the living daylights out of any bowler. Great technique. Pleasure to watch. Big future. Also have quite the promising throwing arm and could be the next Jonty Rhodes!
Much has been said in recent times about the state of health of the South African Blogging community. Most people complained that everyone is talking about the same crap. Capitalizing on a hot topic to get exposure. It was obvious when the SA Blog Award debate happened. Every second blog you visited had a post on the debate. Irretating, yes. I’ve also complained about it. I have also said they are flogging a dead horse. I was wrong…
At least when you got to a blog with the topic like “SA Blog Awards controversy” you were bound to read the opinion of the blogger. Is that not a primary reason for blogging? To express and give your opinion? Is it not a GOOD thing to see that everyone at least had a opinion about it?
Lets look at Technorati. Go to Technorati and click on one of the Top 10 hot searches. I clicked on Twitter, which is the hottest at the moment. You are bound to find one or more blogs that say: “Just checking it out!” with a pingback to another blog post (although not exactly in this example. No pingback here, but it does happen often). Now THAT is a blatent “blog camper”. Spamming in its worst form. What people do is they want to be part of the hot topic, but do not even have an opinion on it! So they simply “leech” onto someone that may have an opinion and in return they get some Technorati exposure.
If you go onto Amatomu, you will see that whatever SA blog you visit from there has got some opinion. If not opinion, then at least some form of originality. I’ve never seen such spamming happening yet in the SA blogosphere. (Apart from the lovely daily links that seems to be soooo popular! At least even there opinions about the links are given in the form of a one-liner.) When this does happen (hopefully never, although that might be wishful thinking) we will have bigger problems. Crap like that detracts from a blogging community in more ways than one. There is nothing more appalling than hitting a blog that only offers you a link to another… PUKE!
We advocate that blogs allow you to express your opinion. So I think it would be appropriate if we swallow our own words and bear with all the opinions, however good or bad, since they are a lot better than leeching off or simply linking to other’s opinions! I woe the day that starts happening…
Johnnie Walker whisky have a competition that it would donate US$1,000,000 to the charity of choice of the first the player that hits six sixes in an over. Well done Herschelle! You’ve made us proud! In tonight’s game against the Netherlands Herschelle KLAPPED 6 big ones over the rope!
Let us hope this is a good omen for SA cricket… Oh, and thank you Johnnie Walker.
Stormhoek and Mike asked the question “Why are Stormhoek not in the SA Blog Awards?”. At first, I felt very much ashamed of myself. How the hell could we forget the hand that pours the wine at our very much liked geeky gettogethers?! Shame on the SA blog community. Shame on me.
I do not want this to sound like an excuse. “Mia Culpa”. But…
Mike must be very serious about JOINING THE FRIGGIN’ CONVERSATION! since he always writes it in capital letters. And this is why Stormhoek slipped up. Do they ever read our blogs? Sure, I can understand that my blog might not be all that interesting to guys like them. Thing is I often read other blogs and comments on them, yet I NEVER see Graham nor Hugh commenting on ANY of my feeded blogs. Almost everyone on the blog awards has commented on my blog. If they have not commented, then they are a part of the MyBlogLog community and I saw their pretty little faces in my sidebar widget and went out of interest to see who they are and what they blog about! I’ve never seen Hugh nor Graham’s face on my widget.
At the 27dinner Graham gave a FANTASTIC speech. Why did he not join everybody that was there in the convo that was happening? Why did he not give his take on the event or commented and joined the conversationJOINED THE CONVERSATION?
That given, Chris is a member of MyBlogLog and frequents my bloggy fairly regularly. But that is still not the Stormhoek blog. That is Chris’s blog.
hat, my Stormhoek friends is why you missed out. That is why it is so damn important to JOIN THE CONVERSATIONS! When nominations time comes, you remember the guys you awed or fought with. The guys who you had convos in the blogosphere with.
Same goes for Vincent Maher. Almost EVERYONE reads his words of wisdom. He runs a great blog. The guy is a damn legend! Yet, he is not on there… Why?! Same reason I suppose. In all fairness, Vincent has read and commented on my blog a while ago. Unfortunately, one blog isn’t going to cut it. You need to be involved in the community.
Not so easy now is it? Time constraints. Deadlines. It is hard work to run a prominent blog. Posting great and interesting posts alone does not make for a successfull or popular blog. Its how active and involved you are within your community.
I might be wrong. Maybe you Stormhoek guys are active on other blogs. Just not the blogs that mattered when it came to the SA Blog Awards.
If there is any other reasons why you think they slipped, let me know (apart from the “We f@cked up” stuff… We know that already.) AND JOIN THE CONVERSATION!
