Fat Cactus, Blog Awards, Yid and Bloggers who take themselves TOO seriously

FAT CACTUS

I had a kewl evening at the Fat Cactus this evening. The people were interesting, (when the non Interneter starts rambling on about her exploits on facebook you realise the big I is starting to influence everyone on a daily basis), the music by the 2 piece jazz band was excellent, and the food was good….

WHEN I GOT IT.

I ordered a VEGETARIAN burger, and on taking my first bite, realised it was MEAT!!!! No Apology, and it took about 20 minutes to bring me my order, by which time I had eaten half the chips off everyone else’s plates, AND everyone else was finished eating.

SEARCHING FOR ERIC EDELSTEIN

Anyway, I was intrigued to see tonight that a large number of people are searching for Eric Edelstein on the search engines (as a large number of visitors to EricEdelstein.com found the site by searching on variations of my name). Now that shouldn’t surprise me, as a movie star with the SAME name as me is becoming more famous by the day, BUT people were searching “Eric Edelstein South Africa” and variations…

SOUTH AFRICAN BLOG AWARDS

The South African Blog Awards (Mike Stopforth mentioned they are around 9 187 in Technorati) have a HUGE commonality between judges and blogs in the final countdown. Yes, blogs can’t be in the finals of a category a judge is judging, but a large number of the finalists blogs are the Judges blogs. Are there so FEW bloggers in SA? Can’t the blog awards find some impartial judges? Common guys, get real? Get some system of voting which is unbiased or get non SA bloggers to judge – here’s an idea: Get International Bloggers to Judge? It seems like an old boys blog club at the moment…

YID

A few weeks ago I registered yid.co.za as I thought it would make a nice portal site sometime in the future. Today I got this mail…

“Dear Eric

We are looking to register the domain name yid.co.za and we see that it is registered in your name.

Please will you let me know if you would be prepared to let us have it, as we own the trademark to the name “yid” . We will pay you all expenses incurred.

Just some background on us, we run a Jewish dating website called “YID” which is short for Your Ideal Date. Its a not-for-profit website, and we have made about 33 matches.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

<name removed>”

What if i’m planning on setting up a website called YourIdeaDen.co.za? or YeahItsDelicious.co.za? or….

And asking me for the domain at the SAME time as dangling the LEGAL rope in front of me is CHUTZPAH!!!!

SERIOUS BLOGGERS

Talking of Chutzpah, SA is a small island in the huge mass of Internet activity, and the few bloggers in SA take themselves FAR too seriously!!

I’ve got a cell phone portal I run with a mate – we have great fun answering people’s questions about everything to do with cell phones. We’ve been doing it for about 2 years, and believe me, answering questions, and reviewing cell phones takes TIME!

But we enjoy it, and even though we haven’t made any money out of the site – it’s actually cost us to date – we are planning on it making money in the future (life isn’t all fun).

So I asked a few bloggers to give us some input telling us what they think of the site. And I encouraged the feedback by giving them a link back and some exposure on our home page. Viral simplicity straight out of the late 90′.

Maybe it was the 10 hours of reading blogs, that caused my emails to them to sound a little spammish, but admittedly they did. Even so, the result was a number of incoming links from bloggers that did see the value in Mobile-QandA. More interesting was the number of bloggers who spent their time lambasting the viral experiment (although some of the bloggers then went on to create their own viral link experiments). IT WAS FUN GUYS!!!

And one interesting side point is that interested sponsors have now approached us…

A few days after I set up this fun experiment, I read a posting by Vincent Maher who posted my email I sent him (and I definately was tired, coz too me it sounded like SPAM!)

I really do think his layout of his blog (into seperate sections for personal and his views on marketing) are a nice way of doing it, BUT the mail i sent him went something like “hey, your site is kewl, don’t you want to link to us”.

He had blocked out the URL and my name, but I thought i’d tell him that my intention was to get some honest feedback on Mobile-QandA at the same time as creating a viral experiment.

I jumped on the phone, and called him to tell him that I wanted him to get involved in my experiment (did he think Mobile-QandA was a good service or not?), and that i did think his site was kewl, AND the coffee invitation was genuine…at the end of the conversation, he said we should catch up next time I was in JHB.

So a good conversation (well, so I thought), until Dave mentioned to me earlier today that Vincent had done a follow up blog post AFTER I spoke to him and it wasn’t overly complementary…I’d link to it if I didn’t keep getting a “Timeout Error” on his Blog…