Media, content, streaming and the like

Jul 26, 2022 |

Recently, I had an interesting back and forth with a friend who is media owner, debating the merits of the different revenue models available to us, including subscriptions, paywalls and the like. In my mind, the main challenge with all of this is that the data and information we have on these is primarily from the US, which is a very different market. I still contend that an American media consumer is more included to pay for content that an African consumer, regardless of the country, including South Africa. This is partly due to priority and means. I reckon, on the list of things many of...

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Why I watch the Tour de France every year

Jul 18, 2022 | ,

Recently I tweeted something about the Tour de France, having just finished watching highlights of the day’s stage and a friend responded, with “Still with the #TourdeFrance. Requesting the original thread about how you fell in love with it.” In my early days on Twitter, I did a series of tweets – before threads were threads – on why I watch the Tour de France every year. It is the only cycling race I follow religiously. When I was writing my book Listen To Your Footsteps, I wrote a short essay on the same topic, but it didn’t make the final edit; it didn’t feel like it fit. But, in response...

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What would happen if your website disappeared?

Jul 8, 2022 |

I started my website in 2009 and, albeit erratically, have shared writing and thoughts on a wide range of topics on it since then. There was my ‘tech journo’ phase when I was plugged into that world and wrote posts on launches, new gadgets, innovations, etc. In fact, one of my first posts was on Nokia, when it was still dominating the market. There’s been my extended music phase where I have written about artists, albums and everything in between, including attempting to create regular features like Digital Crates, where I share musicians and albums I ‘discover’ and Life Soundtrack, where I...

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Book Extract: Trying to remember

Mar 18, 2022 |

This is the fourth in a series of extracts from my book Listen To Your Footsteps, a collection of reflections and essays on fatherhood, identity, loss, creativity, etc. Memory is a funny old thing. You tell a story so many times, you start to question how much of it actually happened. With each telling of the experience, you smooth out the edges, the things that didn’t quite fit in, to the point where you can tell it at the drop of a hat.             When I started performing poetry, I had to learn the craft of standing on a stage in front of people, would, generally, get increasingly...

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How To Work Better

Mar 9, 2022 | ,

In my post Owning Your Platform, I wrote about how, having written and worked for a number of media outlets and brands, a lot of my writing has disappeared into the ether. Fortunately, I have multiple folders with versions of some of the things that I have written. In the interests of ensuring that they aren’t totally lost, I have started sharing some of them here. This is something I wrote in 2020, having spent most of 2019 exploring the idea of productivity and using the time I work efficiently to create more time for other aspects of life. I probably went through at least 8 books and...

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Owning Your Platform

Mar 1, 2022 |

In October 2021, Facebook experienced an outage which also meant that Instagram and Whatsapp also went down. And everyone turned to Twitter to complain. In early February 2022, Twitter also experienced some problems with loading Tweets. When these outages happen, I am always reminded of discussions I have had, over the years, with various corporate and media platforms on the importance of owning your platform – in other words a website that you pay for - and using social media as a way of amplifying your stories. Social media has become pervasive in ways that we initially couldn’t imagine....

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