If you live in Cape Town or are a visitor in this beautiful city, I recommend you to take the time out to enjoy a leisurely walk up to the summit of Lion’s Head to enjoy some of the most amazing views of Cape Town, surrounded by an amazing variety of flora and fauna.

I’ll share some more information about the walk and how easy it is in another blog post, but for now here’s a slide show of the snaps taken with the old trusty Sony Ericsson K800i we had available.

GuyKawasaki

(Guy Kawasaki)

Cool infographic: The best movies of all time map http://om.ly/JPFa

On 3-10-2009 14:29:38 from otweet

Top 250 Movies of All Time Map

According to the article by Kelsey Keith over at FastCompany The Best Movies of All Time infographic comes from a French cinephile forum named Vodkaster and was created based on the most critically acclaimed films of all time. This super cool looking flowchart which reminds me of a tube map plots everything from classics such as Casablanca and Gandhi to epics like Dr. Strangelove and The Godfather.

This wicked data visualization was designed by David Honnorat and can be viewed in various resolutions and downloaded via the original post, The top 250 best movies of all time Map.

There’s not only some huge riding, but also some of the most technically difficult and imaginative stunts you will probably ever see. This video pushes the envelope of what is perceived as being possible on a trials bike (I mean, when last did you see someone take a trail bike along the top of a fence?).

In addition to some jaw-dropping tricks, this video features a wicked soundtrack by Band of Horses, specifically the their epic track entitled "The Funeral." You can find out more about the band at their www.bandofhorses.com.

Community building can be cold.

This evening I was researching information related to planning, building and sustaining social networks or online communities when I found a great post by CommunitySpark Community Manager Martin Reed entitled “How to build an online community” which helped me with the two most important aspects .

In the first part, Martin identifies 5 questions to ask yourself when planning an online community.

Questions you should be asking yourself include:

1. Why do you want an online community?
2. Where do you build the new online community?
3. Where are your members?
4. What makes your community unique?
5. How will you attract members and manage the community?

The second part of the article deals with 5 factors to consider when building an online community.

Factors you should consider include:

1. Keep it simple.
2. Respect your community.
3. Keep it private (at first).
4. Have guidelines and processes from day one.
5. Highlight members and their content.

He concludes the article by saying that you should be realistic and adventurous and commit yourself to managing, measuring and refining your community over the long term because you’re not just building a site to woo potential buyers, you’re building relationships.

I found it a great read, very informative and helpful. There’s just so much new stuff to consider with community building that you have to plan ahead and put yourself in the users shoes to make sure that your venture stands any chance of success. I agree with Martin’s view that community building is about providing and sustaining value for your members in order to create a successful venture in the long term.

I’ll take a turn to answer those questions and review those factors in later posts, but for now I have added Community Spark to my Feedly RSS reader. I’ll also add it to the aggregator when I get that up and running on Cape Town Social using the OneNews WordPress Theme I plan on purchasing as soon as I find my PayPal details.

Wow, that was the first post I have written in ages, I hope you enjoyed it, please share your opinion or let me know what you look for in a social network.

With the new WP Quote Tweets plugin by Tanin Ehrami you can! The WordPress WP Quote Tweets Plugin by Tanin Ehrami makes it possible to embed specific twitter status updates in your WordPress blog via shortcodes. Like this:

oysterfestival

(Knysna Oyster Fest)

2009 Knysna Oyster Festival opens tonight! See you in Knysna...www.oysterfestival.co.za

On 1-7-2009 07:57:40 from web

Nice, huh?

The official line from the plugin author is:

Allows authors to quote Twitter updates in posts or pages using a simple shortcode. {quotetweet tweetid=123456789}. The tweetid can be found in the URL of the tweet that is to be quoted.

Why would you embed Tweets in your blog posts?

Embedding specific Twitter quotes in your blog posts could be a great way to socialize content and really integrate it with the social web. Right off the top of my head I can think of a few uses, some of which I hope to highlight in successive blog posts.

The WP Quote Tweets plugin is available for download at WP Codex or you can Visit the plugin site.

Update: The new version of the WP Quote Tweets plugin and it now supports templates. PLease visit the plugin site for more info.

I’ll share another cool Twitter plugin for WordPress with you soon, it’s something called TweetSuite by Dan Zarrella and it puts major foot to ass in the WordPress Twitter plugins department.

Stay Tuned.

Twit... Twit... Twitter

I was checking out the State of the Twittersphere report by Dan Zarrella who works at HubSpot and was really amazed at the kind of information that’s in it.

Here are a few the Twitter stats & items that I found quite interesting:

• 79.79% failed to provide a homepage URL.
• 75.86% of users have not entered a bio in their profile.
• 68.68% have not specified a location.
• 55.50% os users are not following anyone.
• 54.88% of users with accounts have never tweeted.
• 52.71% of Twitter user accounts have no followers.

There’s tons of other useful infor in the PDF report which is freely available for download from HubSpot.

Jolly by BeBz @ deviantART

I stumbled onto a great resource list while playing with Zemanta‘s ReBlog feature.

The post was written by Chris Brogan and contained a list of 20 free eBooks about Social Media that Chris found one morning when looking for something to read.

1. The New Rules of Viral Marketing – David Meerman Scott
2. Marketing Apple – MarketingApple.com
3. Masters of Marketing – Startup Internet Marketing
4. Podcast Marketing eBook – Christopher S. Penn
5. Google Adwords Secrets – SEOBook
6. Get Viral Get Visitors – Stacie Mahoe
7. Marketing With Case Studies – Dynamic Copywriting
8. How to Write a Marketing Plan – Geisheker Group
9. SEO for WordPress blogs – Blizzard Internet
10. Social Web Analytics – Social Web Analytics
11. Geeks Guide to Promoting Yourself With Twitter – Geekpreneur
12. The Zen of Blogging – Hunter Nutall
13. What is Social Media – iCrossing
14. A Primer in Social Media – SmashLab
15. Effective Internet Presence – Effective Internet Presence
16. Introduction to Good Usability – Peter Pixel
17. Increasing the Response to Your Email Marketing Program – CRM Transformation
18. We Have a Website. Now What? – Craig Rentmeester
19. Blogs & Social Media – PRSA
20. The Podcast Customer Revealed – Edison Media Research

This should make for some great reading, I recognize some of the names on this list and these people are passionate experts who like to educate, inform, inspire and entertain.

If you’ve read any of these eBooks, please leave a comment, I’d love to hear your views.