Photos from the Johannesburg 27dinner held in September 2008.

Sage: [seyj] (noun)  1. A profoundly wise person; a person famed for wisdom. 2. Someone venerated for the possession of wisdom, judgment, and experience. Zealot: [zehl-uht] (noun) 1. One who is zealous, especially excessively so. 2. A fanatically committed person. The fringe fanatics who hide in caves because The World is ending are right. The World is ending, and the whole of civilisation will be wiped out. But what they seem to have wrong is when this will happen. They are so concerned

Wow, finally… my first post. This is quite a momentous occasion for me, I’m a little nervous about what people will think of my blog and if they’ll even read it. You wouldn’t think I’d be nervous considering I blat out my every move on Twitter & Facebook, so much so that there is no need to ask me “So, how have you been?”. Anyone following me will already know… in great, and often unecessary, detail. But I digress (I will do that a lot, so get used to it), back to why I am nervous about th

Blaming a communications technology rather than how it is used for the social impact of the communication does nothing except fill our newspapers with insane headlines like the one above. So the story of Marlon Parker and how he is using social media tools such as Mxit, Facebook, Twitter and blogging to counsel drug users [...]

I thoroughly enjoyed last night’s 27 Dinner in Cape Town – not only for the great food and conversation, but also because of the great presentations. First up was Eran from Springleap who gave us an insight into the various marketing channels they use to get their product out there. Interestingly, some slightly unconventional methods (well, these days) such as cold-calling seem to also be in the repertoire. Great presentation and cool to see how they’ve integrated various traditional and onlin

HAH! You didn’t *really* think you were going learn that from me, did you? Yours truly HAS been living as a hermit and firmly planted under a rock for the last 4 years you know! In fact, I highly recommend that to learn the fine art of working a room, you watch me at any event or gathering and do the exact opposite Last night’s Cape Town 27 Dinner at The Wild Fig was brilliant though. I’m SO glad I went (thank you Mom and JOC for being on Kid Duty so that I could attend. And for doing th

Monday … Lots to do, lots to do! One thing I’m not looking forward to later is a meeting with the headmaster at Son#2’s school. Why do I always feel like *I’m* the one who’s in shit for something when I get summoned to see a headmaster? Bah. Yeah, there was a bit of an “incident” on Friday and now I have to go in this afternoon and sort it out with them … I REALLY REALLY REALLY hope that this does NOT turn into the crap that we went through with Son#1. Seriously, I’ve had enough of it!! Any

In 2000 sociologist Robert Putnam published Bowling Alone. No, I haven’t read it yet, but the title sums up his central observation: across the United States league bowling is on the decline. Putnam is concerned by this because it is representative of the general decline in group activities by Americans. And group activities like league bowling, community BBQ’s, and trivia night at the local pub are what generate social capital. The less we interact, the less social capital we have. So I los

The 29th 27dinner, held on the 25th to accommodate more folks (weekends aren’t ideal for these things), was, I think, an improvement on previous dinners. The new venue, Cappello in Sandton City, suited our presentation format far better and encouraged a more networky vibe. Thanks to Garsen (the owner) and his team for their refreshingly enthusiastic support of our cause. I also tried a new format for the input on the evening. The first ‘presentation’ with Jeff Fletcher from ISLabs took the fo

I thought I might not write this my 27 dinner review - gig, but then forced by a desire to see visitors flock to the Moral Fibre website and to appease my business partner Mr Saul K. I thought I best do it. So here it goes, the 27 dinner review which took place on the 25th of September : The Venue - Capellos Sandton (Beside Edgars on the Second Level of the Sandton Mall) The venue rocks; a definite improvement. First and foremost as a venue for presentations it worked well, the staff could

Speaker missed out on a trip to DCI and Highway Africa 2008 I was honored, exited and pleased when I have received the invitation to be a speaker at the 3rd Digital Citizen Indaba (DCI) conference in Grahamstown, South Africa.Unfortunately, due to different circumstances, I missed out the flight … I own you a sincere apologies for all inconveniences and explication about how come … but I think explanation is not necessary since DCI was a succes. If you think I missed an opportunity Azafady r

Wednesday evening I attended the 27Dinner and it was great to see some old faces and meet some new people Face to Face. All in all it was a great evening of just socializing with old and new friends. And oh the talks was great too One of the questions I was asked over and over again when people hear I work for IBM, is what is a big corporate like IBM doing at a social event like 27Dinner. Few people know that IBM with 400000 permanent employees is dependent in its daily work on social sof

Thank you very much to Dave Duarte and Max Kaizen who have both supported my drive to create stronger relationships between South African bloggers and those bloggers from the rest of Africa. This has nothing to do with with the Xenophobia attacks, although it will restore tremendous goodwill that has always been there in the blogging community - most South African bloggers may not have been aware of this until this talk at the bi-monthly 27Dinner event in Cape Town. I delivered for me one of t

Upcoming Events for the Month of August in South Africa. WordCamp is an informal gathering of WordPress enthusiasts, bloggers, podcasters, developers and designers. The event will bring all these people together, under one roof, for a full day and will feature talks by some of South Africa’s most influential bloggers. Date: 23 August 2008 Time: 9:30 - 16:30 Venue: The WildFig, Cape Town Register at the Wordcamp South Africa site This mont’s 27 dinner, will be held in Capetown. Date:

Eve made a comment on Twitter about morality and the recent 27 Dinner so I asked for a followed a link to this post on the somewhat dubiously named Moral Fibre blog where a discussion was raging about aspects of the dinner held at the Primi in Melrose Arch last week. For the most part the discussion was pretty typical of a 27 Dinner post-mortem until Roy jumped in with his criticism of the speakers, the facilities and the evening generally. It was a pretty hard look at the dinner and I think it