News24.com, along with other Media24 brands (Finance24.com for example), went down yesterday evening citing "technical difficulties". As I write this, it's now over 24 hours later and nothing has changed. In that amount of time, in response to this intensifying disaster, this broken page is the best response they could manage. Aside from the fact that the page is borrowed from a template for a "Newsletter subscribtion (sic) confirmation" (see the page title), the irony of the message they're sending to their 50,000 daily visitors, is that it's now old news. Over 24 hours old.

I just visited Eskom's site who, after this morning's nationwide power cuts, are redirecting their home page traffic to this Load Shedding page which contains links to regional information and their latest press release. A timely and competent response to what could potentially have resulted in innumerous support e-mails and phone calls from irate customers - although this most likely happened regardless but to a lesser degree. I get the impression they (well, their web team at least) are learning from their mistakes which for me is one of the biggest reassurances.

I realise the two can't be compared, but you get my point. News24.com should be doing more. Maybe their hands are tied, I don't know. We'll have to wait for the insider info to surface or headlines to appear once they manage to restore their site to normal operating levels.

Biggest website in South Africa falls over, technicians spend a day in vain trying to restore

I doubt they're that courageous.

Sorry to all the Media24 employees that I know, I couldn't resist ;)

South Africa's largest Internet portal, 24.com, today announced the arrival of TwoFour, a robotic walking, talking and somewhat cheeky search engine. The innovative attention-seeking device will be catapulted in celebritydom as the central character in a marketing campaign urging local consumers to make 24.com their homepage.

TwoFour makes his debut today in television adverts on the MNET and DSTV channels and on national radio stations, 5FM as well as Metro FM. The new face of 24.com will also make appearances on select outdoor advertising as well as promotions inside Vida e Caffe outlets, nationwide.

The press release continues:

The idea was for TwoFour to bring a certain "cool" factor to search engines, ensuring widespread appeal to the local online market.

Darren over at GottaQuirk has this to say in his post, When did corny become the new cool?

We've had SABC's "Dub", Amore Vitone, the Vodacom rodent and now this. Maize is our staple food source and corn the staple of our entertainment diet.

And Rich of Jo'blog asks Are you a hot web freak-a-zoid?

Personally I think that Ogilvy Cape Town have successfully created a mangled, bastardized rip of Short Circuit's Johnny-Five. Check it out on Flickr or view this blog's picture attachment. Ok, so they changed the treads colour and stuck on a weird mic and satellite dish thing, whoopee.

Bah bah baah baah ba wheeeeeee-eeeee-eeeee!

If you're in the business of printing t-shirts, please give me your details. I receive numerous unwanted requests for t-shirt printing (let alone design) and I have no idea why, because I've never offered this as a service or suggested that I do. Here's my favourite one so far, which arrived in my inbox 2 weeks prior to the launch of the official logo:

Can you please provide me with a quote for a Tshirt design. I am looking for a logo for the world cup that will be here in 2010. I really have no ideas at this point but I'm sure your creative mind can come up with something.

One of those "uhh, what??" requests. No offense to the dude, but is that overly opportunistic or what? And damn, here I am determined to avoid blogging the whole 2010 World Cup logo debate due to the general trend that it's become, in my opinion, disappointingly pessimistic.

It was blogged to death, dugg, farked (wow, do Brand SA have a job on their hands), flickr'd, redesigned, has been compared to previous World Cup logos, likened to a frog jumping over a pork chop and even referred to as a rip-off of the Intel logo (sorry, what??).

May I suggest, for an alternative and refreshing view on the matter, that you stop to consider the bigger picture by visiting Commentary's 2010 Logo Revisited. And as for that silly Russian logo, consider the comments on this adfreak post.

Aaah, fresh air. Anyway, moving on...

Another thing I've avoided blogging this week, is the launch of what they're calling "the biggest online business on the continent", namely 24.com - a result of Media24 Digital merging with MWEB Studios.

Touchy subject - if you're a regular on this blog you'll understand why. In short, I have no patience for anything related to the Naspers/MWEB group. Their marketing agency e-mailed me on Wednesday, I quote:

I an article that I found on your site entitled: Nobody Owns 24.com - here's the latest.

A 24.com launch press release followed. The article they're referring to is this post I imagine, so I don't understand what they were getting at by suggesting that the launch of the 24.com brand should overshadow their bad business practices? I could continue this with a scathing review, but Windows has strangely BSOD'ed on me twice while I was writing this blog, and it would be hypocritical of me anyway because I'd have nothing positive to contribute, so I'm calling this one quits. Wheee!

UPDATE [26/07]: Rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic (via BizCommunity)

The winners were supposed to be announced on Tuesday this week. But not even a suggestion of a peep so far - I guess it's to be expected. Media24 just continue to rack up popularity points, don't they...

Listed media group Naspers' subsidiary Media24, which holds the group's print and internet titles, has sent a letter to www.RENTALS24.co.za and sister company www.BONDS24.co.za, insisting that the websites stop using 24 in their company names.

But the websites' owner, Christopher Riley, said Media24 were bullies and that he was prepared to contest the right to use the number. He was issued with the letter in November last year.

You may remember three years ago, Naspers tried to register "24" as a trademark, while intimidating small businesses to either abondon domains ending in 24.com or 24.co.za or transfer ownership of those domains to them. The result (following painful legal fees) then was a victory for the small guy, and Naspers withdrew their trademark registration application. Read more about that incident here: Website firm accuses Naspers of hijacking domain names, and M-Web in 24.com domain tug of war.

Unfortunately, Johan's nobodyowns24.com site is down, but you can view it thanks to archive.org here. nobodyowns24.com

If you search my site for 'Naspers' you'll see I've never had anything positive to say about them. That trend continues; code of ethics my ass.

Saturday night was BIG - we tore up The Swan to say farewell to Esterche who returned Southside yesterday after a seasonal visit. Some of the 135 photos I took are up at Flickr. in a new "Life" set which I'll be renaming as soon as I come up with something more creative. UPDATE: I lomoized them... 'cos I can. Dig!

I spent the rest of the day in front of my notebook, until now - almost 24 hours later - moving once to buy some dinner. It started out having the biggest laugh with Warrenski over our first webdesign attempts in 1996 (that's an entirely separate blog). And then rediscovering the brilliant political cartoon humour of Cape Town-born Zapiro. Someone has kindly archived all of his Bush-related strips, "from ignominious start to ignoble present". Alternatively, you can view his latest cartoons over at the M&G website. If you're visiting from outside South Africa, you need to be a KuduClub member to view the daily cartoon and full archive, sadly - but that's the best part.

You see, the KuduClub is a subscription-based, online premium service for expatriates. Or in other words, a big time-wasting, money-making scheme. I've mentioned it before. It's also a division of Xpatrinet Inc, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Naspers Ltd. I've mentioned them before. And it's powered by none other than Entriq. I've mentioned them before too: they're also responsible for M-Net On Demand, which I reviewed in depth - an entertaining read if I can say so myself.

So where I'm going with all of this, is simply: disable JavaScript in your web browser, which is really easy to do. Thanks to this past advice from one of my readers pointing out the shockingly poor client-side security of this whole KuduClub/Xpatrinet/Naspers/Entriq venture, expats and other international visitors can bypass all ugly log in screens and save US$9.95 per month!

Back to my day. It became one of those rare occasions where I'd visit one site, jump to another remotely-related site from there, and continue on that path for hours until I had 5 browser windows open, each with 5 tabs, all the while generating ideas, adding to my bookmarks, downloading hordes of completely unrelated files, and updating my projects page. Which I should announce has finally seen the light of day. It's still a fraction of the size of it's mirror in my mind. Not to mention this 5am blogging marathon which I've apparently undertaken.