I emailed Keith and he reverted within the hour, which is fantastic!

I truly hope that you guys manage to clean up things and improve your systems. You have a few great initiatives and it is very sad to see that it has been reduced to this state.

I trust that this matter will be solved appropriately and hope that this will be my last blog post about the inefficiencies of your organisation’s projects. I have a lot of respect for the effort gone into these projects and truly appreciate it.

Have a good holiday!

@ ChrisM – Thanks for your comments. I do agree with your largely and fully support all efforts to clean up these social aggregation platforms.

I would however appreciate a less sarcastic tone in your comments. As you can imagine, in order to maintain a level of respect for all those who visit my blog, I need to be fairly stern about this. I’m sure you understand.

@Goblin & Rox – I completely agree with your comments!

@Janine – That is the exact procedure that I followed. Riaan was emailed about this matter in July all the way through to October as well. With him resigning, it is no excuse that this matter was not handled before he left as I feel that within the three 3 months that he had received my mails, a simple response saying that he is busy/overworked/poorly-managed would have sufficed. Sadly that was not the case. Jason has proven that they are listening now though.

@EVERYONE – I appreciate all your comments and look forward to having you on my blog again.

Yup, that’s the one, looking forward to your comment.

Watching the Amatomu debate at http://imod.co.za/2008/12/03/who-should-be-listed-on-amatomu/ – not sure if that’s the one you mean. About to reply.

J

Ok, enough of that. I’m sure you guys are having a tough time getting a strong team together and we can all appreciate that, so as far as my opinion goes, that’s a decent excuse. However, surely you have someone who’s actively watching the blogsphere, which is where you’ve decided to place quite a lot of your ventures in?

Have you seen the latest blogger cry about Amatomu yet?

Let’s rock things Jason, Thought Leader and Amatomu are fantastic platforms, don’t let them slip away and pull us bloggers down with them, we’re proudly South African and love bloging and systems that support blogging!

Sorry we’ve disappointed you. I’m afraid for some reason your mails fell through the holes – probably due to hyperactive spam filters – and I didn’t receive them. Now that we’re aware of your request the editorial team will consider it – I can’t speak for them in terms of approving you as I’m on the technical side of things.

Please drop a mail to Keith Nicholls – KeithN@mg.co.za – he’s expecting to hear from you. I’m currently overseas on leave but will check up that he got the mail. You can copy me in – jasonn@mg.co.za.

Other peeps who wanted to get onto Tech Leader but haven’t managed to get hold of us, please drop Keith a mail.

Unfortunately with Matt, Vince, Riaan and one of the two developers leaving, we’re really short-staffed at the moment, and are having to build up a new team. Please don’t take this as an excuse – we do need to lift our game and you guys do need to call us out when we mess up, but I’d appeal to the blogging community to be patient with things like requests for getting on to the Leaders.

Thought Leader, Tech Leader, Sports Leader, Amatomu and Amagama are all very important platforms to us, and we do throw a large percentage of resources at it. We even hire freelancers just to moderate comments on the Leaders. Sure, we’d like to make money on the Leaders, but at the moment that’s not our goal: in M&G tradition what we really want is to publish the best content out there, spark debate, put pressure on our leaders, and make a positive change in our country.

Love the new site Dee!

Jason

Blogging used to be an alternative to traditional media, and gave ordinary Joe Soaps the platform to share their views.

Now it’s an industry, and it’s about huge traffic and massive advertising and revenue, and traditional media channels have jumped on the bandwagon.