Zoopy Blog|Eating, living, sleeping and breathing social media

After attending and covering the annual DCI and Highway Africa conferences in Grahamstown last year (both managed and hosted by Rhodes University) we are very pleased to be their social media partner again this year for DCI 3.0.

Their social media page will aggregate all videos, photos and blog posts added to Zoopy that contain the dci2008 tag. The page will be populated by Rhodes journalism students as well as DCI attendees throughout the conference.

Also featured on the page is something we’ll be doing more and more on Zoopy landing pages: a Twitter stream. This helps to really pull together a full spectrum of audio, video, text and live elements on the day and will make for a richer experience for delegates and those following from home.

This is one of Africa’s leading web technology events and we look forward to helping play a part in making it enjoyable and memorable in time to come.

If you haven’t been following the buzz surrounding Mozilla Labs‘ new addon for Firefox - Ubiquity - then I suggest you head on over to their blog to read the introduction.  Ubiquity is a tool that allows you to perform certain defined functions in your browser by typing in natural language.  For instance, “email this to info@zoopy.com” would take whatever text you’ve selected in your browser and prepare it for an email to info@zoopy.com in Gmail.

What makes Ubiquity so powerful, is that anyone can create custom commands and share them.  As such, Zoopy is proud to make available the “zoopy” command for Ubiquity users.  Using the command will bring up the latest eight results that match your search query.

To install, follow these simple steps:

1. Install Ubiquity, which can be downloaded here.
2. Go to http://www.zoopy.com/ubiquity/index.html
3. If Ubiquity is installed correctly, a bar should appear across the top of the browser window with a Subscribe… button. Click it.
4. A window will appear telling you that Zoopy is not a trusted source.  You may ignore this by clicking on I know what I’m doing. Subscribe to it!.
5. The “zoopy” command is now available.  You may access it by bringing up the Ubiquity interface (the default key combination is alt + space), and typing in “zoopy” followed by any search term.  Please note that if you press Enter after typing in your search phrase, you’ll be taken to the Zoopy search page.  If you don’t you’ll see the latest eight thumbnails matching your search query in the Ubiquity interface.

Please note that both Ubiquity and the “zoopy” command are in their early developmental phases, and so may behave unexpectedly at times.  If you have any difficulties, please send an email to info@zoopy.com, and we’ll do our best to assist you.

Nic Haralambous is now officially part of the Zoopy team and is spending this week with us in Cape Town, discussing and fleshing out our strategy, rollout plan, company structure and operations.

Nic is excited about the road ahead and we can’t wait for him to take Joburg by storm as GM of Zoopy Gauteng. His team will be joining him next month and together they’ll be adding their own kind of magic to our business, our brand and our user experience as a whole.

Welcome to the team Nic - we’re delighted to have you with us.

Until the end of last week, we had been using the open source ad serving solution de jeur, phpAdsNew (which became OpenAds, and which has now become OpenX).

To give it its due, OpenX is somewhat competent in its duties. It allows decent control over ad management and is capable of serving multiple ad formats, including rich media (like Eyeblaster), flash and full html ads. The reporting isn’t bad and the system is stable, if you install the regular updates. All in all, if you’re running a small web business and want to run your ads on a semi-professional basis with tags and control over what goes live when, OpenX is an ideal choice.

But as you start to grow, the cracks start to show. And for us, they revealed themselves quite quickly. We wanted more control over each individual ad unit (dates/targetting) than we could achieve with OpenX. We needed the ads to deliver as scheduled, every single time (instead of delivering the odd blank ad when OpenX didn’t like campaign configuration). We wanted reporting that was undeniably accurate and recognised by the industry as being credible. And finally, we wanted a system that would allow us to serve advertising in many more formats and areas beyond on-page banners, to take full advantage of the range of media on Zoopy in a number of ways.

DoubleClick, the world’s leading ad management solutions provider, offers a product called DFP (Dart for Publishers) that does all of this and more. It’s a hosted solution (meaning that the software doesn’t sit on our servers) but this only adds to the credibility of the statistics produced, in the same way that Google Analytics is considered a trustworthy source when comparing site A with site B because it’s a third party product not hosted or owned by A or B. Adding to the worldwide appeal of DoubleClick was Google’s outright purchase of the service in April 2007. And there’s no concern over ad delivery speed because DoubleClick has servers distributed globally, including South Africa.

What makes the whole system even easier is that the majority of advertisers use agencies to plan and buy their media. The majority of these agencies use DoubleClick’s DFA (Dart for Advertisers) product to serve their ads. This means that DFA talks to DFP in the same language, with no discrepancies and very little work to book on our side.

Though it was a painful transition from the relative simplicity of OpenX, the move has been worth the effort beyond measure. We now have much more granular control over every area of our site, while at the same time being able to choose multiple placements with greater ease. Reporting is solid, we have more ways to deliver more ads in more types of media and our advertisers now have the peace of mind that comes with an industry-approved ad management solution.

As part of Zoopy’s growth and development into one of the world’s leading social media communities, we’re excited to announce that Zoopy Joburg will be opening its doors on 1 September 2008.

Johannesburg will be an important extension of Zoopy HQ in Cape Town. It will focus on three areas of responsibility: sales (to extend our revenue opportunities), business development (to extend our reach) and content (to extend our platform). The ability for us to have direct discussions with agencies, clients and partners in Gauteng will boost business across the board and give us the ability to have tangible points of contact in two major regions in South Africa.

An important factor in planning our new office has been finding someone who would head things up with the same kind of passion and excitement that’s driven the business in Cape Town. We’ve appointed Nic Haralambous as GM of Zoopy Joburg and couldn’t be happier with our choice. Nic brings a respected set of skills, insight and enthusiasm for the new media industry and will be an excellent contributor to the future of Zoopy. Welcome to the team Nic

We’re still scouting for two content producers to join the Joburg team. Those applying should have a background in journalism and ideally have experience in multimedia production i.e. video, audio and photo. Please send your CV to jason@zoopy.com, or recommend a friend and earn R5k if they’re hired.

Watch this space for Joburg office details once the team is in and settled. Contact details will be published on 1 September.

We’re very excited to announce the arrival of Zoopy’s new content team.

John Bursey, our Content Producer, comes with an array of talents in photography, videography and filming. He will be bringing a fresh feel to our Zoopy content with his inimitable style and professionalism.

Kerri Fernandes, our Content Reporter, comes to us with a fresh set of journalism, publishing, broadcasting and communication skills. She’ll be bringing her own bubbly style to the Zoopy experience.

Welcome guys! Get settled, get busy and make a difference!

AfriGadget is a blog dedicated to showcasing African ingenuity and spreading the word about just how much our continent can achieve with very little.

Run by a team of bloggers, the site was founded by Erik Hersman and makes a point of including visual contributions from readers. It’s a wonderful community of people filled with hope and inspiration.

We’re thrilled to be able to include some of their community in Zoopy, and some of Zoopy in theirs, via a customised page built especially for AfriGadget. This page highlights photos and videos uploaded by the AfriGadget team, as well as user comments and feedback.

Visit the page to view the marvellous achievements being made by amazing people around Africa: http://www.zoopy.com/afrigadget

In an effort to decrease the amount of time it takes to register on Zoopy.com, you will now be logged in immediately after registering and will have 7 days to activate your account.  After 7 days, if you have not activated your account, you will not be able to log in until you do.

This update is part of a continuous process to improve your experience on Zoopy.com.  Watch this space - there’s lots more coming!

Barry Christianson has joined the team as our Web Developer, working closely with our Lead Developer Neil to help us grow bigger, better and faster.

Barry has worked for Prezence, Generator Consulting and other web agencies and we’re excited to have him contributing to the future of Zoopy.

Welcome to Zoopy HQ Barry! Make yourself comfortable and strap yourself in. The road ahead is going to be one exciting ride.

As of last night, ‘views’ on Zoopy means the number of times the media item’s page has been viewed on Zoopy, plus the number of times the media item has been viewed when embedded on the home page or on other websites. We hope that the new figure will give Zoopy users a better idea of how many times a video has been watched, or how many times a photo has been viewed.