Uno de Waal

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Guy Mclaren Interview

Uno as South Africa, Web2.0

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Sep|10|2007

A few of you might have followed the recent spat between some of the bloggers around spam on Muti. I’ve asked Guy for a condensed interview putting down some of his ideas.

More after the jump.

You’ve come up with a lot of flack recently, specifically related around comments for spamming on Muti. Can you tell us what happened in this case?
I was self submitting articles of good quality about achieving results on the web. All the articles are on the website at http//www.trafficdepartment.co.za. They vary from Writing good Content to News about Googles penalizing of web directories. At the same time a client Wade Balsdon was posting blogs on similar subjects and on his religious beliefs. Someone jumped to the conclusion that Wade and I were a single entity and declared that I was spamming the board. In fact with there being no guidelines for any new visitors to MUTI neither Wade nor I was aware of the fact that we were breaking some taboo.

A few individuals that were colluding on the inside decided to mark every post as spam rather than advising us of the unwritten rules of the MUTI jungle. I wrote an article crying foul and the MUTI gang decided to attack. It started with an article by Nic Haralambous and spread to a few others.

Why do you think people said that you were spamming muti?
Personally I think some misguided people see anyone self submitting any article, despite the merits of said article as a spammer. Other misguided people will place “articles” consisting of nothing but sales pitches claiming that its not spam. In the middle of all this you have people writing legitimate articles in order to promote businesses, ideas and opinions. If said people self submit, they are graded with that group that are ipso facto spammers. The group on MUTI seem to have a hidden agenda as well. I have not managed to find the core reason for the attacks and slanderous accusations made by a group who are contacted via a network.

In a few of you video’s you mention the difference between spamming and marketing, What do you think is the difference between spam and worthwile mass marketing and how was this misinterpreted according to you?
Spam is the action of putting sales material in front of the reader whether it is wanted or not. Marketing is the action of writing good quality articles about various subjects. I posted articles about looking after your tyres on behalf of a client site. No sales pitch at all and these were marked spam.

What other sites do you use?
I am assuming you mean social networking. I am a member of many different sites and just this morning joined SABlogger at http://www.sablogger.co.za. Its an awesome alternative to MUTI. But I am on facebook, reddit, diggit, stumble, fark and many more.

Your admin section on your site was exposed pretty quickly, how did this happen and what have you done to remedy the situation?
This was an omission on my part. I forgot to password protect the directory after switching it off during the testing phase. When testing I find having to input the password everytime I log in to be a little tiresome. I screwed up but solved the issue by password protecting the directory as soon as I realised what was going on. My site was not hacked, a sneak came in through a door I forgot to close and sprayed graffiti on the walls. I removed the graffiti by deleting the entries from the very secure database.

The blog Ideate (in this post) likens you to the Star Wars Kid and Gary Brolsma, the Numa Numa guy. What do you think of this? Which one do you find yourself more inclined to be likened to?
I found that humorous and not at all offensive. Even I have a sense of humour. I think we have an individual there with a great sense of humour. He disagrees with my viewpoint and that I can live with. If everyone had the same theories and beliefs this would be a world of copycats and boredom. I thanked him for the exposure as I dont believe that he actually harmed my brand. He disagreed with it but in an inoffensive way. Well, I speak better than the star wars kid, sing worse than Gary Brolsma but am not much better looking than either. But I would say more like Brolsma because the chap has chutzpa. He did not lie down and cry when people laughed at him. I like people that are able to laugh at themselves because lets face it they are much more fun to be around.

What do you think of the local webdevelopment scene? Copy cat clones or locally relevant?
The web development scene is very diverse. I find it strange that people want to try and fit it in a box. There is a wide gamut of different styles and attitudes. There are designers who don’t have a clue about even the basics, someone taught them to use dreamweaver or Front Page and they design sites with no concept of what the business world needs. There are very good developers that code magnificently but don’t understand business. I am sure there is a place and a market for every type. I just chose to move away from bespoke sites for clients to a one size fits all approach for small business. I am not competing for the branding market and as such should not be seen as a threat for designers in that market. Sadly in todays world anything that is peceived as a threat is attacked. Are there copy cats? Yes. Are there sites that are locally relevant? Yes. Mostly though there are designers that churn out ill conceived products for uninformed clients who later become adamant that this website stuff does not work in their market.

Can you tell us a bit more about your different web properties? You have Traffic Department, Mad Genius… what else is there and how do they differ from each other?
First of all MadGenius.co.za is not mine, Wade who owns it also markets my product along with a number of others. I have http://trafficdepartment.co.za which markets the budget website that is the reason for this article. I have http://www.guymclaren.co.za which is my central site advertising bespoke design and photography. I have http://www.lowveldnet.co.za which is a tourism portal for the lowveld. I have http://www.guaranteedsouthafrican.co.za which is an alternative to proudly South African. The project is not yet complete but offers benefits to early signups in the form of an automatic upgrade to Gold membership at no cost. I have a number of projects in the planning phase.

How do they differ from one another? Well they all focus on different products, different strategies and more.

If only it was that simple. The blogging platform is only a part of my product. My product has a very simple interface allowing people with no knowledge of the web a method of getting online. It includes a 5 page “traditional website”area, a Blog, full contact area and more. This package is not designed as a competitor to wordpress, blogger et al, but as a competitor to the sandard static 1 - 5 page website that has no real tangible or even intangible benefit to the client. My clients can speak to me on the phone, by skype and by email for support. They get immediate backup and help with minor issues. They get training and ongoing personal support. They are automatically included in a network. The pretty lady that gets them into the club is my support and package.

How did you get into the whole blogging shebang?
Uno I have been on the web since the early days. I was a MIRC fiend, I have been a member of newsgroups, forums and more since 1996. Blogging flowed from there. We wanted to start our own community and tried to find a platform last year sometime. Every platform we tried had something that prevented us from doing it the way we wanted. Some were too complex for some of our group, some didn’t allow very specific features that we wanted. As I am a coder not a programmer I dont do widgets and API’s. It was a simple solution to use the CMS I already had and make some changes to it. The facts are that sometimes simplicity is the best route to follow.

Follow the rest of the story about Guy Mclaren:
http://www.youtube.com/user/guymclaren
http://www.thecolony.co.uk/2007/09/i-think-i-may-have-struck-chord.html
http://www.ideate.co.za/2007/09/06/guy-mclaren-star-wars-kid-or-gary-brolsma/
http://wiredgecko.net/2007/09/guy-mclaren-fights-back/
http://nicharalambous.com/2007/09/04/social-networks-aka-dating-sites-and-crap-websites/
Guy Mclaren on Amatomu.com

Technorati Tags: guy mclaren, traffic department, muti, spam

Updates: I’ve closed the comments (you can still pingback)

I’ve also updated the links - It was a quick original post, but all the links are there now.

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