Tag Archives: Relax-with-Dax blog

Blogging Burn-Out? Where have all the bloggers gone?

Has blogging lost its charm and appeal, three years after taking off in a big way?  It would appear so, if the blogging habits of some of the longer-standing food and wine bloggers are analysed.  I have observed, for example:

*   Dax Villanueva, of Relax-with-Dax Blog, recently Tweeted about taking a blogging break.  Some food bloggers identified with the sentiment of the ‘blogging holiday’, but Dax does not appear to have reduced his frequency of blogging.

*   Spill Blog has reduced from one blogpost a day at its start last year, to infrequent blogging on weekdays, and does not blog on weekends.  Their infrequent Tweeting (@MackSpill) has rendered them almost invisible.  One wonders how advertisers view the reduced Blogging activity.

*   David Cope’s The Foodie Blog now sees one blogpost a month, compared to many more when he first started blogging.  He almost exclusively Tweets.

*   The Jamie Who? Blog is interesting, as blogger Andy Fenner closed down his blog by this name last year, and incorporated it into a joint lifestyle blog called Aficionado, with two other bloggers.  Its clean and neat design, and top level brand endorsements, did not attract enough advertising revenue for the three partners to live from, Fenner blogged honestly, and therefore it was closed down last week.  Now Fenner will have to start from scratch in building readership, an expensive price to pay.  Even Fenner’s blogging frequency on Aficionado dropped significantly, only blogging once in the past month.  Fenner may have lost interest in blogging generally, announcing that he is opening Frankie Fenner Meat Merchants in the next month.

*   Matt Allison of I’m No Jamie Oliver Blog has not Blogged since the beginning of this month, and will be moving to a new blog he will call ‘Planting Thoughts’, reflecting his new passion for urban farming.

It would appear that Blogging Burn-out may be occurring amongst more established bloggers.  Either they are making good money out of their blogs (or not), or they are making money from other sources.  Those bloggers who do not accept advertising on their blogs, blogging for the love of it, appear to be more frequent bloggers.  Serious bloggers spend a good two hours in writing a post, and it is the posting of the photographs that is time-consuming, especially those taken with a better quality camera.  Attending the function that one blogs about, driving there, and then writing about it, can take almost a full day, a luxury for bloggers who have a ‘day job’.

Recently a ranked list of lifestyle blogs and websites, some incorporating food and/or wine, and almost all accepting advertising, was published by Wyncc (linked to Spit or Swallow and Winetimes), based on daily page views (on 17/10):

  1. food24.com – 126 592
  2. 2oceansvibe.com – 104 158
  3. winetimes.co.za – 47 539
  4. watkykjy.co.za – 25 105
  5. capetownmagazine.com – 19 763
  6. imod.co.za – 16 558
  7. wine.co.za – 14 956
  8. bangersandnash.com – 14 422
  9. lifeissavage.com – 8 546
  10. jhblive.com – 6 944
  11. missmoss.co.za – 6410
  12. cooksister.com – 5 341
  13. capetowngirl.co.za – 4 807
  14. winemag.co.za – 3 739
  15. aficionado.co.za – 3 205
  16. relax-with-dax.co.za – 2 671
  17. whalecottage.com – 2 671
  18. kimgray.co.za – 2 671
  19. whatsforsupper-juno.blogspot.com – 1 068
  20. spill.co.za – 1 068

Using The South African Food & Wine Blogger Directory as a guideline, I checked the Blogging frequency of a number of blogs.  Pendock Uncorked and Sommelier Miguel Chan Wine Journal Blogs post daily or even more frequent blogposts in general, while Cook Sister, Just Food Now, Food & the Fabulous, Hein on Wine, Batonage, Cape Town by Mouth, Betty Bake, and Scrumptious South Africa blogposts appear more than once a week, on average. It is a shame that Sardines on Toast blogger Kobus van der Merwe last blogged in August, and that Pete Goffe-Wood, with a sharp wit, only blogs once in six months on the Kitchen Cowboys Blog.

The annual S A Blog Awards entries closed at midnight, and appears to be a non-event this year, if the low-key Tweeting about it, and the large number of Bloggers who could not be bothered to enter, is an indicator.  Every year the SA Blog Awards attracts criticism, and this year is no exception.  The biggest surprise is that only ten Blog categories will be contested, compared to 24 categories last year, benefiting more focused Bloggers, and not those writing more generally about a diversity of topics:

  • Best Business / Political Blog
  • Best Entertainment / Lifetstyle (sic) Blog
  • Best Environmental Blog
  • Best Fashion Blog
  • Best Food & Wine Blog
  • Best Music Blog
  • Best Photographic Blog
  • Best Science and Technology Blog
  • Best Sport Blog
  • Best Travel Blog

There is very little consistency and comparability with the SA Blog Awards of 2010. Noticeable by their absence this year are the Most Controversial Blog, Best New Blog, and Micro-Blogging (Tweet) categories. The rules have changed too, and for the first time the Blog entries are limited to Bloggers residing in South Africa, automatically excluding regular past-winner in the Food & Wine category, London-based Cook Sister Blog, and the Indieberries Blog winner of last year. Only two categories may be entered per Blogger.  Voting will be limited to one vote per Blog, and closes on 9 November.  Judges will only evaluate the top three publicly-voted Blogs per category.  Judges will choose the Blog ranking in each category.  The judges vote will decide the overall winner of the SA Blog Awards.  Radio sport presenter JP Naude will be running the organisation, not being a blogger himself, with support of last year’s Award’s organiser Chris Rawlinson.

It will be interesting to see how Blogging evolves over time, and whether the rate of new Blog start-ups will reach saturation.   Loyal Blog readership remains at a high level, readers being more active supporters of Blogs than their writers, it would appear.

Chris von Ulmenstein, Whale Cottage Portfolio: www.whalecottage.com Twitter:@WhaleCottage

Toffie Food Festival: No toffees, über-design, über-promise, under-delivery!

When writing our blogpost about the Toffie Food Festival, we wrote about a number of aspects about the organisation of the Toffie Food Festival and Conference that left much to be desired, the organisers making a number of promises which they did not deliver on.  I expressed my scepticism in the blogpost, but it was the talk by ex-blogger Julie Powell, theme of the movie ‘Julie & Julia’, that made me book, despite the high price tag.  Despite enjoying the morning sessions on Saturday, it was the organisers reneging on the confirmed booked secret dinner venue for Saturday evening that was the final straw, and therefore I decided to leave, with my money refunded, when the organisers failed to fix their acknowledged booking error.

The Toffie (no explanation was given by the organisers for this odd name, and there was no toffee, except at the SA Breweries food and beer pairing) Food Festival was not explained, and probably referred to the City Hall room with a number of stalls, creating a mini market, including stands for Woolworth’s coffee, the Queen of Tarts, Oded’s Kitchen, and a few more.  Another room had a number of beer brands for sale.  A further room sold pies from Jason’s, and here mini-croissants were available, being the over-promised ‘breakfast’!   A further room had a colourful Mexican Piñatas design (the organisers seemed to get their countries mixed up, as a link to Argentina was intended, with a speaker from this country).  The problem with all the extra features was that nothing was explained on arrival, or at the start of the Conference.   The registration desk staff, acknowledging our booking, said nothing about the bookings for the workshops running alongside the Festival, nor about the Secret Dinners, which took place in the homes of a number of hosts on Saturday evening.  One had to find out everything oneself.

The Toffie Food Conference was a one and a half day presentation of a random collection of speakers, some having nothing to do with food at all (these were last minute replacements for initially advertised international speakers, the programme having been amended as late as two weeks before its start, Wolfgang Koedel of Paulaner  Brauhaus and perfumer Tammy Fraser being added). The only common element some speakers had was that they had published books, but there was no theme commonality for the Conference overall.  The venue was a tacky dark room in the City Hall, on a noisy corner with taxi-hooting disturbance from outside, and not in the downstairs main City Hall auditorium, as one had expected.  We sat on uncomfortable cheap plastic chairs which had been wrapped in brown paper (this was the ‘creative’ decoration used throughout), which meant that there was a lot of rustling in the venue when one moved on one’s chair. The organisers clearly struggled to fill the venue, it not being full, and ‘gave away’ tickets on Groupon(unfair to those who paid for the weekend in full), as well as offered seats as give-aways on M-Net.   Even on late Saturday afternoon, free Secret Dinner seats were offered via Twitter!

The organisers of the Toffie Food Festival and Conference were artist Peet Pienaar (a grumpy looking ex-rugby player with a Paul Kruger look, and who has a bizarre CV on Wikipedia, which I should have read before booking) and Hannerie Visser (ex-publisher of VISI and TASTE at New Media Publishing), both of never-heard-of-before The President design agency, with what must be the sparsest website ever seen, with design work done for Babylonstoren, BOS, TriBeCa, Navigator Films, and Bruce Lee magazines!  Neither have any food experience, nor have they organised a Conference before.  Copied from Argentina, they organise secret CHOP dinners in their offices, with Pienaar cooking bizarre meals (e.g. veal brain ravioli, the dinner and drinks costing R350) on a weekly basis.   This concept was built into the Toffie Food Festival, each delegate being allocated to a host, at whose home one would have dinner. Hosts were mainly from the decor design field.  While it was meant to be a random match of delegates with host venues, I liked the sound of GreyLamp, being a pop-up restaurant, and therefore I wrote to Visser, requesting this as my dinner venue.  She agreed by e-mail a few days before the event.  When I found the desk dealing with the dinners, I was given details of a completely different host, an editor of an art magazine, who had nothing to do with food at all!  There was no explanation for the error, and one of The President staff promised to sort it out, promising to find me to confirm the correction.  As I had experienced during the booking process, this promise was not met, and I had to return to the desk again. Lying on the table was a (brown paper wrapped) ‘present’ for me, with the news that I could not attend the GreyLamp dinner, as it was fully booked!  I went looking for Visser, but saw Pienaar first, and he rudely told me that it was tough that they had made an error in promising the venue.  This was echoed by Visser, when I finally found her.  It was the way in which she spoke to me, in that it was her right to take a promise away by making a mistake, that annoyed me.  When she offered to refund the money I had paid in full, I accepted it, as their error was a major let-down.  So while I missed out on Julie Powell’s talk after all of that, I was happy to leave this badly organised space, and was able to follow her speech on Twitter.  I couldn’t help but smile when I saw a number of disparaging Tweets about the poor Braai that closed off the Festival yesterday, the promised Argentinian Asado barbeque having fallen away, and the R150 Braai package (for those that brought partners) consisted of only a chop, a sausage and a roll, once again a false over-promise.

The speakers at the Toffie Conference tried their best to make up for the poor organisation and behind-the-scenes dramas happening outside the presentation venue:

*  Kobus van der Merwe, of the cutest Paternoster eatery Oep ve Eet, which I discovered a year ago, spoke about his love for foraging for West Coast foods in the preparation of his meals, including soutslaai, dune spinach, veldkool, seevygies, waterblommetjies, wild sage, and wild rosemary.    He grows some of his own vegetables and herbs, and has access to free-range farm eggs, Khoisan salt, bokkoms, cow’s milk, and flour close by.  Not only do Kobus’ dishes look beautiful from the colourful wild plants he adds, but he is also inspired by shapes from nature, having developed a breadstick in the shape of a branch, and uses streussel to create the look of soil.  Bobotie made with calamari, meat or vegetables are a staple at his restaurant, as are gemsbok sosaties, he said.  The books by Louis Leipoldt and Renata Coetzee are his food inspiration. Kobus calls his focus at Oep ve Eet ‘Earth-to-plate’, or ‘Terroir food’ His food ideas and creativity in its presentation are well worth a book, but can already be seen on his blog Sardine Toast.

*   Eloise Alemany is a small-print-run publisher of her own books, written in Spanish, and which she described as combination food journal, cultural diary, story book and cook book.  She has French parents, grew up in Japan, ran ID magazine in the USA for a while, before moving to Buenos Aires.  Her passion is photography and publishing, she said.  The choice as speaker was unusual, as many a local cook book writer and publisher could have probably been more useful to food writers wishing to have guidelines about how to get their work published.  Ms Alemany’s books were available for sale, but are not available in English.  The covers of the books ‘Libro de Cocino’ and ‘Cuaderno Dulce’ are beautiful, but have no food in them.  She launched secret dinners in unique venues, such as an art gallery and a shoe shop, each with a theme, first for friends, and then expanded these when the unusual dinners received coverage in the Buenos Aires media.  Ms Alemany described herself as an ‘accumalator’ of beautiful things, which come in useful for the styling for shoots.  Buenos Aires experienced a ‘restaurant food revolution’ after the country’s financial crisis five years ago, and it led to interesting small neighbourhood restaurants opening. She encouraged delegates to stick to their vision, and to take risks in doing so.  Food styling must tempt the reader, it must inspire the reader in giving ideas of how to serve a dish, and it must be a memorable composition, she advised.  She varies her styling, some being busy, and others neutral.  She publishes a print run of 1000 books, distributing her books via small design shops in the main.  She concluded with the advice that one should do what one enjoys, and not that which one is good at.

*   Anna Trapido was a lively and informative speaker about the foods that have shaped Nelson Mandela’s life, being the author of ‘Hunger for Freedom’, and was the theme for the unusual lunch we were served on Saturday.  We received so much information that I have written a separate blogpost about it, to be published later this week.

*   I was very surprised when I saw a Taiwanese Barista featured on the programme, and even more so when I heard him speak his language, having an interpreter with him on the stage.  Once again, I wondered why an international speaker had to be brought in for this talk, when Cape Town has some excellent coffee specialists.  From Twitter, highlights of this talk by World Barista champion Tung-Yuan Lin were his development of Latte Art, going beyond the usual heart and leaf designs. He opened his first coffee shop GaBee six years ago, serving 100 different types of drinks.  After winning the barista competition, he pushed himself to develop new ideas, by using local Taiwanese ingredients such as sweet potato and melon; coffee, soda water and ginger; coffee and grapes to create a ‘red wine’; sweet corn soup coffee; creating ‘drinkable desserts’.  He advised delegates to push themselves to try unique combinations of ingredients to create as drinks.

*   Tammy Frazer’s talk on ‘Gourmand fragrances’ seemed completely out of place at a Food Conference.  Her talk generated few Tweets.

*  Wolfgang Koedel of Paulaner Brauhaus talked about beer, describing it as ‘liquid bread’.  Draught beer is ‘cool and trendy’ again, he said. During the World Cup 72000 pints of Paulaner were drunk.

*   Renata Coetzee wrote ‘Koekemakranka: Khoi-Khoin Kultuurgoed en Kom-kuier-Kos’, a Gourmand World Cookbook Award winner.  Her interest in food culture goes back 60 years, incorporating etiquette and folklore too.  She was particularly interested in African food culture, which had not been written about previously. Early civilisations would have eaten a lot of shellfish, bulbs and wild animals, she said.  The Khoi prepared food in claypots, and through mixing foods, stews were born.  Fat from sheeps’ tails was the most common ingredient of Khoi dishes.  Ms Coetzee has reworked the traditional Khoi recipes to make them palatable for Westerners.

*  Julie Powell’s success as a blogger, and subsequent author, in documenting her cooking of Julia Child’s recipe book in one year, and leading to the making of the movie ‘Julie & Julia’, cost her her marriage, which became the theme of her second book, called ‘Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession’. With her marriage on the rocks, Ms Powell decided to do a butcher’s course, a good escape for her, and she enjoyed ‘hacking up meat’.  It is very ‘hip’ to be a butcher these days, she said. She is concerned about the origin of her meat, and it must be organic, sustainable, and hormone-free.   For her, food has good, joyous, generous and loving memories, as well as nasty and divise memories.  She turns to food in times of crisis. She said that she was judged for being a blogger, and stopped blogging when her first book was published.  She does not follow blogs now, she told Elle Decor.  She watches a lot of TV, but does not watch food programmes, finding them boring. In New York pop-up restaurants and food trucks are a new trend.  ‘Technology and blogging have woven us together and made the food conversation more cacophonous than ever before’, she said.  An increasing number of people want to know where their food comes from ethically and environmentally.  Ms Powell is working on her third book, not specifically about food.

It was interesting that Cape Town Tourism did not sponsor the Toffie Food Festival and Conference, as it did the ‘100 Women 100 Wines’ event a week ago, and they only wrote two Tweets about this event.  One would have thought that the tourism body would offer equal attention to all events taking place in Cape Town, and that it would have wanted to demonstrate its tourism leadership by having a visible presence at the event, given its stated focus on Food tourism.  One wonders what the policy is of Cape Town Tourism in its sponsorship of events, and how it decides which events will receive monetary support.

The Toffie Food Festival and Conference was poorly organised, and their over-promised benefits and poor communication are unprofessional.  They have a lot to learn before they attempt to host another such event next year.

POSTSCRIPT 5/9: Sonia Cabano has written in support of our observation about the lack of value for money of the event, as follows:  “Yes, so ToffieFood was expensive and underdelivered. We all know that, and we are all discussing it”.

POSTSCRIPT 6/9: We copied the above sentence by Sonia Cabano from a comment she wrote to this blogpost.  As the rest of the comment was untruthful, disparaging and defamatory, we deleted it, and posted one sentence from it in the blogpost.  She Tweeted a number of times that she felt that the cost of the Toffie Food Festival was too high, but appears to have subsequently deleted these Tweets.

POSTSCRIPT 7/9: Sonia Cobana has Tweeted her Comment that she sent to this blogpost, which we have not allowed.  She is blatantly dishonest in claiming that she was with me when I talked to the organisers Hannerie Visser and Peet Pienaar.   She walked past us while I spoke to Peet Pienaar, gave him her new recipe book ‘Relish’ launched earlier that day, and walked off.  She was not party to any of the discussions I had with the organisers.  I left the event with a staff member of The President (organisers of the Toffie Food Festival), and not a security person, so that he could collect the delegate badge from me, walking me to my car in an area that is not particularly safe.   It appears that she is Tweeting this disparagement in retaliation to our blogposts about Cape Town Tourism, having hounded me on Friday evening, calling seven times to beg me to not write about Ms Grove anymore, being her friend.  I explained that nothing is written about Ms Grove or Mrs Helmbold in their personal capacity, but in that of their work for Cape Town Tourism.

POSTSCRIPT 10/9:  One of the Surprise Dinner hosts told me today that they had been very disappointed with the organisation, only having 13 of the 30 booked Toffie Food Festival delegates arrive, and many of these were ‘freebies’, who had received the dinner place for free, in a last minute desperate attempt by the organisers on Twitter. Hosts were given a budget of R150 per head for a three course meal, and were paid in Woolworths vouchers by the organisers.  Spier sponsored the wine. One wonders why Woolworths backed an unknown ad agency in putting on a first-time food festival and conference that clearly is not their field of expertise, was not well-organised, and was controversial, sullying their own brand.

POSTSCRIPT 11/9:  In her (libelous) report on the Toffie Food Festival, which she did not attend in full, given that the launch of her new book ‘Relish’ co-incided with Saturday morning of the Festival, for the BY supplement to Beeld, Die Burger, and other News24 titles, Sonia Cabano confirmed the complaints about the expense of attendance.  She gets the Festival cost wrong at R1800 (it was R1710), and writes about the near give-away of tickets on Groupon to fill the Festival.  She also mentions that no speakers of colour were included in the Festival programme, and the disappointing food market, which offered nothing new, most of the stallholders selling their wares at weekly markets too.  She also writes about the complaints about the poor Sunday lunch braai, and that Julie Powell, the keynote speaker, was a disappointment, being ‘babelaas’ from the Secret Dinner the night before (‘…dat haar aanbieding die dag daarna belemmer is deur haar selferkende hewige babelaas’) !  Her report confirms that I made the right decision to leave the Toffie Food Festival on Saturday afternoon, after the Secret Dinner booking mismanagement, which was admitted to by the organisers, and therefore they refunded my fee.

POSTSCRIPT 14/9:  Today we received an e-mail from the Toffie Food Festival organisers, advertising their Toffie Food Festival food tour to Buenos Aires from 23 – 30 October, in conjunction with TASTE magazine, at a cost of R 28426 for a single and R23327 for a double, inclusive of the flight, accommodation and meals.

POSTSCRIPT 20/9:  Dax Villanueva, of Relax with Dax Blog, is also rather critical of his experience of the Toffie Food Festival.

Chris von Ulmenstein, Whale Cottage Portfolio: www.whalecottage.com Twitter: @WhaleCottage

SA Blog Awards 2010 have devalued SA blogging!

The SA Blog Awards is a good idea, and can be a good measurement of success and performance in a field that bloggers were never trained for, by raising the standard of blogging in Southern Africa.   It is a shame that the 2010 SA Blog Awards were so poorly organised, and that it has been dogged by controversy.  At the Food & Wine Bloggers’ Club meeting earlier this week, long-standing blogger Dax Villanueva of Relax-with-Dax Blog said that the controversy surrounding the SA Blog Awards had devalued blogging, instead of enhancing it!

Ever since the SA Blog Awards were announced on Twitter about 2 months ago, they have been criticised for their change in procedure compared to previous years.  When the shortlist of 10 finalists for each of the 24 blog categories was announced on 1 September, there was even more criticism and very bitchy commenting by those that did not make the top 10 list in their category, and by those who disparaged others by questioning why some bloggers had made the Top 10 list in specific categories.  When the top two winners per category were announced, and most Top 10 short-listed bloggers were excluded from the Awards Dinner at the One&Only Cape Town last night, the knives really came out, and the organisation of the SA Blog Awards was severely criticised.

Guest of Honour Western Cape Premier Helen Zille spoke at the Awards evening about how “bloggers are the new voice of society” and how blogs “link the local with the big picture”.  The premier, no slouch herself on the social media scene with around 115 000 Facebook friends and one of country’s first verified Twitter accounts, said that digital communications were a “force for entrenching democracy”.  “Everything breaks immediately and is commented on and analysed before it hits the press… it’s a problem for newspapers and I wouldn’t want to be a newspaper editor in this day. It’s made it more difficult to control what information is transmitted”, reports Memeburn, one of the award-winning blogs.

So what were the complaints?:

1.  The announcement of the call for nominations of the SA Blog Awards was on Twitter only.   If one was not on Twitter, or did not follow SA Blog Awards on Twitter, one would not have known about the Awards, or may have been delayed in participating, in seeing Tweets by others about the call for nominations.

2.  The rules of the Awards seemed to have been made up as they went along – the fact that voting was encouraged at Nomination stage already was not clear, and irritated Twitterers, in that they were bombarded with Nomination vote requests.  The process of nomination was also not clear, with a message popping up, telling one that one could not nominate a blog more than twice on the same e-mail address. 

3.  The organisers of the SA Blog Awards were not identified on the SA Blog Awards website, and via Tweets one could put together the information that 2009 Blog winner in the Business category (Dave Duarte) and Chris Rawlinson, winner in the Marketing category, had got together with JP Naude (an infrequent blogger, by his own admission on his site: “Yes I don’t blog much… I’m a businessman and radio presenter” – prior to this mini-blog post earlier this month, JP had last blogged in May! He is a presenter on Good Hope FM) as Chairman of the SA Blog Awards. I met JP at the Vista Bar after the Blog Awards presentation, and he told me that his company organised the SA Blog Awards.  I was shocked when I saw a comment on the shortlisted Bangers and Nash blog, written by SA Blog Awards committee member Chris Rawlinson a few months ago, congratulating Dan Nash on his blog, and stating that a good blog should carry the f-word at least once a day!   So much for the quality of the judges!  (I did get to meet Dan Nash at the Vista Bar, having had dinner at Reubens at the One&Only Cape Town, and he was very generous in handing out tequila).

4.  When the top 10 shortlist was announced per category, the list was on the SA Blog Awards website, and top 10 finalists were only notified by e-mail the following day.  At no stage was an e-mail with the rules ever sent to all nominees.   One had to find information on the website, and this seemed to be amended as the SA Blog Awards progressed.

5.  Previous participants were shocked as to who made the top 10 shortlist, especially those that had won in previous years.  In the Food & Wine Blog category, for example, eight out of ten 2009 finalists did not make it in 2010.  The Relax-with-Dax, Scrumptious, Spit or Swallow, Rossouw’s Restaurants and Neil Pendock’s blogs all fell out of this category, with only the My Easy Cooking and Cooksister Blogs making the 2010 shortlist again.   Relax-with-Dax and Spit or Swallow did make the Microblogging/Twitter shortlist, however, a surprise to them too.

6.   As the SA Blog Awards developed, more and more sponsors were announced for the categories, but not all categories were sponsored (e.g. our Whale Cottage Blog made the shortlist in the Most Controversial Blog category, which did not attract a sponsor!)   In 2009, the ‘old hands’ and finalists tell me, they all went home with prizes.  It appears that despite sponsors coming on board, the category prizes were a little perspex obelisk with the SA Blog Awards logo on it.  This gives little incentive to enter the Awards competition in 2011.   Sponsors’ monies appear to have been used to pay for the dinner, and to compensate JP Naude’s company for organising the Awards.

7.   The highlight for the 2009 finalists was the SA Blog Awards dinner, I have been told, even if the bloggers did not win.  It was a great networking platform, and an honour to have attended.  In pre-announcing the top 2 out of the top 10 of each category this year, the Awards dinner was reduced to about 50 finalists, and only those got to attend the dinner – in the last minute the rules were changed, in that the SA Blog Awards website announced that the dinner was ‘by invitation only’.  Initially the Awards dinner date was set for yesterday (over a long weekend!), leading one to assume that all top 10 finalists would be invited to attend it.

8.  The voting phase for each category spanned about two weeks, and one felt like an Idols’ finalist, begging for votes on one’s blog and on Twitter.   I think that the more the finalists begged, the fewer votes they received.  One was allowed to vote once a day per valid e-mail address one has.  So, for example, someone with 10 e-mail addresses could cast 10 votes daily!   The actual weighting of votes by ‘fans’ and the judges evaluation was only recently stated as being 30 % of the vote by the judges, and 70 % from the public.  The judges per category were also not all announced – on one specific day the judges of some of the 24 categories were named on Twitter, and some judges also proudly tweeted that they were judging blogs (e.g. Jo-Ann Strauss, Sam Wilson and her husband Andreas Späth).  We never got to hear the names of the judge(s) of the Most Controversial Blog category, for example.  Mention was also made that blog ranking statistics would be taken into consideration as well, being Afrigator specifically, a site that frequently goes down.  The question was raised as to the effect it would have on one’s standing if one was not registered on this ranking site.  Oddly, few of the top-ranked Afrigator blogs were in the finals.  It is clear that the larger the number of readers of one’s Blog, and the greater the Twitter following, the higher one’s votes would have been likely to be.   The top first and second winners per category were notified by e-mail that they had made it, and they were listed on the website too.  The remaining 8 finalists per category were not notified by the organisers, and were only told that if they did NOT receive an e-mail, they would know that they had not made it as number 1 or 2!   This was the rudest aspect of the SA Blog Awards organisation, in my opinion.  Many Blog finalists had put in a lot of effort to encourage voting, and thereby had publicised the Awards on behalf of the organisers, who had created little publicity for the event themselves!  No thanks was received for one’s participation.

Despite all of the above, we are proud that we made it to the Top 10 finalist stage in our category, and that we learnt from participation for the first time.  We trust that the organisers of the 2010 SA Blog Awards will accept this feedback and will improve the organisation and credibility of it, to ensure that they have quality participants in 2011!

The overall winner of the SA Blog Awards was a big surprise, being www.watkykjy.co.za, a provocative proudly-Afrikaans on-the-edge blog, that claims to receive 180000 ‘visits’ per month, and describes itself as “Die beste Afrikaanse blog en website in die heelal”!  In the past the Award has been won by www.2Oceansvibe.co.za every year that editor Seth Rotherham (Will Mellor) has entered the Awards.  Rotherham/Mellor did not even bother to attend, being in the Karoo over the weekend, and sent a message to the organisers that this was the last SA Blog Awards competition he had entered.   (Most non-Cape Town top 2 finalists per category did not attend, yet the writer of www.indieberries.blogspot.com travelled all the way from South Korea to pick up her two category wins).

The winners in the 24 categories, announced last night, are as follows (congratulations to them all):

Best Entertainment Blog:  www.2oceansvibe.co.za (ranks 3rd on Afrigator)

Best Media & Marketing Blog:  www.cherryflava.com

Best Post on a SA Blog: www.brainwavez.org/screen/film/features/2009/20091001001-01.html

Best Overseas Blog: www.pharside.co.uk

Best TV Radio Blog: www.ecr.co.za/kagiso/content/en/east-coast-radio/east-coast-radio-blogs-breakfast

Best Politics Blog: www.wonkie.com (ranks 10th on Afrigator)

Best Photographic Blog: www.guywithcamera.co.za (Andrew Brauteseth)

Best New Blog: www.simply-delicious.co.za

Best Food & Wine Blog: www.simply-delicious.co.za

Best Science and Technology Blog: www.shesthegeek.co.za

Best Music Blog: www.dontparty.co.za

Best Fashion Blog: www.kimgray.co.za

Best Design Blog: www.indieberries.blogspot.com

Best Podcast/Video Blog: www.zanews.co.za

Best Business Blog:  www.memeburn.com

Best Group Blog: www.rlabs.org

Best Sport Blog: www.paddlesweep.net

Best Green Blog:  www.sprig.co.za

Best Indigenous Language Blog: www.watkykjy.co.za (7th on Afrigator) 

Most Controversial Blog: www.2oceansvibe.co.za

Best Travel Blog: www.getaway.co.za/page/blog

Best Personal Blog: www.indieberries.blogspot.com

Best Parenting Blog: www.reluctantmom.wordpress.com

Best Twitter Blog: www.twitter.com/mandyjwatson

Best Company Blog: www.rlabs.org

The SA Blog Awards website states that “integrity and credibility of the SA Blog Awards is our highest priority”.  It also states that the organisers would look for a ‘balance between the public voting system and the judge’s choice of winners’, to allow a free and fair selection of winners.  Many participants of this year’s Awards will agree that this was not the case!  

POSTSCRIPT 27/9:  The response to this blogpost has been phenomenal, with more than 850 readers in the first 21 hours of publishing it, and an incredible number of Twitter Retweets, many containing compliments, throughout the day yesterday.  Twitter is normally very quiet on a Sunday, especially over a long weekend.   The link to this post was sent to the organising committee of JP Naude, Chris Rawlinson and Dave Duarte, with no response to date. 

If one googles ‘SA Blog Awards’, one can read many blogposts written in the past two months, criticising various aspects of the SA Blog Awards.

The list of judges per category, with many typing errors, was recently added to the SA Blog Awards website, it would appear.  It is funny to see Randall Abrams listed as a judge for the Most Controversial Blog category – did I not write above that we felt like Idol’s finalists??!!  The other judge for the category was listed as ‘Ivor Vector’, but this name does not exist on a Google search.  However, Ivo Vegtor says he was invited to be a judge, but decided not to.  Randall Abrams has no blog, nor has Graham Howe, one of two judges in the Food & Wine Blog.  As far as judging goes, read the Comments section to this blogpost about what happened to Chris, the writer of iMod, the top ranked blog on Afrigator.  The list of judges for all the categories:  http://www.sablogawards.com/Judge3.aspx

Chris von Ulmenstein: Whale Cottage Portfolio: www.whalecottage.com

Bloggers should not blog about themselves, bloggers told!

The fifth Food & Wine Bloggers’ Club meeting was a lively one, held at the Salt Vodka Bar, with a most entertaining Dax Villanueva of Relax-with-Dax blog, and a most informative Hein Koegelenberg of La Motte, writing the Hein on Wine blog, sharing their views on the importance of social media marketing.   In talking about blog content, Hein advised bloggers to not write about themselves, but to focus on their blog topics instead. 

Hein introduced the La Motte Sauvignon Blanc, and Shiraz Viognier from the Pierneef Collection, and his role at La Motte over the past eleven years.  In winemaking, he said distribution and the intellectual property of the brand are key.  The goal of La Motte is to focus on making excellent Sauvignon Blanc and Shiraz wines, and wants the brand to be one of the Top 10 South African wine brands.   The estate created a vision to meet this goal, called La Motte Redefined, which consisted of a number of elements, all working in unison to create a WOW La Motte experience: a new Tasting Room, which has a combination of wood, brickwork and glass to make it more welcoming and less intimidating; a restaurant striving to be of a top 50 international restaurant standard, focusing on traditional South African food, with a demonstration kitchen and TV cooking; to offer a “plaaswinkel”, which sells items no other farm shop does, including five styles of breads, one of them even including 2 % shiraz;  to establish a gallery to present the collection of 44 Pierneef artworks which they bought from Pierneef’s daughter and brought back to South Africa from the UK; a museum in honour of Dr Anton Rupert; and to honour his wife Hanli’s musical career in a second gallery. 

Hein recognises that social media marketing is the new marketing platform, and he started blogging just over a year ago.  He realised that the world faces information overload, with no one having the time to go beyond the first page of Google when doing a search.  This is why one must use blogs and Twitter to package one’s information in a way that meets the target market’s need.  In the past the wine industry was at the mercy of the evaluation by Parker and Platter – now winemakers can talk to their market, explain the making of the wines and proactively provide information which empowers wine drinkers to drink their wines with greater knowledge about the brand and the particular variety.  Hein says that we are still not using blogging to its fullest extent, and over time many blogs will fall away, and new ones will commence.   He sees the decline of You Tube and videos, due to the time it takes to download them, and the increase in the use of Twitter.  La Motte publishes a new blog post every 2 -3 days, and tweets 2 -3 times per day.  Hein says that if one sets a frequency of communication, one must stick to this, as one’s readers expect it as one does a newspaper, because it becomes a habit for the reader.   This was mentioned by Dax too.   The Cape Winelands Cuisine, which is the focus of Pierneef Ã  La Motte, will be brought into the blog in future.  

Hein follows the late Dr Rupert’s communication mantra: simple, sincere and repetitive.   This applies to social media too.   Hein recognises the power of the Chinese market, and La Motte has made R 8 million in sales in its first year.  Hein is now learning Mandarin, commendable for a very busy wine businessperson.   La Motte wines sold 2800 cases 11 years ago – this has grown to 100 000 cases sold in 40 countries, whilst the economy brand Leopard’s Leap sells 600 000 cases annually.   The distribution company Meridian Wines, founded by Hein too, delivers wines from 28 cellars to restaurants in temperature-controlled vehicles.    The fellow Twitterers smiled in understanding when Hein said that he ends his day and starts the next with his iPhone, to read what has happened in the world.  It is the most time-efficient way for him to stay in touch, he said.

Hein’s talk was followed by a presentation and tasting of the first South African vodka, called Primitiv, made in Wellington by Jorgensen’s Distillery.    It is handcrafted, using artisanal methods, from barley and spelt, giving the vodka its unusual taste of peppery spice, floral and anise touches over a creamy grain base, with a masculine finish.

Dax impressed with his natural talent of speaking about a topic that is clearly close to his heart, and included tap dancing and being really funny, a side to him that he does not often reveal.  Dax said that the frequency of blogging will influence the quality of one’s posts, and therefore the traffic to one’s blog.   He advised that one’s blogging frequency should stay the same, to meet the readers’ need for consistency.   In terms of content, he advised that one pace oneself, and not write all one’s content on one day, to ensure that one’s audience comes back.  Writing comments on other bloggers’ blogs is important, he said, as it shows collegiality, and helps build traffic.  The timing of one’s Tweets is important too, and should be when one’s followers are on Twitter.  Little reading of Tweets is done at night, so tweeting then is wasteful.  Hootsuite, and similar scheduling tools, allows Dax to pre-schedule 4 – 5 Tweets per day, at intervals of one hour.  He advises Tweeting between 9h00 – 15h00.  

Dax writes about food and wine, events in Cape Town, green issues, artisanal beers and the Cape Town lifestyle.  He has been blogging for 7 years already, one of the pioneers.  His blog evolved from a newsletter he created, sharing with others what wonderful things he had discovered in Cape Town, after moving here from PE, via Durban.   Helping provide advice to others about where to celebrate a special event makes Dax feel good, he says.   The 2010 SA Blog Awards, and its poor organisation this year compared to 2009, was discussed.  In the main the comments, also from the bloggers present, were disparaging, and Dax concluded that the SA Blog Awards has devalued blogging due to the controversy associated with it, even though it was meant to achieve the opposite.  

The next meeting of the Food & Wine Bloggers’ Club is on Wednesday 20 October , from 6 – 8 pm, at the Rainbow Room in Mandela Rhodes Place.  Simon Back from Backsberg will introduce his wines and the use of social media in making his family wine estate one of the most environmentally-friendly in the country, and Tom Robbins from Eat Cape Town will talk about Restaurant Reviewing and Blogger Ethics.  Contact Chris at info@whalecottage.com to book.

Chris von Ulmenstein, Whale Cottage Portfolio: www.whalecottage.com