Mashable bills itself as 'The Social Media Guide' and Buckland intends taking it a step further with Memeburn.com, which he himself bills as the 'Mashable/Techcrunch for emerging market tech.' Memeburn is a multi-author blog acting as part start-up and innovation news resource and part social media guide. The new site is unashamedly aimed at what Buckland refers to as the tech elite, entrepreneurs in the tech sector and companies interested in digital trends and innovation.
Buckland recently announced his resignation as head of 20FourLabs to focus on his consultancy, Creative Spark, and to launch Memeburn.com.
Buckland believes there is a gap in the market for his website. "I don't know of a major online site tracking digital innovation, startup news and tech culture in South Africa and broader emerging markets," he says. "There are individual blogs covering news here and there, but no major online presence covering this key sector of the market. It will do what Mashable and Techcrunch do, but for our market." Content will focus on the web, mobile, social media, online media and social networking fields.
Buckland has lined up numerous local and international contributors from the US, UK, several African countries and elsewhere. "There will obviously be an SA bias to start off with, but this will change into a broader emerging markets focus as the site evolves," says Buckland. The site will carry opinion pieces from leaders in the sector, but will also cover tech news in startup space, and Buckland adds that he was careful not to make this "another Thought Leader”, but something different (he launched Thought Leader when he was publisher at Mail & Guardian Online).
"We're coming at it from a number of angles: corporate, entrepreneurial, academic, marketing and media," says Buckland. "We have anthropologists writing about social networks, we have the head of Google SA (Stephen Newton) writing about the future of search, we have Brendan Jack of MTV writing for us."
Donald Gips, US ambassador to South Africa, a tech maven who was involved in setting up of the first White House website, will be contributing a piece, as will Guy Berger, head of journalism at Rhodes University. "I have a Time magazine journalist who has contributed a piece, as well as some contributions from Silicon Valley-based tech writers," Buckland continues. "I'm speaking to some of the country's major newspaper editors who indicated they are contributing pieces."
Other local contributors will include Rob Stokes, Quirk E-Marketing CEO; Walter Pike, head of marketing and advertising at AAA School of Advertising; Jason Elk, CEO Zoopy; Vincent Maher, head of social networking at Vodacom; Elaine Rumboll, director of UCT GSB Executive Education; Anthony Farr, CEO Allan Gray Orbis Foundation as well as various journalists (including yours truly).
Memeburn will also act as a resource site for entrepreneurs. Buckland, who founded 20FourLabs - essentially a start-up in a corporate - for 24.com, recalls how he battled to find the type of entrepreneurially minded people he needed for the operation. In the end most of those recruited came via the 20FourLabs blog, Twitter or word of mouth. MemeJobs, launching alongside Memeburn, will act as a jobs resource for start-ups wanting to advertise jobs and source a multi-skilled, tech-savvy, passionate, entrepreneurial-type of employee.
In another development Buckland earlier this year once again took control of Amatomu, the blog aggregator he helped establish when he headed the Mail & Guardian's online efforts. The site had been sadly neglected after he left Mail & Guardian Online in 2008 to join 24.com as the GM of publishing and later as founder of 20FourLabs and has lost ground to local rival Afrigator. Buckland says he has managed to stabilise the platform and will be giving the site more attention in the near future.
"We've largely been in stealth mode...," says Buckland. "It's a resource-hungry site and was an ambitious project. We plan to look at developing it later in the year. It's struggled in recent years, but it's a valuable brand with quite a bit of potential. There's a good crossover in audience with Memeburn."
Launching the site as an entrepreneur rather than on behalf of a major media company will challenge Buckland's abilities but also positively inform the content of the site.
However, Buckland is an old hand in the new media world, and in www.memeburn.com he has created an easily navigable, well-constructed site whose lengthy list of contributors should see it become a valuable addition to your daily reading list, and hopefully a commercial success.
