The mobile social web

From the latest edition of NGO Pulse, the SANGONet newsletter http://www.sangonet.org.za/

Trina DasGupta, mobile marketing consultant at loveLife, reports on the “Make Your Move” Campaign, which is helping young people “build personal initiative, strengthen their ability to negotiate day-to-day pressures, and find new links to opportunity”. An integral part of the campaign is MYMsta, the worlds’ first cell phone-based social network dedicated to youth empowerment and HIV prevention. Click here to read the full article.

Extract from article:

“loveLife - South Africa’s national HIV prevention programme for youth – has launched the “Make Your Move” campaign, designed to help young people build personal initiative, strengthen their ability to negotiate day-to-day pressures and to help find new links to opportunity. An integral part of the “Make Your Move” campaign has been the creation of MYMsta - the world’s first cell phone-based social network dedicated to youth empowerment and HIV prevention. loveLife has always recognised the importance of peer-to-peer networks in HIV prevention work. loveLife’s groundBREAKER and Mpinshti programme form a youth service corps of 6 000+ peer educators that reach over 500 000 South African youth every month with direct face-to-face interaction. Although nothing can replace that interaction, MYMsta is designed to complement loveLife’s physical network with an inexpensive and easily accessible virtual network, as the proliferation of cell phones in South Africa allows for peer-to-peer education to happen on a much larger scale. (75 percent of 15-24 year olds in South Africa own mobile phones, and 60 percent report using them every day, whereas only six percent of all South Africans have access to the Internet via computers.)”

Now that’s a social network!

What's next in media

Excellent slide show on the new media from Neil Perkin, from the delightfully named Only Dead Fish (swim with the current).

Linked In

Although I do have Face Book entry, that was more out of curiosity than anything else and I think I hold the world record for the least number of Friends on it :-). What I'm finding more useful, and more importantly being taken seriously by fellow professsionals, is Linked In. Check it out. The only issue I have is, what do you do when you get a Linked In request from someone you'd rather not be linked to, for a range of reasons? Any thoughts on the etiquette here?

Starting over

Having not long returned from NTC in New Orleans, I've decided that this time I'm going to make a real attempt to establish and maintain a blog as part of a tangible engagement with all things 'social web'. While from time to time I'll draw attention to what the nonprofit organisation I work for is doing in the information space, the views expressed here are mine alone and should not be seen as reflecting the views of the organisation, its Board or staff.