Let me not get caught up in my own head and clearly lay out what I intend to say:

It’s simple idea but on that only recently dawned on me. I am fortunate to be in an innovate environment. Imagine if I was still a print writer? I’d be doing the same thing over and over and over, every day. I’d call my contacts, I’d gather information and construct a story from the information, I’d conduct an interview and write the story which would be edited, sub-edited and cut-up by the mechanisms in place. My byline would appear in the paper and the sun would set and rise again to repeat the cycle. Sure the focus of the story changes but more often than not it’s the same mechanisms.

Let’s look at an accountant, yes there are challenges in every client that an account might audit, but on the whole there is very little innovation in their market. Pascal might come out with an update, a law might be tweaked here and there and if an account is lucky they land an extremely strange client who they enjoy auditing, but the premise is the same, the actions are the same, the results are the same. NOTHING is new from year to year in the way that they do things.

Very similar situations apply to Lawyers, many GPs (which is a pet hate of mine), Judges and many other careers, career choices, markets and industries. There is very little that drives innovation.

Then you move in to the mobile industry and the market is booming, filled with innovation and change, constantly. That appeals to me.

Now don’t misunderstand me, I am not saying that other jobs or industries aren’t appealing and don’t have their own, relative levels of what some might term innovation. But where I am right now things change on a daily basis. My job spec today could be completely different tomorrow and in every likelihood will be entirely different next year when my current projects launch.

This motivates me and this keeps me interested in what I am doing. I hate being stagnant and I hate reaching a point where maintenance of a job is more common than innovation, creation and envelope pushing.

Let me explain this to someone, anyone, as explicitly as I can. I DO NOT WANT FACEBOOK NOTIFICATIONS IN MY INBOX. EVER. EVER. EVER.

Below are two screenshots, the first is what Facebook changed my notification settings to and the next is afterwards, my settings. Click the images to see fullscreen (and take note of the date).

Posted via email from nicharry’s posterous

Question: “Is there a God?”
Answer: “No.”

In the quite unlikely event that you were to discover any omissions or inaccuracies on this page, they may be reported to the international headquarters of The Official God FAQ, at aod@400monkeys.com, where they will be thoroughly investigated, submitted to rigorous scientific testing and, if substantiated, included in a subsequent update. Thank you.

Posted via web from nicharry’s posterous

Hilarious.

Posted via web from nicharry’s posterous

I just can’t understand the damn relevance. The people of Iran don’t care, they aren’t looking or watching and the green avatar you are now sporting is not going to change the world, in fact I think that these green avatars are way to appear cool. And it bugs me.

It might just be my opinion but that’s OK with me. It just gets under my skin when I begin to feel guilted in to doing something as meaningless as changing the colour of my picture on twitter to a shade of green.

I think it might be. I have been watching closely over the past few months as newspaper after newspaper has fallen away in the US. It’s a very scary and very sad situation that American media finds itself in. Resistance to change over the past few years has positioned many papers in a dire situation where it’s a matter of shit or get off the pot. And many are shitting themselves.

Boston Globe is a one example that I have been watching withe extreme interest. Boston.com is a great resource that has not been used effectively enough to pull Boston Globe out of financial trouble.

The resistance to change coupled with a severe drop in advertising and circulation (with thanks to a recession and online media emerging as a force in the media industry) has left the Boston Globe almost crippled. Many people are set to lose jobs and Boston, the city, is set to lose it’s competitive media market. If Boston Globe closes down the city of Boston will be left with a single daily newspaper. This defeats the purpose of mainstream media acting as a democratic watchdog or fourth estate. With one media organisation remaining things are not looking good.

Enter hyper-local, location-based news content fed to mobile phones produced by hyper-local citizen media producers who put content up via cellphones on to hyper-local portals.

This is what Martin Langeveld of Nieman Journalism Lab had to say on the topic of Boston Globe:

Langeveld’s advice is to go (almost) online-only with Boston.com, and to launch or subsidise a network of hyperlocal sites all over the area, and launch a network of local niche verticals focussed on weather, traffic, jobs, entertainment, education and more. He proposes a tiered, variable pricing model for all, with most of the content free, but paid premium access for a “small but highly-engaged group.” This income could be supplemented with transactional revenue, through selling theatre tickets, for example, or facilitating restaurant reservations.

This model could also expose the Globe’s city-wide reach to a hyper-local market of advertisers (a longer tail than they would previously had access to). This coupled with a free/premium hybrid mode and the paper could be on its way back up.

Regarding the print side of things it’s a simple mechanic to alleviate some immediate strain: Make the paper a weekly and include the news created over the week from the hyper-local portals and citizens media. Pull city-wide, larger advertisers in to this weekly printed publication to subsidise the cost of the print and drop the price to allow for quantity to be sold and to make the paper appear to be more accessible to the everyday person in the street.

There is no quick-fix for papers such as the Boston Globe, that is certain. But it is imperative that these papers start to adapt or simply succumb to a swift death.

It is not an enviable task by any means. Someone is always going to point out that you missed some or other person out, it’s the nature of a list! I think MG does a sterling job and I think Elan also composed himself a great little list of people who should be considered for the list next year.

But this year I was fortunate enough to be added to the list of 300. Initially I paged through the Media section of the list and realised that I wasn’t there. I found myself buried in the Technology section. I think this depicts the progress of my career and illustrates the choices I’ve made in a very accessible way. I am no longer a man working to be heard in the media.

My insert read as follows:

Nic Haralambous; project manager; social media; Vodacom

From the get go, it’s obvious that Nic Haralambous is deeply in love with multimedia. The 24-year old attributes his preference for online over print media to his view of the internet as the more “democratic communication” medium.
Proactive is probably the best word to describe him. “Don’t bitch and moan, give solutions,” he says. It appears to be his mantra.
After hearing a speech by Bob Geldof on television in 2005, he booked a ticket to Edinburgh for the next day, where he rocked up with his film camera to photograph the G8 summit and he was beaten by riot police.
Haralambous has written and shot for the Sunday Times, designed websites for Financial Mail and managed blogspots for the Mail & Guardian. He also started up the website SA Rocks and recently moved from general manager of the social media website, Zoopy, to Vodacom. — Ilham Rawoot

Lunch spot: Plaka, Illovo, Johannesburg

I am joined on the list by Saul, Vincent, Vinny, Jason, Mike, Charl and many more deserving people. The youth in this country are here to stay and make a difference.

Yes, Steam put right there next to the word Punk, which gives us Steampunk. For those of you who aren’t aware of what Steampunk is here is a short definition:

Steampunk is a sub-genre of fantasy and speculative fiction that came into prominence in the 1980s and early 1990s. The term denotes works set in an era or world where steam power is still widely used—usually the 19th century, and often Victorian era England—but with prominent elements of either science fiction or fantasy, such as fictional technological inventions like those found in the works of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, or real technological developments like the computer occurring at an earlier date.

Here are some images to help your imagination get started on the idea of Steampunk:

That’s what I have been doing for the past 3 weeks. I have willingly chosen to drop off the radar. Sometimes it’s nice to be off of a radar. Sometimes it’s quite pleasant to not have people know what you did, when you did and who you did it for. Sometimes it’s nice not to be in touch and updating all the time.