Well, I have finally succumbed. Through ten years of building websites for other people, writing about the web for newspapers and magazines, teaching university students about the web and conducting academic research into the web and its impact and importance, I never once built my own vanity site, or registered my own domain.
But, now, for some reason, I have succumbed and am creating a blog. I’m not sure why, but I suspect it has more to do with the format of blogging, which appeals far more than the format of a personal “home page” as they used to be called.
As you may have surmised from the first paragraph, I am a journalist, web developer and academic, not in that order. I am currently the Johnnic Lecturer in New Media at Rhodes University, in Grahamstown, South Africa. The New Media Lab is part of the Department of Journalism and Media Studies, the leading english-language journalism school in South Africa, and probably Africa.
Right now, though, I am on secondment to the South African Broadcasting Corporation, working specifically with the news division on coverage of the 2004 national elections. I am working primarily on a GIS-based election results system, which will be used to provide ongoing information to journalists working on four TV channels and 16 radio stations, as well as to provide results directly to the online news service, the phone-based Newsbreak system, and to automatically generate television graphics and tickers.