In a bid to win over the hearts and minds of the South African bloggers BeatMagazine will now be offering link love. There are a few rules however, and stringent adherence to said rules must be maintained in order acquire the necessary “electronic – social – capital” to warrant a “link-love” or “link lust”. Whatever you cool kids are calling what you do in the bushes these days.

In order to acquire linklove from BeatMagazine you would need to provide us with the following  :

1. 3 months bank statements (so we can chuckle)
2. A verified copy of your Identity Document (so we can snigger at your adolescent-fro)
3. A smallish brown box, the contents of which will include : your soul neatly bound and polished (rub all that pigeon shit off of your shoulders please), a small Tupperware container filled with your frozen tears, a lock of your hair and access rights as an administrator to your personal blog
4. A written waiver of all of your rights as a human being, if you haven’t already done so by attributing your success in life to your blog’s prestige on Amatomu

Your personal details will not remain confidential and your salary will go viral amongst advertisers. We will be creating credit – card fliers for those desperate moments when Mr Visa can’t cut the coke any more.

Your soul, worthless in its tangled but intangible form, shall be placed in the BeatMag offices as a trinket, it’ll glow like fools gold and attract others just like you.

The smallish brown box you  will be used for our cigars.

We shall let your tears thaw, add them to our left over pizza and feast on your maligned discontent.

Your hair will be tossed in the bin, we were just taking the piss, seriously what on earth would be do with a lock of hair..

Your admin rights to your blog. You can keep them, we couldn’t rival the sort of crap made up in the blogosphere daily. For instance, BeatMag was not behind Ramon Thomas’ outburst, nor are we responsible for blogger’s myopic vision i.e. we don’t populate muti with links about Twitter applications in the face of the World Banking crisis, although we’d love to.

You have already started to monetize your existence as a thinking human entity, we thought we might take this one step further and ensure that the transfer of your identity from man / woman to fictional blogging – blob was completed with little fuss. Waiving your rights to your claim as a human being will ensure that you can enter the web 2.0 world tabula rasa (blank slate) to be assimilated into the machine.

Should you agree to all of the above, simply sign on the dotted line below and one of our representatives will call you short, I mean call you shortly (reed shorty)

…………………………..

BeatMag will not be responsible for the up keep and maintenance of your human form, and will inevitably cast it and its hollow contents into the nearest pit. All BeatMag pits are however kindly donated by Neotel.

Happiness and love to all.

Vince.

The ellusive Eve D

Eve Dmochowska is generally considered a mystery in the online world. The obvious reason is due to most people’s inability to pronounce her surname. When we questioned online miscreant Vincent Hofmann, his comment to us was “How can someone with a three letter name have such a complicated surname? I can’t pronounce it”. 

The second question playing on many people’s minds is how does Eve make a living? Andy “The oldest man on the net” Hadfield was quoted once as saying: “No one knows what Eve does but with a surname like that I’m not sure I want to know”.

Being the investigative journalists that we are, BeatMag did an expose into who the real EveD is. After extreme digging we found out that Eve is in fact a CIA operative working to depose African leaders. The problem is… she’s not very good at it.

We found out that Eve was responsible as the mastermind of the Equatorial Guinea coup and if you ask Simon Mann, you’ll know that it wasn’t extremely successful! She was also involved in a plot to kill Robert Mugabe by sending poisoned cigars which failed to kill Mugabe when Eve swapped the poisoned cigars with the syphilis containing cigars.

The CIA actually tried to fire Eve but she took them to the CCMA on the grounds of unfair dismissal. The case is still on-going and we will report back as soon as possible.

Web 2.0 rockstar and all around nice guy, Andy “Lad” Hadfield is turning 28 today… or at least that’s what he tells us. 

Upon investigating Andy’s Facebook profile we see his year of birth is 1980, making him a youthful 28 years old today. We did however have doubts about Mr Hadfield when we went through his photos and saw a man with rather grey hair which got us wondering. We poked and prodded and all we found were scared people not willing to talk. So much so that when we interviewed his coworkers we were escorted out the building by security. 

BeatMagazine let the story slide until today when we got an anonymous email from the address “thewife@AndyH.co.za”. The contents of this email are quite shocking so if you have a weak stomach please don’t read the following:

“When registering for Facebook Andy couldn’t put his real age in as the option wasn’t available. The date he gave is the closest he could get to the real number. The problem is, you can’t set the century as the 1800’s. The truth is that Andy was born in 1880!”

Andy’s silvery locks and his beyond age wisdom is perfectly logically now. When we replied to the anonymous email address about how he keeps his youthful good looks the response was “a mixture of herbal viagra and awesomeness”

Suddenly everything makes sense in the world and we understand the truth behind Andy’s awesome beard.

There are a lot of blogs out there. That’s the understatement of the century. Yet, most of these blogs go undiscovered, unacknowledged. They are, in essence, shunned for not being one of the ‘cool kids’ of the blogoschmear.

Let’s take a look at some of the cardinal sins of these bloggers:

1.       Laughing at their own jokes; (and closely related is next on the list)

2.       Making jokes;

3.       Not taking themselves seriously;

4.       Not presenting their true identity online – not making their name into a brandname

5.       Writing about their mom/hairdresser/wax appointment and they talk about their pets/kids/boyfriends/girlfriends/drinking/partying/bowel movements or lack thereof;

6.       They actually comment on nearly every blog they read;

7.       Blog rolls actually mean something to them;

8.       They use twitter/face book/ insert other social networking platform here to keep in contact with their friends, and to swap gossip and recipes instead of promoting themselves and their boring-ass brandname.

Because everyone knows, that in order to be a successful blogger you must:

a) use your real name at all times. Your name is not merely something your parents burdened you with, but a handy marketing tool that you imagine emblazoned upon caps, t-shirts, pens and in neon lights above the city;

b) never make jokes, never laugh at your own jokes, and most importantly, you must take yourself and others dead seriously at all fucking times man. Oh wait. And you should never swear. Unless it is an absolute emergency. Like someone made a joke, and you were the butt of it.

c) you must never write about your mom/hairdresser/wax appointment. Furthermore you should never write about bowel movements, eating or anything related to being a person. Your readers should never picture you as ‘human’. You should appear, in their minds, like demi-god blogging beings. They should never think of you taking a crap, and really straining to push that bad boy out. (Someone should have eaten Activia Regular yoghurt, neh?)

d) Never ever turn twitter into a chatroom, or send people ridiculous ‘what kind of vampire are you?’ quiz on facebook. Furthermore, you should never tweet when drunk, nor update more than once every half hour. You should not follow people just because they follow you. In fact, you should weed out your ‘followers’ list at least once a week, because only a handful of ‘chosen’ actually, in your opinion, are worthy of having your updates in their timeline. You weed people out of your followers list, and then feel compelled to blog about it. Frankly, I don’t give a damn, my dear. To you, Facebook and or twitter is used merely to inform people that you have updated your blog. And to share ideas and network with ‘like-minded intellectually-compatible individuals’. You don’t picture twitter as a network. You picture it as a pyramid, with you on top, and all your followers groveling in adoration at your feet.

e) You shouldn’t know what a blog roll is or how to use it. You should never link to anyone else on your blog. Why would you want to give people a means to exit your blog? You MUST trap them forever, and guilt-trip them into not clicking the ‘close’ button on their browser.

f) never comment on a blog that isn’t your own. commenting is your way of responding to others’ comments on your blog when they disagree with you. Dont comment on other peoples’ blogs, because then it might look like you accept their viewpoint, condone their blog, or are affirming their status as bloggers worth reading.

g) If you think that there’s nothing to blog about if you omit strenuous bowel movements/back, sack and crack waxes and rude ‘your mother’ jokes. Think again. There’s all sorts of fascinating shit to write about.

Let’s have a look at what the so-called ‘big boys and girls’ have been writing about in the past week:

1.   Kgalema Motlanthe’s first national address (fuck, excuse me while I choke on my own vomit)

2. The iPhone (I want a phone that can make calls and send text messages. Is that too much to ask? I don’t want a phone that picks my nose for me while I play Sudoku on it)

3. The many forms of web marketing for 2008 (um. Remind me again who gives a flying fanny fuck about this?) Please also note that this list can be translated into 7 different languages. That’s 7 other languages for me to not give a crap in.

4. Electric cars (c’mon. I’d rather drive a wheelbarrow than something as unsexy as an electric car)

5. Microsoft adopting opensource jQuery (Add this to my ‘don’t give a tosswinkie list)

6. Google’s 10th birthday. (Unless there’s free cake with a stripper who’s not adverse to giving me a blowjob under the table, I’m going to pass on this conversation, please)

7. SEO compatibility. (I think they made a spelling mistake there. The thing you should be worried about is SEX compatibility. SEO? No thanks. If it cant get me laid, I don’t care)

8. Whether Harabi will be the next WordPress. (I didn’t know words were pressable. The only thing I care about is making chicks press their thighs together, and then open. So the person who blogged about this – I have one question for you. Dude, do you EVER GET LAID?)

9. Firefox plugins that allow you to save now, read later (dude, the only plugin you should ever been concerned about is the one between your legs. Worry about finding a place to insert that. Once sorted, blog about it. I’d find that so much more interesting.)

Okay, I’m starting to even bore myself, talking about what the high and mighty are wearing out their keyboards typing about. Let’s face it. Those who have actually used the phrase ‘Web 2.0′ as anything other than an insult, or actually have it on their CVs, you should be ashamed of yourself.

So. All you future google whores might want to pay attention to what I’m about to say:

Don’t focus on having a great blog, focus on having a blog that’s great for your readers.

And stop being so god dammed boring, okay?

Vincent lurking at the door

He was wearing a faded t-shirt with the words “Freedom of Movement?” splashed across his chest. He recognized us, remembering the times we’d shared when he was still a successful blogger – before the Ryler incident. He slurred “wheresh my fukin money” and stuck his head into the open window, bringing with him the smell of wet compost.

He’d opted to bow out of the BeatMag network just before it’d made its millions in ad revenue. He’d cited a personal conflict with his own creation, vincenth. The self-reflection which he underwent as a result of blogging about himself, caused a mental separation that would never heal.

Sympathetically we offered him a ride to wherever he was going. We knew that this was our only chance to talk to him before the meth-rehydration-programme he’d been on since his “departure” had its last laugh at his expense.

BeatMag : So what are you up to these days?

Vince : Ag, wat da blikshem. What do you think? I’ve been eating the left overs of buppies, do you think this is a joke – I’ll fuckin smack you. Ok!

BeatMag : Ya..ok, no I’m not laughing hey, just something caught in my eye.

Vince : Ya where was I saying?

BeatMag : We asked what you’re doing these days?

Vince : Ya, Moral Fibre’s going well – we’ve started printing your shirts already and the stock will be on the shelves soon.

BetMag : But…Vincent

Vince : But what!! Jesus, such fucking pressure all the time. You people always badgering me with your, “you’ve done nothing yet”… “where’s the shop Vince”…”this shirt doesn’t fit..bla bla bla!”

BeatMag : Ok, ya, we were going to actually just say but its been ten years? Talita is running Moral Fibre now, quite profitably too actually. We just wanted to know what you were doing.

Vince : oh. Shuddup! ok just Shuddup [he whimpers, takes out a small moleskine book and a black bic pen from his tattered pants and begins writing]

BeatMag : What are you writing?

Vince : Nothing. [he scribbles something down] Just leave it ok!

BeatMag : Come on man, if its good we’ll see if we can get it published [we can't]

Vince : Really, you mean that? [we don't]

BeatMag : Of course you can trust us, would we lie to you? [we would]

Vince : Well its this story of this young guy, he’s called Vince and he’s got this scar on his face. It looks like a lightning bolt. His parents, a witch and wizard have been killed by Lord Norman of the BlueWorld Realm. He lives with his two aunts, Sheebee and Expensivethrills, both mugglepoofs. They belittle him every day and fill his young mind with foul language and explicit discussions about scissoring.

BeatMag : Ok but this is a bit similar to …

Vince : [holds his hand up to us] “Ok just fuck off and let me finish, here’s the best part. So like he lives in his aunts house, and there’s this school called BlogWarts. The headmaster, Humblewhore, knowing of Vince’s hereditary baldness and secret mind tricks sends him a magical – mule, carrying with it a letter of invitation to Blogwarts” He stops and pauses for effect and whispers “its Saul, the mule, its Saul, because he’s an ass”. [Saul looks at me, flashes his platinum grin and sniggers]

“Vince..” he carries on “is to attend the magical Blogwarts school of wizardry ultimately conquering evil Lord Norman and winning the prize for most handsome wizard in the world, ever. Yah anyway you get the picture, you wouldn’t understand the rest its way over your heads, the story is actually an [he raises his hands and gesticulates the universal sign of intellectual arrogance, the finger apostrophees] allegorical tale which speaks to theory on institutionalized conformity, confronting notions of sexuali”.

But before he could finish his pathetic story, Saul kicked him to the Curb, shouting as he did, “Harry Potter assehole, Harry Potter”.

<Secretly they were jealous of Vincent’s ideas, and decided to write a story based on his. Saul grew nervous however claiming foolishly that “the Vincent Potter idea was not truly original” their friend and legal aid, reminded them that originality is relative and that South Africa being the cradle of humankind was afterall the real Milli Vanilli and thus existed in parallel to the rest of the world>

Yusuf Asylum

Recent rumours have suggested that Mike Stopforth of Cerebra / 27dinner’s fame has retreated from the limelight, in favour of a remote sanctuary in the Port St. Johns.

We asked Mike’s colleagues about his decision to bow out, in spite of being in the prime of his extraordinary career. Asking to remain anonymous, Mike’s employees said :

“We were never too sure how he was going to cope with his fame, Ghandi struggled, Mandela struggled and now it appears Mike is struggling coming to grips with his rise to the ascendancy.”

“Mike don’t go, don’t go” slobbered another employee, whilst another stated “Mike has been like a gay uncle to me, he touched my heart in more ways than one”.

It appears it is not only his employees who’ve struggled to take the news but others in the online community too. Hell once we found out the detrimental side effects of bursting the Mike Demi – God bubble we had to try it on more victims so we interviewed as many as we could.

Gustav Bertram stoically remarked, “the borg giveth and the borg taketh away”.

Nick Rocky Haralambous whilst convulsing on the floor and rolling his eyes in a rather unattractive fashion spluttered the words, “no, not him, it can’t be,no,no,no – he was my one true love” and as the words apple blossom scrolled across his vacant eyes we couldn’t help but feel a pang of disgust.

Charl Norman wept openly and posted a lament on his website – the piece included visions of a future without MIke, a world without a mountain. With sweeping metaphors and penned illusions Charl Painted a world in which the offices of web startups were devoid of Nintendo Wiis and X-boxes, and strange developers.

Rafiq Phillips said “this is notalossbut teh beginning, the apple does not fall far from the source, let the people of the wwworld free”

We tracked down mike, and although he refused to comment, he produced a small brochure with the details of his retreat on it – and we are ashamed to report the pricing is reasonable. The Yusuf Asylum package includes one free massage with a happy ending, accommodation, and includes a free bronze mike – statuette which when tipped produces a liquid remarkably similar to Jack Daniels.

Mike leaves behind a powerful legacy and his team @cerebra who for those interested can check up on at www.cerebra.co.za . For those more enamoured with Mike, you can find his personal blog  at www.mikestopforth.com however in light of what we now know the site is said to be changing to www.mikestopped.co.za

Gustav Bertram in 2045

In an unsurprising twist, open source activist, Gustav Bertram has admitted that he is in fact a cyborg.

“This isn’t that big a surprise to us in the community” said Web 2.0 demi-god Mike Stopforth. “We all knew he had no sense of humour and I guess it only makes sense that he is actually a robot”.

When Beat Magazine interviewed Bertram, he candidly admitted to being a robot from the year 2045 sent back in time to protect someone who goes by the name “Cohn Jonner”. Unfortunately his robot overlords set the time backwards to 2002 rather than 2020 proving that artificial intelligence still has a long way to go even in the year 2045.

“I had a lot of time to kill and since I’m a robot all I knew what to do was program.” Said Bertram in an exclusive chat with Beat.

Bertram describes his passions as long walks on the beach and Pina Colada’s. “I even had to program a drunk protocol for myself so I could fit in with people on the beach drinking Pina Colada’s” said Bertram.

Asked whether he was the root of every computer related virus in the world Bertram blushed a beetroot colour and was heard to have said that this was an unfortunate side effect of a coupling with a “robot of ill repute” back in the year 2045. Unfortunately, despite being a robot, Gustav has needs and had a particularly saucy session with a Dell laptop back in 2004 which then spread the nasty disease through the Internet.

The good news about this evil super virus from the future is for Apple users. Gustav has a distaste for Apple PC’s and “wouldn’t touch them with a ten foot stiffy disk” so Apple users are safe…. for now

Nick is the kind of guy who gets sent into the “pit” by his employers, the last time we heard from him was at the iphone 3g launch. Who knows if he’ll ever come back. I for one fear that the deadly combination of iPhone ironic stupidity and Fresh’s ironic humour might just provide Nic’s undoing.

Nick Rocky Haralambous

Nick, if you didn’t already know runs a blog called SARocks which if you don’t you’ll have to google if you haven’t already. The site itself is at the forefront of new media employing the as yet unexplored territory of positive-South Africanism. A perspective which has led to some suggesting that Nic reads the news with a single designated eye as some have suggested he seems to miss most of the negative press.

Now onto the man himself; known to many as Nick Rocky Haralambous he spends his quiet time mulling over his favourite self – help book, “how to take great shots of yourself whilst holding the camera…yourself’.

When not updating the world of twitter on his latest album “acquisitions” he can be found singing cabaret and dancing with what he likes to call the “anti-crime marches” a rather strange title for a musical act but a title nonetheless.

Sources closest to Nic suggest that he has a few skeletons in his closet. which like saulk’s “firststep.co.za” has an instruction manual hidden within it which instructs one on the proper skipping out technique.

Skeleton number one, is that he has a facial hair grooming kit to match Trump’s follicle flattening fantasia. So large is his collection of beard trimmers, that some say you can see it from the moon. Although this fact is yet to be confirmed – space travel is of course a bit of communist propaganda so there is truly no way of telling just yet.

Skeleton number two, Nic appears to have a strange fascination with the dating site zoopy.com and their mascot Charl Norman who heads up dating site of a similar name zoopedup. It would appear that the two hit it off at the Johannesburg 27dinner, whilst the rest of the party mingled, Nic and Charl, on mxit of course, e-whispered sweet nothings into one another’s ears.

Nic Rocky H. great guy..check out what he can do @ www.sarocks.co.za and www.zoopy.co.za or find him lurking on www.charlnorman.co.za