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About the Tour & this website

Greetings, this is the planning site for the tour. If you would like to see public information including the full itinerary & updates, stories and personalities, go to www.brandsouthafricablog.co.za.

South Africans are innovative people who solve problems - hence the name of this website. We are looking forward to hosting some of the world's top bloggers in December this year. Use this site to check your details on the planned itinerary, find times & contacts, and send us corrections.

• Go to: Thought Leader posting on blogger tour

• About the bloggers: listing and biogs

Brand South Africa, under the auspices of the SA International Marketing Council (IMC), has invited a group of bloggers from the United States to tour selected sites in this country during early December. This follows a very successful tour in 2005, also run for the IMC, in which six top US journalists came to SA and we obtained front page coverage in several major newspapers, along with features in scientific journals.

Blogging is one of the most powerful forms of communication today. Top bloggers are global opinion-formers, read widely by media and decision makers in the public and private sectors. Because blogging features direct personal opinion, there is no sense of mediated messages - the writer tells it like it is.

THEMES

The itinerary takes us from Cape Town via the West Coast to Johannesburg, Soweto, and the Magaliesberg. This is as much as we could fit into 10 days without stretching events too thinly. Focal points of the tour, from 29 November to 9 December, are:

• RENEWABLE GREEN ENERGY - the Joule electric car, the Darling Wind Farm, Eskom's green power initiatives.

• MAJOR ENGINEERING ACHIEVEMENTS - undersea diamond dredging from the world's biggest mining ship, the world's deepest mine on the gold reef of the Witwatersrand.

• 2010 SOCCER WORLD CUP - meeting the Local Organising Committee & visiting Soccer City stadium, the hub of events.

• SOUTH AFRICA'S SPACE PROGRAMME and related science  - satellite projects, the Square Kilometre Array (SA pitching for the SKA, the world's biggest radio astronomy telescope).

• SOCIAL, CULTURAL AND BUSINESS INNOVATIONS - community ownership of mining resources, intellectual property issues, Outward Bound's amazing strategies for developing the youth, discovering the origins of humanity through cutting edge palaeoarchaeology.

• GROUNDBREAKING SOFTWARE & BLOGGING. - the Ubuntu open source operating system, the cellphone "Office of Africa", meetings with local bloggers to exchange notes.

The bloggers will be writing and videoing "on the hoof" for their influential personal websites. Those invited span many fields of interest from scitech and IT to marketing and travel blogging, but all are influential within US and world media. Our itinerary offers dramatic stories of achievements and innovation, exciting personalities, engagement with communities, and the stunning scenery for which South Africa is famous.

All of our guests are IT literate and green-orientated. In advance of the tour this website will be supplying  information about site visits, guests, and story ideas. There is an update section to follow for changes or additions to the itinerary.

Stories should have international significance. We want to avoid deadly PowerPoint presentations and foot-dragging tours of facilities, and instead stress the human, creative side of our national personality. This is an unparalleled opportunity for organisations to gain international recognition for valid achievements, through direct conversations with blog writers who say what they think.

Email your queries.

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