While normally I use this space to point out other links floating around out there, I'm going to change that up a bit and point to articles from this blog that I personally liked or that generated some buzz. While obviously incredibly navel gazing, it's been a busy year and next year promises to be even more so. I'd just like to take a minute to stop, breathe and look around at what's happened.
This is actually a series that I write on from time to time and it is admittedly quite geeky, but if you're the least bit inclined to developing sites that people can actually use, take a look at it and feel free to point out other things that I might have missed.
Amusing to me that an ITCY fugitive was thought to be hiding out in Kenya because naturally, a Serb war criminal would just blend right in there.
This sucks and we have yet to really see any movement by Google in the direction of making payments to Africans who run Google AdSense on their sites.
Why are there so many Guineas in the world and why has Frederick Forsyth been part of coups in them?
Yeah, what happened with that?
Black hat SEO for Kenya.
What is the bestest, cheapest setup for a blogger on the go?
Unfortunately sobering.
English: The open source language
You know it's true. That's why we love to hate it so much.
Terrestrial broadband is slowly snaking its way in to one of the largest and most unwired countries on the continent.
I blogged like a maniac on this. You can also view coverage of other peoples' posts on the focus page for Maker Faire Africa.
More observations and a lot of really great things that I learned.
Not terribly cool, but a definite trend.
The confusing science of caring
Asking why social media campaigns seem to ignore Africa.
Probably the article that got the most mileage of the year and one that I'm really quite pleased with as the questions about The Cloud and the rest of the world (not just Africa) need to be thought about.
Why Francophone Africa is less dynamic than Anglophone
An article that a Francophone blogger asked and one that I hope people will pick up and think about more as cross-lingual issues are worked upon in 2010.
Internet Explorer 6. You are dead to me.
Perhaps not the most poignant article in the world, but I just wanted to put it in the list as I am truly, truly done with IE6. At least I can take that away from 2009 if nothing else.
Coffee drinkers the world over are well-known for needing their coffee fix wherever they might be. This can lead to rather burdensome life requirements of course as was shown by a friend of a friend who took an entire espresso machine with him when he went to DR Congo. He was Italian of course, so I have a great deal of respect for the attention to detail.
I never really got in to coffee. It's not to say that I don't like it, as I do enjoy a dark, straight cup as they make it in Spain, Bosnia, or Turkey, but at the same time, I just really don't need it. And I really don't need that whipped cream, cinnamon sprinkled joke they pass off as coffee at places like Starbucks.
Snicker as you may (or if British, nod in approval) but I happen to be much more of a tea fan. This is fine when in Eastern Congo, Rwanda, Kenya, or a number of other African countries that have vast, wonderful tea fields, but when traveling at large, you often have to BYOT (Bring Your Own Tea.) For instance, when in Ghana, I found that there was indeed Lipton and it was better than the bagged version you get in the US, but it still just wasn't quite "there". If you lob the phrase "tea snob" at me, I probably won't duck it at this point as I've just had so many crappy cups of tea while traveling that I generally pass if it doesn't seem up to snuff. I'll try not to sneer if in your company, but I make no promises.
The travel woes changed a great deal with the discovery of this bad boy, which is a very portable tea leaf infuser that's rather affordable. It's large enough to let the tea steep properly, unlike the ball, but small enough to fit anywhere. Naturally one might be looking at this and thinking, "Um, buddy, why don't you just travel bag-enabled?" I did this for awhile, but I have to be honest with you in that once you go loose, you can't go bag; thank you very much, Fortnum & Mason Assam. I assume it's something along the same lines as grinding your own coffee beans prior to brewing.
But that's about it. I can take this little fellow with me anywhere and it will span just about any cup. I can bring my own leaves or just try what is locally grown. Boil up some water, send it my way, and you've got a happy tea drinker. Bill, I'm hoping to get over your way soon to try some Cameroonian tea as well and I will be there, infuser in hand.
I have to admit that this was all inspired by this article on Twiga which shows that you absolutely don't need to go the fancy infuser route and may very easily find a local metal smith that can construct one out of recycled materials. But, just a bit of travel tea-lore for some of my fellow drinkers out there who might be staying in the shadows because it seems that few folks write about tea and travel as if one excludes the other, to which I say, "Hardly!"
This fellow, Vincenzo Cosenza recently published a World Map of Social Networks on December 6th and it just happens that large blogging outfits such as TechCrunch are picking up on it today.
It's a really cool map that does indeed show that Facebook and their currently more than a 1/3 of a billion users are slowly sucking in all the rest of the users in the world. Not too much shocking there are Facebook grows like Borg these days. I mean, even my mom is on it, although she is thoroughly not in to it.
What is more of a surprise is that there actually isn't a massive void between South Africa and North Africa on the map. Amazingly, there are some countries in Sub-Saharan Africa on the map, as if they actually do exist. I know, it's shocking. Naturally, there could be more and it goes to show that Alexa is not accurately measuring statistics in Africa as I know that there are scads of people using Facebook and Twitter in countries that aren't listed on that map, such as I, don't know... Mali, Benin, and Togo amongst others? Couldn't they have just tossed Facebook over those countries just for the hell of it so that they could be included?
Still, an interesting map if you're curious about such things. Although, like I said, it shows few surprises in the social network landscape, which is why it's getting rather humdrum to some extent since there is little competition (I don't put Facebook and Twitter in to the same group) and thus, little exciting in innovation these days.
I read this article on Ratio Magazine and it's a good read about Google in Africa. The author starts out with some solid points:
I’ve always found it difficult to keep a straight face when corporate execs tell me they are not interested in making money. This happens all the time in Africa, and the subtext I suppose is that “good” companies do not publicly chase bottom lines in poor places... I would argue that other companies operating here need to give profit a chance.
This issue of profit in poor places is a much larger discussion that has been going around for awhile of course. But after this opening, things get a bit murky as the article goes in to general initiatives to date. I was left wanting a bit more or maybe something more focused on something more specific. This was not to be though and it brought up the big question as to what exactly Google is doing in Africa.
To be honest, I haven't a clue. They seem to be all over the map with enough money to burn that they can put it in to a multitude of programs and see what sticks. This would fall in to line with their general approach to development as it is founded in engineering and iteration to solve a problem. But at the same time, I thought about it a bit more and it doesn't really seem like Google is a bit more adrift in Africa than anywhere else. In their defense, I do enjoy the fact that they're trying so many things and as Erik pointed out, they're trying things like Google Maps in Kenya and seeing where they go. Undoubtedly a great deal of innovation will come out of this. How much local innovation will be killed off due to the massive influence of Google remains to be seen. But, these are exciting times.
I'm just rather annoyed by and reminded by this Ratio article that again, I want to know more. There is a tool that is so vastly underused by Google in Africa, it's rather annoying and that is their Google Africa blog. I mean, according to Google Reader, this blog only has 250 subscribers (FeedBurner claims over 1,600 which I don't believe), which for an official Google blog is pretty paltry given that the official blog has 605,000 readers. The blog is not often updated with at most four posts a month. Then there is the fact that other blogs scoop this official blog on stories. How are other people scooping Google on their own news?!!
It makes me feel that the person in charge of this blog must get paid to write four articles a month or something, because that's all you'll see out of it and really, there's a great deal more going on than a little update once a week. This should be a massive hub, a go-to spot for all of us who want to hear about Google in Africa, but it isn't. I've seen them link to sarticles where I keep track of the statistics and the clicks on their links bring in nearly no one indicating that there are few people actually reading this blog. I mean, it's great that there are a number of other blogs out there telling us about what Google is doing, but shouldn't we get it straight from the coder's mouth?
To me, it seems like they need to have more than one author on that blog, update it more frequently, and not worry if it appears that they're all over the place with their current strategy. Any of us who follow what they're doing in the least can see this and it's okay. I think that I speak for a good number of us in saying that we want to hear more. Innovation is cool and exciting. Tell us about it and more often!
One of my main hobbies is maps. Not really making them so much, but more seeing them and staring at them. That's why these couple of maps I found quite cool.
Yeah, I know that a lot of people think that malaria is a "mostly-African" problem. Truth is, it existed a great many places in the world in addition to Africa. This map from 1870 in the US shows that it was indeed a rather massive problem there as well. It can definitely be eradicated with time, but it's tough when "winters" are like the really fantastic 25C days I experienced in Ghana.
The description breaks it down a lot better than I could ever hope to summarize. It's been around for some time, but I still find it really cool. See if you can figure out which parts are most likely the African networks.
Iris Amuto: The African Paradox
Video of a young Kenyan speaking about perception in regards to Africa. She has some really great points, one of my favorite being, "The word depression does not exist in most African languages." I've found out in further talks with some people that where it does seem to exist, it's really a loan word from a European language. That has to be one of the most telling sentences about what the real Africa is like.
Over at Le petit nègre (his title, not mine) it has been proposed to have the #afroflop awards for the worst-designed African websites on the web.
The starting point of these awards is the recognition that the majority of sites WAF [Web Africain Francophone] are supposed to lead by example but are absolutely poor in terms of design, usability and accessibility. And nothing and no one seems to do anything about it. I generalize, of course, some players try to remedy this picture, but their voices are either ignored or misunderstood.
He has initially proposed all of this in French, but I think a great deal of it carries to any other site in any other language as well. Naturally, your choices in foul design should be guided by these principles:
Is the loading time lengthy? Does the site does crash your browser?Does the presence of Flash, Silverlight, Java, make the site more or less usable?
Is the content easily accessible and enhanced by the look of the site?
To participate in this, all you need to do is reply to @lepetitnegre on Twitter with the link and the hash #afroflop. Ah yes, you also need to specify as to which category of failure:
#load - the worst / long time to load a site#design
#animation
#public - worst site for a public/government institution
#private - worst private company, NGO, or other site
#biz - worst e-commerce site (including social networks)
#people - worst personal site (artists, politicians, famous character, personal blog, etc. ...)
#waf - worst site overall
As he mentioned, a site can belong to more than one of these categories and a great many probably do. Also, while #waf is specific to his competition in French, I think it could easily be called the Worst AfroFlop as well, so it still works.
Anyways, just something fun that Twiga pointed out to me as it dealt with web design. And again, let me emphasize that this is not my idea, I'm just translating it. So if you're in to it and quote me on it, quote Le petit nègre as well, since he came up with it.
Hundreds if not tens of hundreds of my fellow web developers the world over have been wanting to burn Microsoft's Internet Explorer version 6 off the face of the earth for nearly a decade now. And honestly, I've been there along the way as well, pitchfork in hand, setting up a site with a widget called, End6! (multilingual of course) to vent my frustrations. Suffice to say, all of us developers hate it because it's broken and it won't go away. For all of you who aren't developers, it works decently well overall, although is showing its age these days and naturally leaves your system open to any number of nasty viruses; upgrade whenever possible. Please. I beg of you.
It wasn't the fact that it doesn't display Bambara or Fula characters properly that put me over the top. It wasn't this article that talks about the fact that even Microsoft who deployed this hellish concoction of code upon the world are now saying, "Uh yeah, that thing is no good. Upgrade to the latest and greatest." It was deploying the new features last week that did me in. All of that looks smashingly great in every single browser in current use except IE6. So, for about 90% of the internet, it's perfect. After wrestling with it for about a half hour I finally said, "You know what, screw it." It's a dying browser and we need to look towards the future. I'm not going to compromise my code for a system that just doesn't work. Yeah, I'll monkey around to get it functional, but I'm done with trying to get to look exactly like the other browsers out there.
This comes at a time where we have indeed seen IE6 usage drop by 50% over the last year. I'm assuming that by the end of January, we'll see even more of it drop off as a lot of people will actually decide to upgrade from Windows XP and will get a bright, shiny copy of Explorer 8 with Windows 7. Or maybe they'll go Mac, in which they'll be using Safari, Firefox, or Chrome. Whatever the case, despite the fact that there was a slight uptick, or that IE6 usage stayed nearly the same from last month, it is definitely going away and now all those web developers who were begging people to upgrade need to take the next big step and just stop supporting it altogether. Yeah, I know, possibly losing 10% of your traffic could be detrimental, but as the article on downloadsquad.com points out above, it's not home users who are the problem.
All this time people pointed some incredibly ignorant fingers at other parts of the world in regards to IE6 usage; specifically Africa. The assumption was that people there weren't upgrading because their computers were too old, or because they didn't have the technical capacity, or any other number of ill-reasoned ideas.
Now, it is true that you'll still run in to IE6 in internet cafes here and there. Those cafe owners rarely seem to want to bother to upgrade. But for anyone who has their own computer, I've always found them to be using whatever the newest browser is that they can get. Often, they're even on some beta version. In other words, the problem is not Africa. I mean, think about it. Africa currently makes up less than 3% of all the internet traffic in the world. How could they account for the 10-12% of users on IE6 still? These numbers don't and have never added up.
It's only now that people see where the real culprit is, which are corporations who, for some reason, bet the house on building applications to run on a single web browser--forever. One big offender is the insurance company, AllState who are indeed using IE6 in all their offices. Yet another tremendous offender is the UN. Yes, that international body deploys systems in the field with IE6, still. I've seen it firsthand and heard from friends working in various capacities that they are cursed with this thing.
This gets back to a previous article which was about what screen size one should design a website for if deploying it in Africa. That same logic in the past would say that yes, you absolutely must support IE6 if targeting a site towards Africa. I say that while you can't ignore it altogether like you can IE5.5 or Netscape 4, at the same time, you need to just make sure it will function okay in IE6 without crashing the computer. But, if making sure that your website works perfectly because some IT guy at a US insurance company won't upgrade the system, then in brutal honestly, screw them.
As a side note to all of this, if you want to just block IE6 users on your site altogether, don't rely on JavaScript. Use browscap.ini to sniff out and block accordingly. Fire up IE6 or download IETester and take a look at my personal site, www.hudin.com to see how I'm dealing with it there.
A couple of days ago, McAfee released the information that .cm was the most dangerous domain on the internet currently. It's not so much that Cameroon has more internet scammers, but more that the internet scammers of the world have turned to .cm domains to create malware sites when people mistype a .com address. Unfortunately I think that a lot of people are now going to associate the country of Cameroon with being full of nefarious net thugs, which is quite unfortunate, as I say it's simply not true. You can read a full breakdown of all of this in a PDF on McAfee's site. (Yeah, a PDF is kinda like a fax machine, if you were wondering...)
The funny thing in this is that as I state on my about page, rarely is it the case that I am able to combine my Croatian lineage with my interests in African tech. Well, it appears that this is one instance (again) where there is actually an overlap.
As a complete opposite to .cm, it turns out that the .hr domain for Croatia is one of the safest in the world--Croatia in Croatian is Hrvatska thus the HR. Again, this doesn't mean that there are less scammers in Croatia, it just means that of those sites using the .hr domain name, there are less that are harmful on the web. Why is this?
To start out, a Croatian domain is considerably more expensive to register than a .cm, so that does play in to things to some extent. Then there is the fact that unless you have a Croatian website, in Croatia, .hr sucks as a domain extension. No one in their right mind would bother to register that for typo mistakes because really, there are none to be had. This all makes it a safer domain purely due to being less desirable.
But beyond these two points, there is something else that plays in to this in that you have to be a Croatian citizen or have a Croatian company (incorporated in Croatia) to purchase one of these very expensive domains. This in effect limits the possible buyers to a maximum of about 5 million. While that sounds like a lot, think about the fact that from what I found, it seems that anyone can register a .cm domain. This creates a potential pool of billions of buyers. Obviously your chances to have a couple of bad apples in the bunch rises a great deal in this.
I think that when saying .cm is the most dangerous domain on the internet (or .cn or .hk or whatever) there needs to be a total given along with this to state how many of these sites are actually registered by the people of that country. I'd bet good money that if you did that, you'd see that nearly none of the malware idiots are Cameroonians because the overall penetration of the internet in Cameroon is around 3% currently. So, people just don't have the access to go about creating some nefarious site when there are much better things like email, Facebook, or other communication tools to use when one has limited and very expensive net time.
In all honesty, I think we screwed up (or rather the US with ICANN screwed up) in creating non-country specific domains in the first place such as .com, .net, .org, .info, .travel, .biz, etc. I think that if we only had domain extensions per country to date and you had to be a citizen of that country to get one, things would look a great deal different in internet land and I have absolutely no idea who on the net would have the "most dangerous domain" honors.
Normally, I only do these bits infrequently whenever I get a couple of links that I want to share around. This has not been the case with World Aids Day. There have been many posts about Twitter specifically and their idea that for some reason, AIDS = Africa despite the fact that it affects the entire world. I mean, even Croatia has (a most likely inaccurately reported) 10 deaths a year from AIDS. And the United States for all its "civility and development" has more AIDS deaths a year per capita than Mauritania, Libya, Comoros, Algeria, or Mauritius.
I was tempted to write up a post on it from the Twitter angle, but have thought better of it as the following two posts really summed up just about anything I'd have to say, but with a lot less sarcasm.
The Wronging Rights girls are always a good read. Kate is pretty much spot-on (as usual) with her post.
Brand Africa, Twitter and World AIDS Day
Alasdair comments from South Africa about the inanity of this, but without stooping to throwing insults or heavy objects (unlike my approach to arguments.) He goes on to point out that the European and North American view of Africa has let them lose a great number of business opportunities that Asia and South America have seized upon.
Not really much of a surprise there, but apparently Equatorial Guinea's Teodor Obiang Nguema wants to do better than the 97% "win" he had in the last election. His perfectionism is a bit out of control. Those who don't suffer from attempting to do better are the BBC as they had their correspondent in Ghana chiming in about this election in Equatorial Guinea. Not only are these in two different countries in two different regions of Africa, but I'm curious if Caspar Leighton even speaks Spanish or just assumed that they speak English in Guinea after phoning in commentary he probably gleaned from Wikipedia.
Windows 7 - 10 African Languages
Rebecca talks about Microsoft's plans to have their latest operating system available in multiple local African languages. Pretty cool overall, but we'll have to pass judgment in awhile on this as it's not slated to happen until the year after next.
Programming Language Popularity
Jon breaks down what seem to be the most popular programming languages in Africa, according to some Google Insights stats. Thankfully he qualifies at the very beginning that these are just a starting place and not absolutely definitive. Good to state as Google stats for Africa are sketchy at best. It's really hard to tell who all those queries are and things could be skewed a great degree one way or another given that a lot of IPs for African users show up as somewhere in Europe due to where the VSAT connections touch down to terra firma.
