Honestly, I hate articles about "Hey, I just redesigned my blog! Look! Look!" They're masturbatory at best. So of course for anyone reading this who has kept up with this blog for some time, you're realizing that I've redesigned it and am announcing it. That would seem to go counter to what I just said, but I have more of a reason to do this than craving attention (well okay, a little attention is always nice and I'm not above admitting that :)
First off, this blog was using the Okapi theme for the longest time. It happens that out of all the built-in themes, this little fellow is the most popular and so I wanted to have something a little different; a custom theme. Now, this is something that we've had as an option at Maneno to anyone who wanted to create their own in the past and then send it to us for inclusion, but I just wanted to show that yes, it can be done with relative ease.
Secondly, there is the header image. You can do what I've done here on your own blog now. I wrote more about this here and if you want to personalize your blog a bit more, have at it. Twiga, Toujous Pas Sage, and Canchas have all done this. As you can see, they started out with base themes that are then changed up a bit by the custom header.
Then there is the issue of uploading your own CSS. This is a function that will be arriving very soon. It's something that we feel is really important and while other sites either don't have or charge for this function, we will be letting people do it for free and they'll be able to style the site in a way that embellishes a current template or allows them to create from the basic template like you see on the Site Blog. I'm using it here for the sake of testing and it should be available to everyone by the end of September if not sooner.
There were also some other small changes here that are worth mentioning like moving the feed icon to the top, making the the Maneno favicon "cuter", and cleaning up our primary CSS a bit more to be lighter and run faster on older browsers/systems.
So, that's why I'm bothering to announce this redesign as it means a number of good things for the site overall. I hope you like them.
I read the Google Africa blog whenever there is new content, which honestly, isn't that often. For some reason, the fact that their Google Translate can now translate between all its current languages as well as Swahili and Afrikaans hasn't been mentioned there. I mean, this is huge! This is great! This is... reported on an unofficial Google blog?
I assume that a bigger announcement must be coming soon and they're just checking to make sure that all the conditionals are closed in the code before letting everyone know. For instance, three days ago, before the Afrikaans option was in there, I actually had to translate something from Afrikaans to English. I used Dutch for the source language option and magically, it translated fine, which it shouldn't have given the dialectic drift from Dutch at Afrikaans. I can only assume that Google Translate auto-detected the language as Afrikaans, which was lurking somewhere in the background.
There are implications with this that go above and beyond a simple announcement, specifically for Swahili. A year ago, I talked with some of the guys who work on Google's linguistic endeavors and they told me that the required corpus for Swahili machine translation was at 40% of what was needed and that was the highest for any African language. This means that in the last year, there was either a huge batch of pages in Swahili which Google had missed or there was a 250% increase in the amount of Swahili text available on the web. I'm guessing it's some combination of both as well as Google paying something get a dictionary in there because Google really wants to get established in Africa.
Whatever the case, it's quite excellent news for languages in Africa as these are the first two African languages to be included in this system. If you create the tools, you grow the language. Here's to more and soon, although I don't know what this is going to mean to the Kamusi Project...
And now apparently the Google Africa Blog has decided to write about this over a week after the fact. I feel so incredibly ahead of things right now.
Now that I'm back home after a lengthy time away, I caught up on getting the photos I took while in Ghana, online. Often, we upload photos to our flickr account but these were uploaded to my personal site, where I generally upload trip photos. All of them are under the Ghana Gallery with the exception of photos from Maker Faire Africa which are all in the Maker Faire Africa set.
My photos from here are generally "okay" at best. There wasn't a lot of sun to add any dramatic shadows to subjects and I was just getting the hang of a borrowed lens. On top of all that, I was rather timid in how I approached taking photos as I didn't know what the generally attitude of people would be to my taking pictures. Turns out people don't mind and so the shots from when I got back to Accra were a good deal better.
It's an interesting town with a lot of history and a very, very compact city center that is flooded with markets. I suppose I was a bit overwhelmed, but I did manage to get off a few decent shots here, although they were mainly of market settings as that was where I spent more of my time. Again, the sunlight wasn't terribly complacent in getting off the best shots and so I feel like a great deal of them were flat.
I didn't really even mean for this gallery to happen, but I got a lift from Kumasi back to Accra and it's a pretty long ride. I ended up taking a lot of shots of the back of taxi windows where the often have funny messages, although usually they're religious in nature. But, a fun glimpse of driving around if one is interested in seeing the fun side of taxis. Florian writes more about the phenomena.
By far and away my best gallery from the trip. Cape Coast is quite picturesque with a decently long history as a town that you can easily see around you. The structures left over from the Colonial days along with the amount of color in the town lend to good photos. On top of that, there is typically a mist near the edge of the town from the ocean that creates interesting shots, especially when the sun breaks through later in the day.
On a side note, I learned that under no circumstances should you take a picture of the Mighty Victory hotel that is next to Fort Victoria. I did that and a woman who I assume was the owner came running out and yelled at me how it was private property and gave me a line about, "People don't like having their pictures taken here." Based on her accent, she sounded much more American than Ghanaian which would explain the whole "private property" and general asshole attitude that went counter to every single other Ghanaian I met on the trip. That in combination with the fact that two separate locals told me, "Mighty Victory? They are not kind people there." made me extremely happy to have not stayed there and I recommend for everyone else to avoid it no matter how much your taxi driver might try to push it on you.
I had a great time in Ghana, but unfortunately the photos don't showcase that as well as I'd like. I suppose it's because I've taken tens of thousands of photos and I'm getting really picky about how they turn out. It's also the case that I was in Ghana in what is considered "winter" there, so I didn't get as much sun as would have made better pictures. On the bright side, it was quite cool and enjoyable though, which given how badly I can overheat, was probably a good thing.
Like most things encountered by unsuspecting foreigners in Ghana, the high quality offerings at Busy Internet in Accra are quite impressive. It sits on the main Ring Road just a bit east of Kwame Nkrumah Circle. This is a large, modern building with every service imaginable for those who choose the geeky path in life to those who just need to check their email. Even nefarious taxi drivers know where this place is.
Started in 2001, Busy Internet was created to provide faster internet to the masses. It opened with about 100 computers to use in an internet cafe manner and evolved in to an incubator housing the offices of Ghanaian startups. The incubator aspect has faded away though as many of the original companies that started there have moved on to their own premises. In their place, a lot of groups rent space at the office to run their operations. Additionally, Busy Internet functions as an ISP in Ghana and I'm told that they provide much better service than Vodaphone, the lovely country monopoly most people have to turn to for internet.
With secretarial services and copy machines available, Busy Internet is basically The place in Accra to meet, socialize and network if you're the least bit invested in the tech scene there. I saw great proof of this as the place is packed all day long with folks working on a wide variety of projects like the Busy Lab. Of course, with the discovery of oil this year at Takoradi, they seem to be providing a lot of services outside Accra as well.
Overall, quite cool and it blows away a great many internet cafe/incubator/networking spots I've seen in cities the likes of Barcelona and San Francisco.
One group that calls Busy home is Internet Research. I met these guys previously, but actually had a chance to sit down for awhile and chat with Worlali Senyo and Charles Amega-Selorm about what it is they do.
The company started in 2001 and moved to Busy in 2006. In a nutshell, they provide research and consulting about IT intelligence for all of Ghana as well as a great deal of West Africa. They've consulted for OSI, TIER (a UC Berkeley project), Balancing Act, and The World Bank to name a few. They also work as the secretary to the Ghana ISP Association which is comprised of 23 of the 40 total ISPs in Ghana. They are working on getting the other 17 in to the fold.
But beyond all the general work that they do, they are working for that whole "down the road thing". For instance, they're trying to get a Google cache server set up at the Internet Exchange in town, which happens to be the AITI Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence where Maker Faire Africa was held. This cache server would be a massive change to how internet traffic shapes up in Ghana as apparently (and I'm only quoting these guys on this) 80% of all of Ghana's outbound traffic is going to YouTube. With a cache, you could drastically reduce that and open up bandwidth for more... well, useful things.
Overall though, when it comes to a group like Internet Research, I have to say that I'm thrilled they exist. There are far, far too many foreigners going in to Africa to "assess this situation", which is ridiculous when there are local groups like these guys already there, who know the region, know the languages, and have a vested interest in seeing things change. I find this to be a much more effective way to run operations than having some result of nepotism come in to a country for two weeks, look around and say, "Yes, yes, they need more bandwidth here." and then leave. That person isn't going to push for a local IX, whereas these guys will and that is something we should all get behind. Great to meet this crew and see the premises on my last day in Ghana.
Given the focus of what I'm doing in the coding of Maneno, I am very concerned as the state of bandwidth and availability of internet in African countries. While traveling through through Accra, Cape Coast, and Kumasi, I got a decent taste of the speed and reliability. I have to say that overall, it is quite good. In the internet cafes, the speed worked out to somewhere around 256 up and 1.5 down. The down was faster at various times, but the up was never much more than 256 as far as I could note.
The only noticeable problem was what I call the "bog effect". I'm not sure if it was the line or the number of users online at a certain time, but everything would be chirping along fine and it would be like a bucket of cold water was dumped on the connection as everything would suddenly time out. Thirty or so seconds later, everything would come back up and be fine. It's more of annoyance than it is an actual impediment and I even have this happen every so often on my home connection in the US.
As stated earlier, there is much more of a latency problem than there is a bandwidth problem. Even when you go farther in to the interior in a place like Kumasi, the speeds are the same as they are on the coast where the cable touches down. Of course, outside of the major towns and cities, connectivity drops off massively. However when inside the towns, the only real barrier to widespread internet access is cost. While paying $0.65 USD an hour to use an internet cafe is quite cheap for me, someone who earns maybe $20 USD a day is going to have a hard time being online. The only free connection I've encountered was at Smoothy's in Accra (where the Ghana blogging meetup is) but you'll need to have your own laptop to make that happen.
It needs to be noted that when there is a direct correlation between distance from the Atlantic, speed, and cost. For instance, I was told that in a town like Tamale, which is about 2/3 of the way up north, speeds are massively slower and massively more expensive for that slow speed. The issue being that "lovely" Vodaphone bought out the original company phone system of Ghana Telecom and has a monopoly. The backbone of cable running inland gets more and more narrow the further north you go and they have no interest in expanding it.
But in contrast, a town like Takoradi, which is near the western edge of the country on the coast, there are some of the best connections in the country. Why? Oil was discovered there this year and so countless foreign companies are setting up shop to tap in to it. They want to have network access and so bandwidth is getting a huge bump there currently. I heard this from some of the "gang" I met up with in Accra who often find themselves zipping out there for a day to work on support issues and the amount of trips they are making is only increasing.
Home connections are a different issue altogether. Very, very few people have them. The cost is exorbitant and with Vodaphone having bought out the state telecom a short while ago, there has been little care as to whether people can actually afford this or not. The other problem is that the bandwidth is nowhere near as good as for business connections. In fact, from everyone I've talked to who has it, it's insanely slow. It only picks up speed between 02:00 and 05:30. Those who really want to do all their hardcore internet work often stay up until then to do it. Needless to say, the geeks of Ghana are a young group.
In general though, Ghana is in pretty good shape for connectivity and bandwidth even though apparently 70% of it is hogged up by video sharing sited like YouTube (according to some fellows I met in the Busy Internet building.) The only big problems I've encountered were ones like last Saturday where apparently the entire link for the country went down and while connectivity within Ghana was fine, anything outside was impossible. That's obviously going to be an issue when you only have one link with the rest of the world. Just another argument for developers to someday host their local sites locally.
Something I forgot to write about while I was up in Kumasi was how insanely lost I would get walking around. It all started with arrival on Mass Metro Transit from Cape Coast which dumps you right in to the fury and fire of the smaller street markets in Kumasi. They are, in a word dizzying. But, you eventually find your way when you ask multiple people which way you go.
I brought a copy of the Rough Guides map to Kumasi. Let me tell you though, this map is toxic. For one thing, they tilted it to not sit on the North South axis. The scale and placement of landmarks is also off. Then they simplified the streets to fit in to their format, which was a tremendous mistake as the corners and streets don't format to this well and you turn a corner, which should go one place according to the map, you end up in another place. It seems like every time I walked somewhere, I got extremely lost when I turned a corner. I thought that this was the only option, but if you can get access to it, the Google Map is considerably better for guiding you around.
But it doesn't begin and end with the maps. I realized that there were actually three looks to the streets. There is morning which isn't too busy, afternoon which is a madhouse, and then evening which is completely dead. Each of these phases makes the streets look different and be very hard to find your way in the same direction twice as that guy selling cellphones in the morning where you know to turn for your hotel is gone at 18:00.
Ultimately, it's the roundabouts that are best for orientation. Each of these has a different statue in the middle. While a great many streets come in to them, they are all well-marked and you can save yourself by aligning to these as you can see below. Also, look out for Pempeh II Road. That cuts right through the center and you often cross it when walking around. I can't guarantee that this will save you, but it's your only hope for navigating things better than I did at first.
I thoroughly hate taxis. From living in San Francisco where I simply avoid taking them, to visiting cousins in Croatia and Serbia where they're the only way to get around, to my new experiences in Ghana where again, taxis are hell. I always used to joke that the reason they are hell was because all of them secretly wanted to become truckers and because they weren't, they took this out on their passengers, then I found out this was actually true. But it's the fact that no matter where in the world you are, they will try to screw you whether you are a local or a tourist.
I've taken a lot of taxis while in Ghana because they are generally cheap and they are readily available, being about every second car on the road. Also, the only other option are the tro-tros and I don't trust a lot of those drivers, although they are damned cheap. The experiences have varied ever so slightly, but most all have been painful to varying degrees. Let me share a few:
From the Airport This should be a 5 Cedi ride to the center. If you pop out of the airport and are white, they will immediately try to get 15 if not 20. Ignore all the guys who are inside the airport and go to your left when exiting the main doors to haggle with the "less" annoying guys. I managed to only get my ride down to 8, but when arriving the guy claimed tt have no change for a 10. I felt like hell after the flight and needed to sleep very badly, so he managed to weasel a full 10 Cedi out of me for the ride.
Around Accra I needed to go from the west side of the center to the east side. This should always be a 3 Cedi ride at most. On my first day, one guy picked me up, drove me maybe half a kilometer and told me that it was where I needed to go. I didn't believe him, but I had little choice given that I didn't know the city as well as I do know and so I was left about a half hour walk from there I wanted to go. I stopped taking taxis for awhile. Most of the time though, they'll ask 5 Cedi for this cross-center trip. Tell the driver 3 and if he doesn't budge, tell him to go away. There was one honest guy I encountered the whole time in Accra who actually told me 3 Cedi from the start. His taxi also happened to be one of the cleanest and he drove quite normally. If I were staying longer, I would have gotten his number in case I needed a longer hire.
Accra Mall This is out past the airport, but it should also be a 5 Cedi ride. Naturally, best of luck in trying to get that. The taxi drivers will always bemoan how far it is and try to get 15 or more out of you. I managed to get it for 8 going out and then the incredible Mac Jordan haggled one down to 6 for the trip back. Another trip to the Mall, Mac Jordan managed to get all the rides back for a group of us to be 5. This of course meant telling a group of taxi drivers who were standing around to "shove it" as they simply would not come down on their prices despite the fact one after another, we all got taxis for a lesser rate. This just goes to show that loyalty amongst taxis drivers is such that they would probably sell another one's mother if it meant a quick buck.
With the Mall, there is also the added danger of coming back when there is no traffic and the road is quite good, which lets the driver really open it up. I was in one rickety hunk of junk that got up to 120kph briefly, which probably one of the most terrifying things I've ever experienced.
Cape Coast I only took one here from the STC station which was way out of town. I have no idea if the price was fair or not, but it was 4 Cedi and he took right to where I was staying. This is something rare I've found as you tell a driver a hotel or some street name and they have no idea where it is. In Accra this is more common.
Also in Cape Coast you'll find any number of taxi drivers who want to take you to Kekum Park. If you're going just try to negotiate a round trip price, otherwise, you'll be stuck out there with nothing but the most predatory of guys waiting to charge you whatever they want to get back to town.
Kumasi Again, I only took one here to go meet up with Flo, whose host gave me a ride down to Accra. I had to haggle with the guy, but he eventually came down on his price. Otherwise, there is no need to take a taxi around the center as it is quite compact.
Conclusion Taxi drivers suck. And if you really get taken in by their hard luck stories about how far somewhere is, just keep in mind that if you're a tourist or an expat, you're probably going somewhere popular which means that they'll easily get a return fare and so you're actually doing them a favor by going out there. Also remember to haggle. I know that for Americans and Northern Europeans, it is often looked down upon, but these guys need to be kept in check. If not, they'll keep raising their prices and make them out of reach not only for tourists, but also the locals. Lastly, if you are a tourist, try to ditch your luggage as fast as possible. Dragging around a suitcase is like being a wounded animal in the wild for predatory taxi drivers.
I was ever so pleased to be able to meet up with the Ghanaian blogging group this last Thursday in Accra. Again, many thanks to them for shifting their regular meeting date back a week so that I and others from Maker Faire Africa could attend.
In the week that I was previously bopping around Ghana, I saw a decent swatch of the country in Accra, Cape Coast, and Kumasi. Apparently the strongest contingent of bloggers is in Accra, although the Ghanaian diaspora plays a large part in the blogging as well.
The group was started nearly exactly one year ago by Kajsa Hallberg Adu who started out blogging as an expat while living in Ghana and then decided to meet up with other bloggers that she had found. From there the group grew steadily and is now covers 61 blogs, which all seem to be aggregated at ghanablogging.com. Despite the potential of "ruining a perfectly good digital friendship" they have about 8-10 people who meet regularly with some checking in at various times and new members showing up often.
While the group on Thursday was quite large (due to many Maker Faire Africa people showing up), I feel that there were a great number of things to take away from it. For starters, one needs to keep in mind that Ghana is a country of about 23 million people. Out of that total, there is this small extremely small percentage that are blogging. Why? Is it a lack of interest? Not necessarily. People in Ghana seem as interested in blogging as anyone else that I've met. They have the same reasons to blog as anyone else. They want to talk about politics, sports, love, news, etc. Apparently poetry is really coming in to a fashion at the moment in Ghana, so the world may see a good number of poetry blogs coming out of the country than anything else. So, the reasons to blog are there and aren't why more Ghanaians are blogging.
The reason starts with money. Blogging is something that is done primarily by those in the upper class sections of societies. It's not that it's seen as something erudite, but more the fact that the cost of being online is quite costly. For instance to get a wireless data modem costs about 200 Cedis. The average yearly salary is 600 Cedis (these were figures I heard from those at the meeting.) That 200 doesn't include the cost of actually being online. So quickly, the costs go up and only those with higher incomes can afford to be online, much less have the time to blog. Time online for many Africans, including those outside Ghana is used more to communicate rather than interact or blog as blogging isn't necessarily viewed as communication in the way that email or Skype are.
Additionally, those who earn more in Ghana often have schooled outside the country and so were exposed to blogging because of this. Mac Jordan is a prime example of this where, when studying abroad four years ago, he started blogging and has been ever since. Kajsa, who founded the group started blogging as an expat who had obviously already heard about blogging in her native Sweden. Also, a great deal of the Ghanaian bloggers are in the Diaspora where again, they have greater access to learn about blogging.
The group brought up a comparison with Nigeria in terms of blogging. It may seem like an odd comparison given the differences in the two countries (populations, economies, etc) but they are both Anglophone Sub-Saharan countries in West Africa. In the case of the Nigerians, blogging did find its way in to the hands of the general population. Why? Because people enjoyed the great advantage of having an immediacy of information that was simply not available with their traditional media. Ironically enough, I think this is one of the reasons that people in the US started blogging.
From what I've witnessed in Ghana, their freedom of the press is excellent and so the constraint that brought about so many Nigerians to blog hasn't played out in Ghana. Will it? You never know, but given how solid Ghana is overall, it would take something catastrophic for this to happen.
One closing issue was in access to blogging in that, if internet is expensive, would an option like being able to SMS articles be beneficial to them. I asked this because we at Maneno are going about with the initial planning phases to implement an SMS/MMS input system. The response I got was favorable, but not rabid. Obviously, when you have proper broadband speeds as they do in Ghana, tapping in a blog article on T9, two sentences at a time is less than awesome. In fact, Nana tried doing just this with a system for a year and found it frustrating, eventually giving up on it. The ultimate verdict was that yes, it could be useful because people are heavily mobile-fied in Ghana and if they see something that happens, it would be very handy to just text it in right away. Outside of that it wouldn't be something that any of them would use on a regular basis. Oh, there is one instance I found where it would be very useful, which was for the poetry bloggers who write shorter works that they might be inspired to write when out, in which case SMS access would be very handle.
And that's the gist of what I got from the meet up. It's not to say that there isn't a great deal more to be said about blogging in Ghana and I feel that there will be a good deal more in due course as those in this group are really passionate about blogging and work to bring more in to the fold. I'll write more about bandwidth in Ghana in a future article.
If you want to know who what Ghanaian bloggers were represented, here is a sample:
Kajsa was kind enough to compile the list and write more about the meet up on her blog, here.
Coco was one of the more interesting folks to come to Maker Faire Africa which is saying a lot given the crowd. She's originally from Liberia and has bounced back and forth between there and the US, specifically, Houston, which she found to be the most compatible with her home of Liberia. Most everyone knows that Liberia has had a rough go of it for the last few years and is currently rebuilding under Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf. When asked as to why she went back to Liberia she simply replied, "There's no place like home."
Once word got out about Coco, Twitter buzzed up around her because one of the main things that she does (she actually has a number of creative endeavors) is to make African Barbie dolls. For anyone familiar with these dolls, you know that they are mostly white in both skin tone and dress. Coco picks up cheap dolls, and paints them to have darker skin tones as well as dress them in proper African womens' dresses. @kenyanpundit asked as to why the dolls had blue eyes. After the fair, I asked Coco this and she said that she didn't have time with this batch to repaint them as she doe normally repaint the eyes. So, there you go.
Cool stuff overall and if you ever get the chance to meet Coco, chat her up, she's very cool. And Scarlett Lion has a much longer article about her if you wanted to read more about this fabulous woman.
Paul Sika like Nana Kofi Acquah was one of the other more traditional artists at Maker Faire Africa in that he is also a photographer, although from Côte d'Ivoire. Of course, as is often the case things didn't start out this way. He was studying software engineering in England when he found that he had a much stronger love of cinema after seeing a trailer for The Matrix on Tottenham Court Road in London. Realizing that finishing his degree was his best move, he started photography as a side hobby and so began his path towards "one frame" movie making.
In 2007, he moved back to Côte d'Ivoire and initially worked as a graphic designer for a company. He left to go work more in photography and advertising which then eventually led to his large exhibit in Abidjan last November which he showed a portion of at Maker Faire Africa.
When asked what his influence was, he said that in the beginning, he didn't have one. He took shots of most everything and had no real focus in doing so. Then he started letting his environment be more of a factor in his photos. For instance, his "Charbon Fire" photo series (one of which is pictured right) was inspired by a bag of coal he saw in the street. The "At The Heart of Me" photo series was inspired by a calendar. He says that due to not having a formal art education he escaped a good deal of the formatting that would have taken place if that had been the case. It's interesting in talking to Paul as you get the feeling that his scientific background plays a huge part in how he approaches his art.
Paul has been featured on KanYe West's website, Arise Magazine, the BBC, and has upcoming features in the next issues of Canoe Magazine and B.Spirit. For the future, he is looking to do licensing of his designs and form a fashion line. He also has a book of his photos coming out this year. But, I was curious as to his thoughts on how 21st century licensing is changing a great many things. With digital, anything we create is endlessly able to be reproduced. How can you make money in an environment like that? Paul brought up the fact that if you were painting cathedrals in the 16th century as an artist, then at some point your work went out of style and you had to change. In other words, it's up to the artist to add some form of value or uniqueness to what they create in order to make a living through it.
You can view more about Paul and his work which has the tagline, "this is a valuable art piece" here.
