With the simple changing of a word to another word (no matter how similar it may seem), you can completely change expectations and results. Naturally this seems as if it would be obvious, but it is amazing how often mistakes are made in this area that lead to long term confusion.
I mention this because of Avenue Afrique. This is an energized, happening French project that is working to create African blogging communities in various countries. They've had overall good success with most of the sub-project "avenues" have taken off. But, others have faltered. A large part of the reason to this is that the countries where they are focusing on at the moment: Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, Mali, and Senegal, are unfamiliar with blogging and it is an uphill endeavor to let people know about it. This is of course partially hampered in part by their using WordPress (which is slow even on my rather fast DSL connection in Côte d'Ivoire), but more importantly, it's due to how they are projecting the image of blogging.
Take a look at this article announcing an upcoming "blogcamp" in Dakar, Senegal. While it's in French, any English speaker can easily pick out "recrute des correspondants" which means, "recruit correspondents". The word, "correspondents" as well as "journalists" (which they use freely on their site as well) are very loaded words. One may think, "Pfft, whatever. Bloggers, journalists, they're all the same this day and age." and one would be a bit wrong. The key difference in journalist/correspondent vs. blogger is that a journalist is part of a larger news organization and is a paid staff member within a staff hierarchy where an editor approves or changes what it is that they write. A blogger on the other hand can be paid, but is typically not and writes whatever it is that they want, free of the burdens of approval and potential censorship. This is the beauty of blogging in that it allows a free exchange of information, which can be incredibly important in societies where the dissemination of news is contained within government control, such as a number of African countries.
We humans are funny creatures in that to understand something new, we try to understand it within the bounds of what we already know. So to quote Three Amigos, if I walk in to a bar, ask for a beer and they tell me that they only have tequila, but it's kinda like beer, then I'm going to equate tequila as being beer. The problem that so many of these blog promotion organizations are creating is that by using the words "correspondent" or "journalist" when they mean "blogger", people then relate to blogging in the terms of a news organization because they're new to blogging. Traditional news is beer and blogging is tequila. While both of the same genus, I assume that anyone can see the problem there when one gets confused with the other. I know that it sucks to explain to each and every person you meet what exactly a "blogger" is, but that's a responsibility you've chosen to accept if you want to truly promote blogging in areas where it has yet to be picked up to any large degree.
This relation of blogging = traditional news then sets up a series of expectations. First and foremost, it has people expecting to get paid whether immediately or down the road. For instance, take Congo Blog where it's "bloggers" are each paid a very respectable sum in Congo of $50 USD per article. Combined in to that fact is that all of the bloggers were/still are professional journalists in Congo prior to their writing on this group blog. As far as I know, there was no effort made to recruit people from the general populace.
So you can see the confusion wherein anyone in Congo is going to expect to be paid to blog because they point to Congo Blog as the singular example of "blogging" in the country. Don't get me wrong, I think that getting paid to blog is fine as long as it is sustainable and warranted, but the real thrust behind blogging is the fact that it can be done for free. Who on earth in Congo is then going to want to blog for free when there are people getting paid for it? What happens when the NGO sponsoring this project has to reduce or cut off the funding? And most importantly, will the average person on the street in Kinshasa or Goma think that they personally have access to blogging when they see that it's just these professional journalists that are "blogging"?
This is a key point in the issue of perception in that making blogging sound fancy by using the terms from traditional media as opposed to the new, unfamiliar terms associated with it, it makes it appear out of reach to regular people. In societies where a title still actually means something (as opposed to the US where everyone is a "manager" these days) this is very important. With how things are shaping up in relation to African blogging, people truly think that if they aren't already a journalist, then they simply can't "blog" when nothing could be farther from the truth. So, ironically, all these initiatives to get more Africans blogging are then actually making the medium less approachable and possibly discouraging many wold be bloggers by incorrect word choice when promoting blogging.
It's probably at this point that I need to point out that while this problem exists in Anglophone spheres, it is much, much more prevalent in Francophone. I assume that the background on this is that blogging initially started with English speakers who were a lot like me (frustrated English Literature majors in college) and saw blogging as an exciting new outlet that eschewed traditional news. Whereas in France, it seems that blogging has grown out of traditional journalism to a large degree. So the line has blurred and while an under current of people in France understand blogging, the general populace does not to a large degree. This lack of knowledge is then replicated in projects outside of France and you get the blogging misunderstanding that we see in the projects.
Ultimately, all I can say is choose your words carefully when starting a blogging project and if paying, make sure it scales with the local economy and is sustainable within the bounds of the project, such as through advertising, subscriptions, contests, etc. It would be the best if blogging started as a natural event in Africa as starting a blog is free, but if people keep associating it with journalism, news, correspondents, editorials, and the like, that is never going to happen.
Grasscutter vs. Agouti
Yeah, let's do it. I want to see a showdown between these two rodent delicacies. I haven't tried either one yet, but I hear they're both quite good. Unfortunately I find them to also be quite cute, so if someone presents one to me someday, please present it in meat form, not in "fresh" form. But I want to hear from those who have tried both. Which is better and why? Or does it really just depend on the sauce as it seems to often be the case in West African foods?
The end of telecenters in Senegal
While earlier I wrote an article about the decline of internet cafes in Senegal, the PDF report in this new link talks the initial inception of telephone landlines in the country, the increase of them, and now the decrease as mobile phones have taken off. Sorry, it's only in French.
Ivorian blogger, Manasse's blog. Yes, sorry, only in French again, but it's quite easy to use Google Translate to read what he's writing and he's a solid blogger, so it's worth your time.
Attention shift to local content
I always enjoy Rebecca's articles and this one is even more interesting to me as whenever I meet African web developers, I always put out the question of: Why not develop African content for Africa hosted in Africa? It's typically a very reserved response that I get, but now that Kenya actually has a fund aimed at stimulating local web content growth, it will be interesting to see what becomes of this. Probably a good test case for if it can take off or not.
I came across this good read yesterday about the closure of Senegalese internet cafes. For those reading this blog right now, it might be a tough go as it's in French, but Google Translate can be a good friend if you want to look it over and get a tasty overview of the internet situation in Senegal currently.
Basically, it comes down to the fact that the monopoly is a huge problem in Senegal. Sonatel (who apparently offer the iPhone) is the current government-owned monopoly on the main internet connection to the outside world. Naturally, since they have no competition, they don't really care about offering competitive prices. No matter if it's Orange, Tigo, or relative newcomer, Expresso, it doesn't matter that they offer data plans as they all have to buy bandwidth from the Sonatel connection and costs work out to generally the same. This is a common problem throughout most of Africa unfortunately.
In Senegal, the situation was exacerbated by the fact that internet usage took off and people got in to getting online. This in turn made for more internet cafes. More internet cafes made for more competition. The prices for users dropped from about $3 USD an hour to $0.65 per hour. This of course made for even more people getting on the internet, but only once those price points were reached.
These prices it turned out, were not tenable for business. Despite a massive demand, internet cafes have been closing left and right simply because they can't afford to pay the connection fees and offer service at the prices people are able to afford. Naturally, the connection fees didn't drop with more usage, which has been the inverse of this situation in the US, Europe, and Asia, with a number of Asian countries making out the best on price vs. speed (Japan is spoiled rotten with 100Mbs per second at $25 USD.)
Tossed in to this is also the case that a growing number of people have been able to connect at home through the growing ADSL network, especially in towns such as Dakar. It's all been downhill for those on ground trying to provide cafe connections for the masses.
While the circumstances are a bit different, one does have to wonder how much life an internet cafe has left anywhere in the world? Outside of tourists locations, they seem to be drying up everywhere to some degree as more and more of us travel with laptops or at the very least, wifi/highspeed data enabled phones that can do simple browsing anywhere we go. And this is a trend you see in Africa as well. Like I found in Cape Coast, Ghana, there are a number of growing cafes that have ceased to be the typical cafe of the past. They offer more of a place to plug in and work for the day, aka, the coworking space.
Obviously when your outbound connections are controlled by one entity, any change in the market is treacherous as the free market is anything but. Even still, I'm not sure that only connection costs are to blame for less internet cafes in a country like Senegal. User habits as to how people get online are changing the world over and I ask if the public internet access point soon be a relic? As I watch people wondering the streets, checking Facebook on the iPhones, I say yes, although it's a yes I don't necessarily like as the 21st coffeehouse was something I was enjoying.
So 2009 appears to be going down in the books as the Year of the Cable in Sub-Saharan Africa what with all the cable lighting up in East Africa and now the Glo-1 landing in Lagos over the weekend which will provide additional bandwidth to West African countries. Friends in Ghana were excitedly talking about this when I was there last month as it will open up a second route out of the country above and beyond the single line that they currently have which is tied in to the old SAT-3 line.
Throughput is going to start out at 640 Gbs and eventually be cranked up to 2.5 Tbs. There's been a bit of coverage on it which you can read at 27 Months, TechMasai, Vanguard, ITNewsAfrica, and This Day. I'm probably missing a lot of others as cable landings are a pretty big deal and this one is made even more so as it's being deployed primarily by Globacom Limited who are a Nigerian company.
The only thing that should probably be mentioned in all of this is that from Ghana to Senegal, the cable leapfrogs six countries (yes, I am indeed counting The Gambia in there). I'm not sure if this is because these other countries didn't want in on the connection (which colleagues in Côte d'Ivoire tell me is often the case) or if the countries were simply left out. It's a shame about this as a lot of Information Ministers are going to hobble their countries in the future if they don't have enough connectivity coming in. They'll have to run connections to neighboring countries who do have it and then pay a premium for something they should have had directly in the first place. So it goes apparently, but bandwidth is decidedly becoming a hard currency around the world and countries need to get in on it when they can.
Bloggers and website owners in Africa are getting taste of a new scam. Naturally, it's probably not originally created to be a scam, but it's turned in to that for those in Africa who use Google AdSense. For those unfamiliar with the term, AdSense is a program that people can enroll in to get a snippet of code to place on their site. Google then scans the content of pages the code is placed on, displays relevant text ads, and the website owner gets a small payment for each ad click-through. Overall it works quite well. I use it on a few websites of mine and make enough money to pay for the basic costs of the sites. I'm not getting rich on it, but I don't have to do anything to earn the money, so that's a win-win.
People with larger sites that get more traffic can make a great deal more though. This being the case, a number of website owners in Sub-Saharan Africa have taken to using Google AdSense on their sites. Again, it works well overall and they appear to get a good number of click-throughs which result in some pretty decent earnings for these guys. The problem comes when they want to actually get at the money coming to them from Google.
The quite excellent Atelier des médias, a ning network based on a radio show in French (ning doesn't like Google Translate by the way) broke the story about what has been happening to a lot of these guys with the checks that they get sent from Google. For those running AdSense, you may be asking right now, "They mail the checks? Really? But Google just does a direct deposit in to my bank account. The check is a last resort" Yes, they do direct bank deposits when you're not in Africa. This is explained a bit more in the article:
Google does not offer the possibility of electronic transfer to its customers residing in Africa and they only offer the sole option of receiving their payment by check, a check they have the greatest difficulty in cashing.
But there is an added layer of trouble to even starting a Google AdSense account in the first place as Serigne Diagne, the fellow who is the main subject of the article and owner of senactu (a Senegalese new portal), mentions in a comment which appears to single Africa out as a "problem" region:
...google only accepts payment by check for a person who is in Africa, for people who open the adsense account in Europe, America or Asia...
I have to admire the fact that Serigne is able to comment so evenhandedly on this as he has received good payments from Google that he cannot access as the article stated:
Serigne is quite angry because his site, senactu.com displays advertisements from Google (via AdSense) and has received two checks in the amount of $208.84 and $233.55 [USD]. The two checks are from CityBank, that banks located in the Dakar will not cash, not even at the local branch of CityBank.
And you can go on to see similar stories in the comments from prominent African bloggers that are in agreement with the article. I just have to ask, what gives? First off, why checks by mail? In general, postal systems around the world are not known for always being that great. When mailing to Croatia, I tell people, "Okay, I sent it in January, you should see it in February." to which they always reply, "Fine, but which year?" African postal systems can work in their roundabout way, but at the same time, there is no need for this. Why no direct bank transfers like website owners in the Americas, Europe, or Asia can access? That would seem to be the easiest option. Or, barring that, how about phone credits? This is a highly-used form of complementary currency in Sub-Saharan Africa. It's almost like Google doesn't want the payments to be received...
Let's face it, while Google is making strides to have a presence on Africa, they're a bit timid. They don't really want to invest themselves wholeheartedly, but at the same time, they want it known that they're there. They're fine with their AdSense being displayed on African sites, but how many AdWords (the other, paying-to-Google side of AdSense) clients are they going to have there? Most likely, the clients are based in France or Belgium as shown by some of the ads that I clicked on senactu. Is the mighty Google with their secret sauce afraid that they'll get taken in some African scam? Is Google really working to develop a web economy in Africa? Why do their Western Union payments not include anywhere in Sub-Saharan Africa? Does Google really want to pay these African website operators or just take the AdWords client money without paying the AdSense money? From where I'm sitting, it would appear that they don't and it's a nasty scam to those who started using AdSense in good faith. Hopefully others will chime in on this and show some proof to the contrary.
