My Weku writes up a breakdown about a new African photo sharing site from developer Kwabena Aning in Ghana.
Bumni Oloruntoba on A Bombastic Element points out a really well-done map showing the connectedness of various African countries.
Or, "The Explorer The" in German. Clement Nyirenda comments on the fact that Germany officially told people to get off Internet Explorer; a move of Germany's seconded by France just yesterday. I mean, think about it, how often do France and Germany agree on anything? So yes, Internet Explorer is that bad.
Observations from a blogger who has come back in to the blogging fold after other social media systems have picked up in popularity. Definitely food for thought.
A really fantastic graphic about Americans and how they give to charities. Basically, they give a lot, but not necessarily wisely. Take a look, it's mostly pictures!
If you haven't give it a try. This could really change things a great deal in the video arena for those of us on slower connections. Of course, it doesn't work on every video on YouTube, but the fact that they're deploying this is quite cool.
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.
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.
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.
The Dirty Truth about Rural Broadband
Just to show that telecoms really are dirtbags no matter where you are in the world when it comes to providing service to those in the less profitable regions of a country.
La population rurale et le téléphone portable au Mali.
An article by Maneno author, Boukary on his blog Fasokan about general mobile use in the country. Read worth the cut and paste in to Google Translate (yes, it's in French.)
M-commerce and its Impact on Africa
An article by Alex Twinomugisha about the rise of the mighty "m" in Africa. Mobile everything and how it is changing lives.
Technology and the developing world
The article is about development that actually takes place in Nicaragua, but is absolutely and completely applicable to African development efforts in that basically, you can't dictate how people use what they are given and more often than not, people will chose what they feel is more important to them.
Remember the Right to Communicate?
An article about the (rightly) ongoing debate in one having a human right to communicate and thus be granted access to telephony in some variant.
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 can't even describe by how many ways how incredibly cool this is. I just hope that the library grows more and more with time as it is often very hard to get ahold of African films outside the continent. Definitely check this out.
Definitely not strictly an Africa thing, but mighty useful if you want to block your wifi signal from leaving your premises. I'd love to see some of the anti-mobile signal paint be lathered in generous amounts at my local theater!
Why the MTN-Bharti Airtel deal collapsed
Rebecca covers the collapse of what would have been a $23 billion mobile network merger in South Africa. Apparently the main stopping block was obstinacy. Go figure.
Jen writes about how Africa is at a crucial tipping point in terms of investment in technology and how many countries are in a state where investment in ICT will be an investment in the country's society and economic growth. Definite food for thought.
This very cool site project was supposed to launch yesterday. Apparently drupal gave some pain, which I know well. Stay tuned and see where they go. Should be something to watch and keep updated on with their @ZimbabweInPix twitter account. Twiga will also soon have an interview with one of the founders working to make it happen.
Moses Kemibaro gets a real taste of proper broadband in Kenya. Honestly, I'd be happy to get the speeds he was experiencing in San Francisco!
For those unaware "mzungu" means "white person" in Kiswahili. Tumwijuke relates a number of quotes she's heard from white friends in Uganda. I have to admit that I never get tired of posts like these because even when North Americans/Europeans mean well, we still blunder in to saying things like these.
The U.S. Ambassador to Kenya, Mike Ranneberger... [drumroll] has started using Twitter. First the US Embassy in Kinshasa and now this. Twitter knows no freakin' bounds!
Kiswahili Tech Projects are Falling Apart
Good article talking about all the issues in creating a local African language version of software and other technology. I know the pains all too well and as the article points out, people often end up using the English (or French) versions which does little to motivate Microsoft or anyone else to bother in the first place. Damn you, chicken and egg!
