Maybe there are some coders too, but I didn't meet anyone who fessed up to being a hardcore coder. I got the gist, based on the conversations about the various Google products that seem to be targeted towards the African market that these are developed in the famous 20% time of other staff in other countries, which means they're not developed by those using them firsthand. In general, this isn't the worst thing in the world as you can apply a good deal of theory and construct artificial testing environments (code wind tunnels if you will.) But I can tell you that actually living in the market your application is working to serve shows you endless shortcomings as well as unknown strengths. Google needs more coders in Africa.

To that end, I learned a very interesting and potentially brilliant setup in that CEO Eric Schmidt wants there to be the same percentage of developers in each country of the world as those countries stack up for internet users in the world. I don't know what the current amounts are of coding staff in the US, but under this plan, only 40% of Google's development staff would eventually be in the US as 40% of the current internet users are in the US. It's quite a genius tack that I applaud and hope will eventually become a reality... especially in Africa. This also goes a long way to explaining why there are only 23 staff here as African internet users are less than 1% of the total in the world. They could still use a few more hires though.

I've said it before but the growth figures are way out of line. I have two numbers with two different carriers here in Côte d'Ivoire: Orange and Moov. I have to have both of these numbers as at any given point at least one of them is without a signal and that is often when standing directly below a tower. The networks are overloaded.

This last week put me over the top when both phones were without data access and voice at various points with 2-3 hour delays on SMS's. It makes people pouting about 3G access on their iPhone seem paltry. Although, after talking to a friend of a friend who was in Myanmar for the last three years, the networks here are blissful by comparison.

I'm seriously thinking about getting a third and looking like a true idiot with all these devices dangling off of me. But, it's the case that the mobile systems here, as in many parts of Africa (I've personally experienced the same problems in Ghana as well as Congo) are purely set up for the extraction of wealth. What mining and rubber harvest was to Sub-Saharan Africa during Colonial times, the mobile phone industry is to Modern times. Put in as little money as possibly to get out as much as possible. This explains why there are so many mobile players out there and they all offer pretty much the same kind of deal--a less than stellar one.

Sure, the market will continue to grow and with every person getting two or three numbers, it's going to look huge. But, for anyone actually using the networks on the ground, they leave a great deal to be desired, no matter how large and pretty their billboards down in Zone Quatre appear.

No, what partially put me in a bad mood was "content" as in "local African content" as in, there is extremely little of it. But this is something that can always grow, so in and of itself, this is not what's bothering me. What my big problem is that the #1 complaint amongst all the Ivorian attendees at the BarCamp was how to monetize their websites, since it seems that they can't, due to the majority of advertising/monetizing systems being closed off to them as they are in Sub-Saharan Africa. I would agree with this in part, but the fact that no one makes the direct correlation between local content and ad revenue was the very fiery lightbulb that went off over the weekend and I've been annoyed by it ever since.

As Google Africa people were at the event, they got drilled on why people couldn't get AdSense payments in Côte d'Ivoire. I think that Tidjane handled the explanations quite well on this and you could get the sense he's used to dealing with that question quite often. But, no matter what Theophile says in regards to his Ivoire Blog setup, there is simply not enough content to drive ads in Africa currently.

If this doesn't make sense, look at the fact that it just so happened the rise of Google AdWords (started taking off in 2002) came at the same time as the rise of blogging (started taking off in 1999). Note that the start of blogging and thus the rise of freeform online content happened three years prior to widespread AdWords deployments. People were creating content before there was any option to monetize it.

All of this is not a coincidence because if I write about a restaurant on a local San Francisco blog I maintain, then there is a good chance that that restaurant would want to buy ad space on the blog article for themselves. This works. Google has made money from it. The restaurant makes money from the advertisement. I make money from posting the ads on articles I enjoy writing. That's three mighty happy entities.

But when it comes to Africa, this ecosystem doesn't exist as two of these three components are missing and it won't exist until there is more first and foremost, local content. This means more bloggers writing about more topics. If the content is there, then the readers will follow. Once those follow, then so will the advertising. The advertising will not come first. There needs to be a corpus of content; a body of text to base the advertising on. There are no protests to march in or online petitions to sign that can change this fact. But this is changing as the AdSense running on the top level of this site is switching from voluntourism to being more product-based.

I'm really upset with myself because I was happily joining in on the pitchfork shaking at Google. I stand by the fact that some of the things they have done weren't probably done as well as they should, but they are indeed learning as they go. It's a new market for this type of thing and while they've had billions of dollars of success doing it elsewhere, that doesn't directly translate to Africa where you have countries like Congo with less than 1% of their population online. So in this sense, I do have to defend Google and not just because I enjoyed talking to the gang over the weekend, but because their tack on this is perfectly plausible and realistic. What isn't realistic are the people who think that tossing AdSense on a blog will make them rich and so why can't they have it now. I think I make about $500 a year on my account which has ads displaying on six or seven separate sites. I won't get rich from this, but it drives the internet's economic engine and pays my hosting costs.

It just needs to be remembered that when it comes to this type of economy in Africa, there is one fuel: content, oodles and flowing oodles of local content written by Africans in Africa.

Nothing on this map should come as a surprise to anyone following African technology and it's all part of the BBC's large SuperPower report they're doing on how the net is changing lives around the world. But, that said, it's not changing the lives of too many in DR Congo with the 0.45% penetration rate there that they even make special note of, although I assume that will change a good deal once their inland cable reaches Kinshasa and potentially, 10 million new users. Also on that note, not including 2009 really skews things a just a wee bit as the East African cables have changed the game a great deal on that side of the continent.

Anyways, a map worth a look is you enjoy all thingies animated.

This frustration is further belied by Rebecca in a recent tweet:

Just done an interview abt @iHubNairobi with #BBCSwahili; I need to practice Swahili more....whats a domain in Swahili? More research needed

Again, according to Google Translate, 'domain' (as in web domain name) is 'miliki', which does sound like a proper Swahili word, but I'm assuming it has a completely different meaning probably having to do with rule of land or something. And that's the issue, do you adopt some "3rd party" loan word for these purposes or do you come up with a new word because let's face it, no one is probably going to call the 'web', 'mtandao' as it's just too long and everyone knows the word web now.

Let me emphasize that this doesn't just affect African languages. The problem exists everywhere which is why a word like 'web' is just 'web' in Spanish despite there officially being no 'w' in the alphabet. It's also why Speakers of Croatian will say SAD instead of Sjedinjene Američke Države for the United States of America due to the length.

I suppose that in the end there needs to be a balance of ease with authenticity when it comes to adding new words to a language. I just hope that efforts like the ones from Kamusi and ANLoc (site appears to be down?) gain some traction because it's a problem that isn't going to go away and will only get worse as time goes on. Just look at German, which currently has 8,000 loan words from English. At what point is your language (and thusly, your identity) no longer yours?

That said most of the wrecks that I've seen have been have been pretty tranquil in comparison to this which happened next to a village called Aniassue about 30km south of Abengourou. The entire trailer is on its side and the truck cab is up in the air like a tree. I mean, look at that wreck. It's mesmerizing in its absolute destruction. Thankfully, there was a village side road that allow us to bypass this nightmare lest we would have been stuck there for the rest of the day undoubtedly.

It also appears that few if any were hurt in this wreck. That's because the worst are the logging trucks, which are always incredibly unbalanced with these massive multi-tonne logs cast about the trailer and lightly held in place by a thin chain. It's often the case that these will lose a log that then flies off to side and kills innocent people who were just standing there. These guys bother me the most, especially as we tried to pass one last Friday who then proceeded to swing in to us and nearly toss our truck in to the bush. Thankfully, there were just a couple of scratches to the paint and we were able to get around him after that with a proper one-finger salute, which fell on blind eyes.

Suffice to say, trucks around here are incredibly dangerous as they just work to haul as much as they can, as fast as the can out of the country for export. This is a shame given the great wealth of talented craftsmen in the country that could actually export finished products instead.

Yes, take your i-something, open the Contacts App, create a new contact and add a new address. Alternatively just try to edit an existing address. Now try to change the country field to Ghana. Note, if you will, the result: Ghana is not in the list of countries. Search under "Africa (Western)" and you'll see nary a trace of Ghana.

He goes on to talk about how it's probably just a bug and that it will be updated at some point in the near future, especially if a stink is to be raised about it. But, it begs that question as to why it's not there in the first place. It's not like the list of all 193 countries in the world is that hard to find and yes, Ghana is on that list.

I could buy the bug issue as I saw this first hand when working at a company and looking at their international shipping to see that my country, Croatia wasn't in the list. I really scanned through the list and then found it under Hrvatska, which is how you say Croatia in Croatian. But, this was the only country like that. There was no España or Deutschland in the list. I asked my manager what the deal with that was and he admitted that they had just cut and paste the list from another site. So, in this case it was abject laziness and it could be in the Apple iApp situation that the same applies because Americans and by association, American coders are often unaware that Africa is a continent and not a country, they probably just screwed up.

But then there rises the issue that Jean-Patrick Ehouman ran in to when trying to run ads on Facebook in that when you choose a country to target in their system, Côte d'Ivoire is not in the list. Oddly enough, in this instance, Ghana is in the list as well as Nigeria. But, in West Africa the following countries are not available for ad targeting on Facebook: Mali, Cameroon, Liberia, Benin, Togo, Guinea, Senegal, The Gambia, Niger, Burkina Faso, Sierra Leone, and Mauritania. That's a big list and I didn't even check for the rest of Africa.

So here is where you get in to a chicken and egg problem. Businesses will claim that there is no market for them in Africa. But, they are in effect creating the barriers to any kind of market developing by simple acts of non-inclusion. If Apple does some kind of Big Brother thing (which I wouldn't put past them) and looks at all the contacts that all their iPhone users have registered, they'll see none in Ghana and assume that there is no business in Ghana. The same goes for Facebook. They can easily say that they won't bother with West Africa because no one is buying ads for the region. Likewise, Google can claim that AdWords in Africa don't work because you can't register or get paid for running AdWords for most everyone on the continent.

The solution to all of this is basically for companies to stop sticking their heads in the sand when it comes to Africa. As I've said before, Google is making a good deal of headway in this department, although it's slow going. Facebook, Apple, and a great number of others still have some way to go. But just having all the countries in the world available as options would be a rather massive first step. An important second step would be to incorporate more languages. So what if you don't see any French or Spanish users on your site or for your product? Maybe if that version is made available the market will suddenly explode.

It all boils down to the fact that at some point, you gotta say screw it, roast the chicken, boil the eggs, and take a chance that in all likelihood will pay off big time.

There are many reasons for this, the first being that everything still works very well on this Thinkpad Z60m. I can edit video/photos fine and for web programming, it's a champ. It's still running Windows XP. I don't see it running Windows 7 though and at some point in the future, I will indeed have to upgrade, but until Windows XP user percentages drop below their current numbers by a large degree, that isn't going to happen.

But, the main reason I keep it around is waste. Andrew McConnell has a superb photo gallery up on his site about an electronics dump in Ghana, just outside of Accra. I've seen this dump and the cloud of horrid smoke that rises from it. If you had seen it and knew what it was, you would probably hang on to your electronics longer as well.

This is a big problem and it's only going to get bigger. It's one of the things that makes me truly cringe about the information age in that the leftover components are all getting dumped in countries such as those in Sub-Saharan Africa. People have few ways to fight back other than to deal with what is dumped upon their shores. And when they do fight back, suddenly, they're called pirates.

I despise the electronics industry for their constant push for people to upgrade and yes, I will bash on Apple right now as most any avid Apple enthusiast will tell me that when you have problems with the machine, that means it's time for an upgrade. An upgrade means more waste. More waste means more toxins shoved off to foreign lands on people who just have to take it and deal with the health consequences of toxin-laced groundwater and air.

For anyone who thinks that they need the latest iPod/iPhone, or laptop marvel, they should come and stay for awhile in rural areas in Africa where the trash is burned daily and you're breathing in an ungodly amount of things you'd rather not know about (mainly damnable petrochemicals.) For me, in a few months, I won't breath this anymore, but for the people here, it's constantly in the air and it's only growing more. Think the next time you buy an electronics item, stop and think if you really and truly need it. I doubt that most will heed this, as people like whatever is new and shiny, but if we can just even slow down consumption, we can buy time to deal with this growing mass of waste.

As a carbon-related side note, how much carbon waste is being generated in Africa with this Africa Carbon Forum and how much carbon will it reduce? I would like to put forth the strengths of teleconferencing, although I know that means a number of people won't get to travel business class to do it...

It may yet well stay, but it will depend on a great many things; namely a resolution to the current crisis at some time in the foreseeable future, which seems rather unlikely. Things are heating up and protests are growing around the country. I've found that the media blows these a bit out of proportion, but still, the fact is that to date, eight people have been killed in three different cities due to the police using live ammunition on the crowds when the go-to tear gas wouldn't disperse them as it did where I am in Abengourou last week.

The Old Hippo on the Sofa

The more alarming aspect in all of this is that the government's approach to the situation could be transposed on just about any time over the last 50 years. Violent repression of assembled crowds. Making state television avoid the issues. Suppression of outside voices. Repression of opposition newspapers. This is old stuff and it belies the fact that you're dealing with an old regime that has yet to really wake up to how Ivorians get their information. In doing what they're doing, they are only making people more angry and are not controlling the message. To do that, they would have to shut down the internet, television, and mobile networks. In doing that, they would make a great many enemies with those who matter most: foreign companies with deep pockets.

Les nouveaux médias

One of the prime sources of information through all of this has been Facebook. I didn't learn about the France24 blockage through their site, but actually through an update of a Ivorian friend on the site. Twitter is useful, but only insofar as the amount of users on it and this has been greatly stunted by the fact that if you are trying to SMS the system with a +225 number, you aren't allowed. I made a request to change this, but as you can see, I don't have much sway on that company.

Blogs are in a different state. I really wish that Ivoire Blog would pull together some kind of coverage section in regards to these events, but it has not yet come to pass. They have more Ivorian bloggers than anywhere else, so it would seem that they would be a good, direct source of information. Otherwise, I have seen few reactions to the state of affairs. I'm not sure if this isn't because there is a lack of political commentators in blogs (which are in much greater supply in other countries, African or not) or just because people don't really want to comment on it just yet due to their being no absolutes in the process and it being an ongoing issue with no solution in sight.

Whatever the case, this has been a sudden change of events in what has been a very long, ongoing process. To dub it a Valentine's anything is ridiculous. Like other crises that arise, there is no simplification of the process and it very well could end up taking the rest of the year for this to sort out.

There's just one problem in that you have one of two choices in furniture. The first is go the plastic route, which is great for those who enjoy white home furnishing that stick to you in the heat and will end up as landfill in short order. The other is to have your furniture built locally from the Ivoirian hardwoods. There is a very large industry of carpenters here. Some are pretty basic and others are amazing craftsmen that produce some of the finest wood work I've ever seen.

Our main working table and the chairs came from a fellow who definitely knew what he was doing, but had his own mind as to how to do it. For starters, the table was about 10cm too low. I couldn't get my legs under it and after two weeks of doing everything on it from a sideways vantage, we finally had it raised a bit with some incredibly stylish new feet. That left the chair. Woe is the chair.

At first glance in the photo, it appears fine, but it is actually incredibly narrow. I have bruises on my hip bones from squeezing in and out of it, often forgetting the magic angle of approach to achieve seating bliss. Then of course, the arms are too low, but this was the case even when the table was lower, so I don't get it. Then there is the fact my elbow starts bitching after a few hours of work, so I've "praved" a bit of a cushion there with some dish towel I found.

Why do I stick with this miserable contraption that gets up with me when I stand? Well, I've only got about four months left here at this point and it makes little sense to buy another chair, although the though has cross my mind. I'm sure it will cross even more forcefully if the chair were to collapse on me one day as it seems to be threatening to do. That and if we got two incredibly awesome chairs, we'd have a hard time not shipping them home when we leave.

A very mighty nod to Sean whose title I re-appropriated.