I’ve been thinking a lot about the need to have more time spent away from the normal timesinks that define our working lives. Getting more dead time. Daydreaming time. Doodling time.

My main ways:

I had 10 hours of driving time on Friday. That’s the perfect environment for me to get some thinking done, I’m unable to escape to the digital tethers of mobile phone or computer, and reading a book isn’t possible. Therefore I think, and seemingly unrelated patterns start to become apparent from different projects, people and initiatives that I’m involved in.

This fits in with an article I read on Fast Company recently, “Hard Work’s Overrated, Maybe Detrimental“.

“By most measures, we spend about a third of our time daydreaming, yet our brain is unusually active during these seemingly idle moments. Left to its own devices, our brain activates several areas associated with complex problem solving, which researchers had previously assumed were dormant during daydreams. Moreover, it appears to be the only time these areas work in unison.”

Honestly, I don’t do this daydreaming stuff enough, I need to do it more. My goal is to untether myself from my iPhone and books more often. Some of my best ideas last year came from an airplane flight where I forgot my book and my iPhone was dead, leaving me with 5 hours an pen and a notebook…

I used to draw a lot, but about 7-8 years ago I just kind of stopped. I’m determined to get started again, even if it is just doodling spaceships in a notebook.

Closely related to doodling is finding crazy, yet professional and cool, images that inspire me to strange thoughts. Case in point…

Good blogs to follow for occasional posts with reams of these types of images are InstantShift or Smashing Magazine.

I’m very interested in hearing how others get their creative juices flowing. At some point we all have to shake up the norm, the status quo, in our lives or work. Is there a way that you do this purposefully?

Opera Unite
“Opera Unite now decentralizes and democratizes the cloud.” A groundbreaking new initiative from the Opera team. This has the potential to be really big. I didn’t do my homework on this one, and after reading Chris Messina’s analysis, I agree this is lame.

BOKU launches
Mobile payments are going mainstream. BOKU’s system doesn’t require users to have a credit card or bank account.

WordPress 2.8
A big new release for the world’s top blogging platform. I, like Adii, am interested in how much people trust WP to get it right, and just update without doing any backups.

Digital Security
My friend Patrick Meier has put together what might be the best overview I’ve read on digital security in repressive environments. All the more important due to this week’s Iran events.

In completely unrelated news, I’m not working off of my normal MacBook Pro machine and it’s proving just how reliant I am on one device. Instead I’m working off of an Acer AspireOne netbook. While this is a great substitute and travel computer, it is definitely not anywhere near what I need as my daily workhorse. I find I am much less efficient.

It’s only fitting for me to get back on the blogging bandwagon with a “Why I blog about Africa” post, as I was tagged by Kaushal in a blog meme. The simplest explanation of a meme that I could find was: “An idea, project, statement or even a question that is posted by one blog and responded to by other blogs.” This particular blog meme was started by Théophile Kouamouo, a blogger based in Côte d’Ivoire.

So why do I blog about Africa? Africa is a continent of extremes - extreme good and extreme bad, extreme hope and extreme disappointment, a roller coaster of emotions and a complete spectrum of the human experience. Sometimes I wonder just how smart aliens are, for traveling many light years across the universe and landing in the least important places. The most succinct introduction to the human race can only be found in Africa, not New Mexico!

With all this in mind, one realizes that enough can’t be said about Africa. I was lucky to be born on a continent so diverse in culture, climate and a thousand and one other things - Where the earth finds it difficult to contain its treasures; treasures that perhaps, have been the source of Africa’s pain.

I want to write about a continent struggling to find its place in a far less interesting world. A continent that has been maturing like a fine wine in a dark cellar waiting to be uncorked. Why would I blog about anything else?

Nairobi Notes
I initially found out about Nairobi Notes through her Twitter updates (@nairobinotes) - they were interesting, funny and timely, which eventully led me to her blog.

Startup Africa
First off, I love their name - I’m just not sure how they got that amazing URL… How was it not taken? Anyway, Startup Africa does an excellent job of providing news on events, websites and startups in Africa, with a particularly good focus on South Africa.

TechMasai
Another new favorite of mine in the African web tech scene is TechMasai. They profile new African websites and services, often with some opinionated commentary which I like.

Mootbox
Short, interesting, and tends to be Nigeria-focused. In Omodudu’s own words, it’s about, “business, Micro-finance, Social Entrepreneurship, Small business development and other assorted randomness.” Follow Oz on Twitter too @Osize.

Jackfruity
I could just tell you that I like this blog because of it’s design - I’ve always salivated over Rebekah’s site design(s). However, she writes really cool and interesting stuff about Uganda, Sudan and humanitarian issues too. Keep her in your feed.

That’s all for this year!

I think there’s more to it than just the number of ways to communicate, it’s also about the number of new people who come online each year with their own blog, Twitter comments, Facebook Note, etc. Each year there is more content being put online and so your own voice matters less relative to the sum of all noise out there. This applies to niches, and the web in general, and I refer to it as asymptotic publishing growth.

Put another way, even if your blog grows more readers every year, it shrinks in relation to the whole.

This is particularly apparent to first-movers in any new platform. At first you have an inordinate amount of “voice” in a specific sphere, which seems to erode over time.

One of my theories on what happens as these environments mature is that as they grow and there becomes more and more options for readers, that there tends to be a coalescing or readers around a certain few blogs or publishers. Though every one of the publishers is likely growing in size, there are certain “keystone” blogs to each niche that have an inordinate amount of influence relative to the general blog in that space.

For example, as a technology blog reader, I might visit 10 blogs every day. However, three of those are likely the same as everyone else.

I compare this to teen hangout locations. There are a lot of places to hang out, and everyone tends to go to a few of their favorite places. However, everyone knows the place to be on Friday night, and that’s the place where the majority of teens go.

There will always be more noise in the blogosphere, or whichever publishing platform is your choice of the moment, than when you first started in it. However, those that provide the most value to the readers will continue to grow and also garner a greater relative audience than their peers.

Basically, asymptotic growth is a truth that we all have to live with, but there will always be islands of influence.

I heard a very troubling comment during that discussion, and surprisingly it came from Marissa Mayer of Google (found at 52:45). That was how anonymity is the enemy of trust, and that she doesn’t see a future for anonymity online. It destroys community and promotes anarchy.

To give some sense of reference, without having to watch the video, here is a word-for-word transcription of Marissa’s comments. It starts with her talking about youth and misinformation on the web leading to apathy, she stated:

“…I think it’s really important as we look at tools to think about how we can support fact checking, how can we guard against misinformation, how is there going to be established an element of authority and trustworthiness? …I grew up with the newspaper and the encyclopedia, which you could trust. And now you have blogs, which are held often as news and often aren’t factual. Or you have Wikipedia, which usually gets most things right, but there are a lot times there is vandalism or corrections that need to be made.”

“When you look at the elements of anonymity and the lack of accountability that happens on the web, it really does start to create doubt in the fibers of who can you trust. Especially when you think of why should I engage? The sense of identity. If I’m anonymous and I’m not accountable for my actions and there are other people out there putting out a lot of misinformation of which the same is true, I think it does lead to apathy and a lack of engagement, which is why I think it is important as we look at these tools to understand the effects of identity. To understand the effect of accountability, authority, trustworthiness and make sure that we’re developing tools and social systems online that encourage an element of engagement and try to fight that apathy trend that says, ‘well I just can’t trust anything. Why should I care?’.

On the question of if there is a way to hone in on the issue of misinformation, beside media literacy:

“Well, I think there are two ways to look at it, on the institutional level and on the individual level. So I think that what you’re seeing is that there are institutions that are rising up online that basically have an element of brand and credibility and standards that they apply. When you look at the Huffington Post, the Drudge Report, inherently the people who run those organizations are saying that here are stories I believe, I believe they’re verified enough that I’m willing to attach my brand and my name to it. So you can see that that’s starting to happen on an institution level online.”

“And I also think there are individual systems where people are verified or credentialed, or you have a profile that tells all about you and shows the other contributions you’ve made to the system. Just there’s greater accountability on the personal level… So I think a lot of the systems that support pure anonymity… I really believe that virtual systems should mirror physical systems. The physical world has been around for a lot longer, and in the physical world you really can’t do anything anonymously. So when you look at systems online that break that paradigm where you can be completely anonymous, or be whoever you want to be, without any since of history or of what you did last week, that’s not really reality and that breaks down the elements of trust and authority.“

That’s about where I jumped in with my comments on not being able to trust those who are monitoring your online speech. Where Marissa then answered:

“Well, I think anonymity has its place. So there’s certainly times, when you know you should have commentary or some type of act giving should be anonymous. But, by and large most systems should have accountability the same way they do in the physical world.”

Besides all of my thoughts swirling around the fact that the web really grew due to anonymity, I balked at this comment because I was surprised at hearing one of the highest Google executives speak so lightly of it.

Maybe this is where I differ a little from my American tech counterparts. You see, there’s something about growing up in a country where you can’t pretend to believe that the government really has your best interests at heart that makes one a little squeemish about not having this anonymous free speech. For, if it wasn’t anonymous, then it definitely wouldn’t be free.

We have a way of projecting our world view on to those around us. In this case, I believe Google (or Marissa) is doing just that. Having these open, trusting, everyone-knows-everyone systems is all well and good when you live in the US. It’s not so good in other parts of the world.

It’s especially not good when you ask who controls all that personal information, and how they let outside bodies (government or otherwise) access that personal data about you.

I came to terms a few years ago about having a lot of personal information on the web, open to others. That’s a personal decision, and not one that any company should be making claims to knowing what’s right to do or not. What I hear, extrapolating from this, is that it’s okay if you don’t want to be a part of it, you can always opt out - but if you do, you also opt out of any meaningful part in the discussion. Frankly, I find that troubling.

Below is the video archive of this talk on Media and Civic Engagement, and is about 1.5 hours (browse the “on demand library” and it’s the 6th from the top on the list):

[Rachel Sterne of Groundreport created a great backchannel platform for viewers to discuss these items in real-time, and there was some direct discussion happening between online commenters and the participants in the room.]

Try and imagine growing food in tall buildings with a self-contained climate powered by renewable energy. A radical idea yes - but one that would address the need for arable land and year-round supply of food. These towering greenhouses immune to weather and pests might very well be the source of nutrition for generations of the future!

While I feel that this fantastic future 'might' be a pipe dream for now, our grandchildren might be forced to effectuate it by inevitable circumstances.

So here we are at another conference on Africa, full of Africans, held outside Africa at an Asian economic powerhouse. This all sounds very familiar. In 2007 the African Development Bank Group held its Annual Meetings in Shanghai, China, from May 16-17. It is easy to become cynical. What is the world coming to, after all, when Africans are unable to host their own meetings? How can the African Development Bank take its annual meeting to Shanghai, is there no African city that can host our top bankers and economists? Why do 40+ African Heads of State have to fly half way across the world to Japan to sit down and discuss issues of crucial importance to the continent? It is easy to become cynical of the whole TICAD process and dismiss it as yet another example of the never-ending talking shop of conferences on Africa.

That would be unfortunate position to take and would be missing the point. The multitude of problems facing Africa require a dedicated African response. That is established. “African solutions to African problems” is the rallying cry heard from cabinet rooms to street corners across the African continent. These African solutions, however, cannot exist in isolation from the rest of the world. Rather active, positive and accountable engagement with partners is required. These partners may be development organisations such as the numerous UN bodies, these partners could be individual countries, such as Japan and China. China is one of the 24 Non-Regional Members of the African Development Bank and only the second to host the Annual Meetings after Spain in 2001. Japan launched TICAD in 1993 to promote high-level policy dialogue between African leaders and development partners.

At TICAD the focus is on two general objectives: Ownership and Partnership.

1. to promote high-level policy dialogue between African leaders and their partners
2. to mobilize support for African-owned development initiatives

Rather than viewing these occasional meetings hosted for Africans outside African as an insult to our independence we should consider them an alternative type of forum, which may just produce some concrete results. After all our African Heads of State gather regularly across the continent at African Union meetings and the results of those meetings usually leave a lot to be desired. Take the African Union meeting earlier this year in Addis Ababa held while Kenya was at the height of violence, a situation the Heads of State refused to address as they collectively buried their heads in the sand. Meetings being held in African is no guarantee for success.

Another advantage of holding a high level meeting such as TICAD outside Africa is that it removes the pressure of acting as host from all nations leaving the Heads of State and ministers to concentrate fully on engaging with each other positively. It is an added advantage that TICAD is hosted by the very efficient yet extremely polite Japanese people (and I am not just saying that because I am a sitting on a 16MB broadband connection – although it helps). Heads of State are ferried from one venue to the other rapidly and safely with none of the megalomania that usually accompanies our African presidential security details.

Japan has proved herself to be a host worth listening to because she listens and acts on what she hears. The TICAD process is very much one of dialogue. This is reflected in the growing support for the process. At TICAD III in 2003 23 Heads of State came to Tokyo, this time round the number has double to over 40 Heads of State/Heads of Governments attending. Every single African country, bar one, has a strong delegation here. The only country without a delegation is Somalia. One clear indicator of political success in Africa would be a strong Somali delegation at TICAD V in five years time.

[Photo Credit: Heads of State/Government at TICAD IV. Copyright: Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Japan]

TICAD IV | TICAD

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The proliferation of social networks has led to a new fad… Data Portability. Data Portability is the ability to share information across multiple interfaces and web platforms using open standards. Once the data is accessed, it can repackaged, remixed, right-clicked… you name it. Basically your Facebook profile content for instance could appear on other social sites, and the flickr photos from your phone in return could appear on a google map. The basic idea is to mash together the infinite amounts of shared data (cue the scrolling Matrix code) and attempt make sense of it.

My nagging question is - does it all end? Mashing all this information together has led to an avalanche (more like a storm) of information that we have to deal with daily. For instance a news item can be mashed together with related YouTube links, google maps, flickr photos, message boards, stock ticker information, blogs and what your friends on Twitter think… the list is endless. By the time you’re done reading you’ll know all there is to know about Myanmar.

I have two problems; First can the human mind deal with the coming onslaught of information? Secondly, where does privacy begin and end, or should we just give it up altogether? Personally, I’m afraid that a super machine in the very near future will have the ability to assimilate together all this information, decipher it and draw very precise social patterns for every individual.

Advertisers, is it really that difficult to understand that you should advertise your value proposition not your unknown brand name? No one knows, or cares to ask, what ABCWidgets.com is or does. They might care that you create the right widget for their need, or that you’re the fastest delivery in the business, etc…

Learn about saving the mountain gorilla in a conflict zone by playing this new game on your mobile phone. A Java game with an education component.

Saving your image files with a specific name (ex: soccer_ball.jpg rather than ns8743.jpg) is a lot better for both your sanity and your search engine traffic. Funny enough, but image search engines still use the file name as their key - so if you want to be found for a certain image, make sure you name it appropriately.

The Kenyan post-election fiasco had a rather jarring effect on me. Why? After all, I grew up in war-torn Southern Sudan, lived through disruptions prior to the Kenyan elections in 1993, and have seen the repercussions of these actions first-hand.

I subscribe to the train of thought that you can’t care for everything. There is always a crisis happening in some part of the world, and no one is capable of caring about them all, much less doing something about each of them.

It turns out that I’m not alone.

A couple of years ago I read an article by someone who was discussing some of the points around what Oxford philosopher John Mackie calls self-referential altruism in a collection of his papers titled Persons and Values. The basic idea is that we find it easier to care about those closer to us. Adam Smith talked about it in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, on how it would be more troubling for a European to lose his little finger than to hear of the destruction of all of China (full quote here).

Steven Berlin Johnson, co-founder of Outside.In, calls this the “Pothole Paradox” and brings it to life in my digital world-view. He describes it like this:

“Say you’ve got a particularly nasty pothole on your street that you’ve been scraping the undercarriage of your car against for a year. When the town or city finally decides to fix the pothole, that event is genuinely news in your world. And it is news that you’ll never get from your local paper, or TV affiliate, or radio station…

…News about a pothole repair just five blocks from your street is the least interesting thing you could possibly imagine.”

So, What’s Important?

What I’m getting at is this: While people are being oppressed, fighting and dying in some foreign country what do you do? What about if it happens in your country? When does it become important enough to use your talents to make a difference?

Typically, it takes an event that directly affects you to make you go beyond thinking and to act. That’s why things that are happening in places like Sudan and Zimbabwe are on people’s radar, but so few are doing anything about it. You can only have so many things on your radar that you actually care about and fewer still that you do something about.

In the case of Kenya, it spurred me on to create Ushahidi, in the hopes that I could do something from my vantage point so far removed from the events taking place. Other Kenyans abroad worked on different, but equally important digital initiatives.

A digital world helps us to do that. Just decades ago those who were not in close enough proximity to an event were unable to do much, if anything about it. Today, we can successfully effect change through digital tools and be thousands of miles away.

That’s an encouraging and scary thought. Global tools that have real time read/write access are extremely powerful. Depending on ones motives, your impact can be good or bad. Even if your motives are good, your tool can be used for bad. How’s that for a quandry?

What does this all mean?
Quite frankly, I’m not sure yet. That’s part of the reason I’ve delayed posting this article for so long. I thought it would be helpful (to me at least) getting out some of my thoughts and theories on crisis, caring, action and the digital world.

I’d appreciate any thoughts and comments that you have on this too.

I wrote a post about African TLDs (the suffix that country domain names go by) a couple months back. Then, today I came across this visualization in a poster of the world of country TLDs. Simple, interesting and useful.

(You can buy this as a print at HistoryShots.com for $29)

Using graphics to represent data is nothing new, however, doing it well isn’t easy. The moment this became crystal clear to me was when I had the opportunity to listen to the incomparable Jeffrey Veen (before he left Adaptive Path for Google) discuss how to visualize rainfall data - going from database to consumer visualization. The main slides are seen below:

(It’s not nearly as good without his oratory, but you can see the Next Gen slideshow here)

There are now a number of excellent blogs, agencies and consultants who deal with this stuff every day. If you’re as interested in this as I am, you might enjoy these resources:

• Gapminder (and corresponding TED Talk by Hans Rosling)
• Information Aesthetics (blog)
• Visual Complexity (Aggregation website)
• The Visual Thesaurus (amazing!)
• Silobreaker (Public data analysis - past blog post)
• Adaptive Path (Agency archives)
• Flowing Data (blog)
• Tactical Tech’s “Visualizing Data for Advocacy” booklet

Disappointed at their current president, Mwai Kibaki, for playing Moi-politics.
Angry at their ministers of parliament, voting an unprecedented number out of office.
Jaded by the election results - wondering if bothering to come out for the next elections is even necessary.

Of the three, I would suggest that citizens being jaded is the most harmful for the long-term. Why bother voting if you can’t have the confidence in your government to count them openly and honestly?

Image by Afromusing

A short summary:
Massive turnouts for this election in Kenya. Many incumbents were voted out of their parliamentary seats. Raila Odinga was a heavy favorite over incumbent Mwai Kibaki for president, and appeared to be in the lead by a good 40,000 votes. Counting was delayed. The electoral commission claims that Kibaki won by 200,000+ votes. Riots begin, and a state of emergency is declared.

Blog coverage of these elections have been excellent. The Kenyan blogosphere is one of the best and biggest on the continent, and they did their jobs well.

Ory gave some of the best media coverage of the elections, better than the traditional media, on her blog KenyanPundit.

MentalAcrobatics claims that something is not right with this election and also has a good post on the Kenyan election experience.

More coverage on the Thinker’s Room.

Juliana has some great pictures of the elections from upcountry.

“And he demeans the people who will receive the computers, asking his readers if they will feel “better about the world’s problems, knowing that some poor tribesman’s child has a laptop”, apparently contrasting a “tribesman” with a real person like himself, safe in his Western affluence.”

Who cares?
Why does it matter that two rich Westerners are batting back and forth over the strategies and benefits of a cheap computer for children in developing countries?

As someone who grew up in Sudan and Kenya, I care. I care because I continue to hear the argument, “why give kids a computer when what they really need is food and water?” I care because people need to stop talking about Africans as if they’re in need of another handout and implying that every child in Africa is living in squalor. Most of all, I care because I don’t hear many voices from the countries that are going to be using these new computers, only from journalists from western countries.

Let’s talk about the Africa we know
There will continue to be drought, floods, war, corruption and poverty - all of the items that plague many African nations and which are amplified by the media.

However, there will also continue to be a solid majority of Africans who live happy lives without the interference of any aid or development organization. They will live in their village, raise their children, send them to school and teach them from their rich heritage. There will continue to be children growing up in the city who love to learn and would blossom even more with access to technology and information.

If you grew up in Africa, do you think that there is a use for inexpensive computers in schools?

See the picture above. Why shouldn’t those children have access to these machines? They aren’t illiterate or under-nourished. How many of us remember this same type of schooling? I do, I was in a primary school very similar to this in Southern Sudan. Why couldn’t any of my classmates become technologically literate with access to the right machines? Why only the relatively affluent white child?

What is Africa anyway, and who decides what’s “right” for each country?
Let’s stop painting Africa with a broad brush. Let’s speak out and remind people that it’s made up of more than just “tribesmen”. That not every country is the same and that there are wealthy, middle class, and yes, even poor people. Let’s stop pretending that Ghana is the same as Ethiopia, or that what applies to Botswana applies to Chad.

Most of all, as people with experience living there, let’s own our part of this debate. Why should one more Westerner be making the case for, or against, a cheap laptop for kids in Africa? I’d rather hear two Africans debate it. I’d rather have a thought leader from some African country step up and make the case for, or against, it.

Just because we grew up listening to others decide what’s right for our countries doesn’t mean we need to continue in that same way.

Try this on for size: as an African, you are more of an expert on what your part of Africa needs than any self-prescribed expert from the west.

• Associate Product Marketing - Nairobi
• Geographic Consultant - Nairobi
• Geographic Supervisor - Nairobi
• Office Associate - Nairobi
• Strategic Partner Development (SPD), Local Markets - Nairobi
• Technical Support Associate, Google Applications - Nairobi
• Industry Leader - Johannesburg
• Account Manager - Johannesburg
• Account Strategist - Johannesburg
• Office Lead - Francophone West Africa

How a lack of eCommerce solutions is crippling Africa
I’ve started to contribute (sporadically) to a new website called Thought Leader out of South Africa. Here I talk about the problems that we face in Africa with regard to running businesses online. There are no real payment and merchant options that fit the needs of Africans.

Of course, anyone who reads my stuff will realize that I’ve been talking about this for a while…

I had a hard enough time tracking down how to make sure I got the Rugby World Cup games at home in the United States, and then a number of people asking me, so here it is. There is only one way to get it, and that’s via the Setanta sports channel.

You can only get the Setanta channel in the US via satellite. Your choices are DirectTV or Dish Network. Once you order the service you’ll have to add an extra $15/month for the Setanta channel.

DirectTV tends to be about $5 less each month, but Dish Network has a bigger dish and gets less interruption (so I read somewhere). I ended up going with Dish Network, with Setanta sports, and I ordered a DVR for an additional $5 in order to record the games that I couldn’t watch live. All told, the package runs about $50/month, which is about what cable TV costs here - so it’s comparable.

One last item. If you want to do a month-to-month contract instead of an 18 month one, you’ll need to go through DirectTV or Dish Network, not their local dealers. So just give them a call via their website.

Hope that helps someone.

After 2 good years at eppraisal.com I’ve decided to move on, though I will still stay on in an advisory role. It’s a good company, with people genuinely passionate about changing the way you access information about real estate on the web. I’ll miss working with the team on a daily basis.

Why?
Over the last year I’ve been struggling with two issues:

First, “talking” vs “doing”. I hear a lot of people who talk about how things should be, or criticize the way things are but never do anything about it. I’ve always been a doer, and this is a way for me to gain some much needed time to work on projects that have need much more attention. (more on these projects at a later date, though one is AfriGadget).

Second, rejecting the big business theory of work, life and associated expectations. Malvina Reynolds sums this up brilliantly in her song Little Boxes. Success in life is not just about money, though that is needed (and believe me, I’m a capitalist). However, I don’t think that money is the only thing there is in life and that balance, life goals and family should be taken into consideration.

So what is it I’ll be doing?
I’m going to work independently as a web strategy and new media consultant (my company site). In the time that I am not focused on client needs, I will be pouring my time into AfriGadget and other independent projects related to Africa where my skills and experience can make a difference.

One of the perks is that I’m looking forward to spending more daytime hours in my home office, allowing for more time with my girls:

I’m really excited about the future!

Your normal White African articles will soon continue, thanks for weathering this brief intermission…

I try to keep it on me at all times. It’s useful for taking notes at a conference when I can’t use my computer (or the battery is dead), when I’m sourcing stories for AfriGadget, when I’ve got a “brilliant idea” while out and about, or when I need to take notes from a phone call.

It’s not like you couldn’t use any old notebook to do the same thing - I just happened to buy into the Moleskine story. Sometimes the answer isn’t gadgets or the web, it’s what our grandparent’s grew up using.

Technology’s great benefit is simplifying complex tasks. We need to guard against complicating simplex tasks.

Moleskin hacks:

Moleskine Hard drive
Indexing Hack
43 Folders - Moleskine Hacks
Pen holder - Flickr picture step-by-step
PigPog’s list of Moleskine links

You see, there’s the stuff that’s good for you, the stuff that helps you grow, some have certain types of vitamins to help you fend off diseases and sickness, others are like junkfood, etc…

When I travel, I tend to read a lot of “junkfood” books. Thrillers, fantasy, sci-fi - you know the type. It’s kind of like grabbing a candy as a snack, since you know it’ll be good and keep you going. Of course, you can take a bad analogy to far, so I’ll stop here.

By the way, once in a while you find some gems. Interesting books that I’ve read in the last couple weeks include, all of which I recommend:

The Traveler by John Twelve Hawks
This is rather interesting, no one knows who the real author is - he “lives off the grid”. It’s an Orwellian story, much like a modern day 1984. Very compelling ideas, even if rather fantastic in nature. I wouldn’t suggest any ludites or conspiracy fanatics read it.

American Gods by Neil Gaiman
Odd. That’s all I have to say. Very well written and interesting, but odd… It’s the story about the decline and clash of the “old gods” brought over to America by immigrants and the rise of the new “tech/city gods” of the modern world.

Thank You for Arguing by Jay Heinrichs
Not junk food, but a useful book on the art of persuasion. A lot of good tips and thoughts on what to do to ensure that your ideas get agreed upon or “win the day”, whether at home, work, school or presenting.

95% of the children’s mothers are in prison. Only four mothers are in prison for capital offenses, the others are in for drugs, neglect, prostitution, or some other type of petty offense. Since the majority of children are neglected, there is generally a large amount of medical attention needed - which again stretches their resources.

Juergen, who writes as Kikuyumoja and originally asked us to take a look at the place, has set up a blog for the NEST home (www.thenesthome.com). It’s been up for a while, and it helps keep up to date with what is happening at the orphanage. If you would like to support them, you can there.

Afromusing has a moving blog post up telling a story about one of the abused babies that was given into the NEST home’s care.

(more…)

Fun!

I finally got out to see the third installment and it now joins my list of favorite trilogies, along with:

• Star Wars
• Indiana Jones
• The Lord of the Rings
• The Matrix

7 random thoughts from that blogger called Mentalacrobatics

1. I find it amazing how many single women in Kenya wear a wedding ring on their ring finger. The few I know tell me they do that to scare away the seedy and slimy men that approach them. That doesn’t make sense to me. Seedy and slimy men will not be scared away by a wedding ring. In fact if anything that just increases your appeal to such characters. However, all decent, honourable and normal guys once they spot the wedding ring will keep a respectful distance in the courting game. A wedding ring is like kryptonite to single men, believe me. Then the same Kenyan women complain that there are no suitable men around to marry! Well remove the fake wedding rings and then see what happens!
2. It is unbelievably hard to get some people to put a simple and small piece of code on their blog. These are not the people who do not know how to upload the ringcode. Those ones usually ask for help. Rather it is mainly experience bloggers who for one reason or another can not be bothered to upload the ringcode yet want to be counted as a KBW member. The excuses they give are many, for example: I don’t have time (it takes less than 20 seconds), It is to big (the ring code is about 1 byte big) it doesn’t fit in with my template (you can format the font to your hearts content so long as it can be read and clicked) . excuses excuses excuses. I believe the reason they have this attitude is because it is so easy to become a KBW member. If we charged USD 50.00 per month and insisted on 10,000 word blog posts weekly to qualify for membership, they would probably have the ringcode up, with flashing lights, in an instance.
3. We all have our pet peeves, the little things that irritate us. One of mine is when people wrongly interchange the terms hacker and cracker. For those who do not know:

   A hacker is a person intensely interested in the arcane and recondite workings of any computer operating system. Most often, hackers are programmers. As such, hackers obtain advanced knowledge of operating systems and programming languages. They may know of holes within systems and the reasons for such holes. Hackers constantly seek further knowledge, freely share what they have discovered, and never, ever intentionally damage data.

   A cracker is a person who breaks into or otherwise violates the system integrity of remote machines, with malicious intent. Crackers, having gained unauthorized access, destroy vital data, deny legitimate users service, or basically cause problems for their targets. Crackers can easily be identified because their actions are malicious.

   At least have the decency to know what you are accusing someone of before you go banging on about it over and over again.

4. Every relationship reaches a point where you think, hmmmm, this could actually work, or alternatively, damn, this will never work. For me that point usually comes during an unexpected crisis and how the other person reacts to it.

   For example, having a puncture is inconvenient, having a puncture at 3am in the still of the night, is scary, having a puncture at 3am in the still of the night on a dark stretch of Thika Road notorious for muggings and carjacking is a bloody crisis, even more so when you are with a date you are trying to impress! There I was going through all the potential options in my head:

   • Stop and change the tire right there – ARE YOU MAD?
   • Stop and wait for help – From whom? This is not Gotham where you can fire up the Bat Signal and wait for Batman
   • Drive to a police station – HEHEHEHEHE yeah right “Kihjana ghucha gipande hii”
   • Drive on to a safer place, probably a petrol station and change the tire there, knowing full well that you will complete destroy the flat tire that is on the wheel. Sacrifice the tire to save your life – hmm ok

   While I’m doing all this thinking inside I’m saying all these reassuring things out loud, we’ll be fine etc, I’ve done this before etc, don’t worry. Basically just trying to keep things calm and give her no reason to panic.Then I realise that while I’ve been thinking she was saying the same things to me, as in her first reaction was not to panic but to reassure me in case I was about to panic.

   At that point I would start to think, hmmm this could work you know.

   As opposed to those who start shouting and sulking over something simple as looking for a parking space in town!

5. You know those guys who make a big deal of how much they hate football? The ones who say things like, “football just doesn’t make sense and I don’t follow it” you know those guys, the ones who go to the supermarket during the world cup final because, “it will be empty with everybody at home watching the game” you know those clowns right. Guys who come in when you are watching a game and try to change the channel to the MTV Base during half time when you are trying to follow the analysis? You know those guys right? Well every single one of them is now a Chelsea fan. That’s why we look down on you, you chelski muppets. I know 2, TWO, genuine Chelsea fans from East Africa, two of my bros who have been with Chelsea from back in the day, even before akina Viali etc were playing at Chelsea, which to be honest was the first time many of us even noticed that silly team. And those two bros of mine hate these new school Chelsea fans more than we do, hehe!




6. African society is governed by a set of rules which you learn at an early age. These rules come and go, one topic of conversation is always which tribe is more traditional than the other. But one thing we all share across the board are the terms of respect and indeed status that are given to the brothers and sisters of our parents.

   For example, in English my mother’s sister is my aunt and my father’s sister is my aunt. In our culture, my mother’s sister is Mamamti and my father’s sister is Senje. Dare you call a Mamti Senje, one of my brother’s did once, we haven’t seen him since!

   In a similar way in English my father’s brother is uncle and my mother’s brother is uncle. In our culture my father’s brother is Papamti and my mother’s brother is Khotsa.

   It extends, the husband of a Mamamti automatically becomes a Papamti etc.

   We really do not have a specific word for cousin. I call my male cousins, brother and my female cousins, sister. (That is why I always say, me and my brothers, we are many (see story 5 above). I like this. It means I have brothers who are Kisii, Luo, Kikuyu, Kamba, Swahili, Maasai etc. I got back up!

   This one doesn’t extend as automatically. I only call my cousin’s husband brother if I feel he is worthy!

   My friends are used to this arrangement now and so when I introduce them to one of my brothers they ask me, “is this your brother, brother ….. or just your brother?”

7. A so called friend who happens to live in the states sent me this picture the other day.

   
   
   

   They took it with the camera on their phone while watching the latest episode of 24 and sent it to taunt me because they know it will be at least 3 days before I get my hands on the latest episodes. This has to rank amongst the cruellest SMS I have ever received.

© Mentalacrobatics for Mentalacrobatics, 2007. | Permalink | 5 comments

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We (Africa) have arrived at the table very late in the game. Developed countries are almost done sucking fossil fuels out of the ground - the very substance required to support the quality of life everyone craves (including environmentalists). As China & India fight for the remaining crumbs to satisfy their explosive economies, I can’t help but wonder where this leaves us. The last major oil reserves have already been discovered, and the remaining options can only be compared to pulling teeth.

• Solar Power
  Extremely clean, and there’s plenty of it on the continent. Unfortunately technology hasn’t advanced enough for us to harness it efficiently. Right now, this form of energy is just a romantic dream that is still out of reach.

• Hydroelectric Power
  Has been extremely reliable for years. Also, it requires large dams that displace people and destroy ecosystems. Ultimately our future lies here. Africa has taken advantage of only 7% of its hydroelectric potential compared to 75% in Europe. It is however going to require massive dams that translate to massive investment on a still volatile continent.

• Methane Gas (NEW!!)
  For a moment there I was convinced this was the Silver Bullet solution to our problems, a green almost endless supply of energy. As stated in this BBC News article and on Afromusing, Lake Kivu in Rwanda is holding enough unexploited energy to meet Rwanda’s (and the regions) needs for 200 years. In all the excitement, finer details like the fact that methane is a extremely explosive gas were left out - more details here.

I’d like to go on, but I think you get the idea - we are literally going to be pulling teeth to come up with a solution. Ultimately, the environment will be a casualty if we want to get what everyone else has.

click on the image for a larger sample

Thoughts on Behavioral Targeting in Advertising in Africa
Advertising and marketing, especially online, is an ever-changing beast. I just sat through a good session on behavioral targeting, and wish I had a chance to discuss some of my thoughts on that with some of Africa’s leading websites and news portals. Is anyone doing any behavioral targeting in African advertising?

If I were an advertiser on any of the African online newspaper sites or forums, I would like to make sure my money was being used to target the demographics that wanted my services. For instance, if I have a product that is better for locals at the country level versus wanting to only reach people in the African diaspora in Europe. It’s a big difference and means a lot to me as far as ROI goes.

Of course, there’s a difference in brand marketing and actually trying to get a transaction, but that just provides another difference that I wonder if the platforms are reaching out to?

Coming back from the Web 2.0 Expo, I happened to be seated with a number of the Humboldt State University rugby team. They mentioned that the US Division II rugby playoffs were taking place this weekend at a facility near Orlando, Florida.

Realizing that I didn’t want to see a computer, blog, check email or think about the web at all, I set off for the pitch with to try out my new camera in a real “sports” setting.

The image above, of a guy diving to tackle as the other dives for the try, is my absolute favorite of the whole day. I took about 1400 pictures in the space of 3 hours and came out with 250 decent pictures. Of those, only 50 would I consider “good”.

Today I’ve learned a few things about sports photography:

1. It seems to take a lot of luck
2. Having a massive zoom lense makes your life easier
3. It’s NOT easy
4. It’s a lot of fun

The rest of the set can be found here

I entered into the Ask.com Experts session. Funnily enough, they asked a venture capital question trying to find a “VC expert”. No one could answer the question, “who writes VentureBlog?” - interestingly enough, I wrote about him yesterday, and David Hornik commented on it… (By the way, I’m NOT a VC expert)

The best thing about this is now I don’t need to think up an excuse to tell my wife in order to buy one.

There are more pictures and slides from my Web 2.0 Flickr set for it, this one just happens to be my favorite. David Hornik, of VentureBlog, gave the talk, which was BY FAR the most entertaining one yet. (Update: In context, it’s not as bad as it sounds, more on the presentation)

Other highlights have been the Eric Schmidt/John Batelle interview, the presentation by Technorati’s David Sifry and Hitwise’s Bill Tancer, and of course, meeting up with Colin Daniels of the Sunday Times.

All together, it’s been a really good conference. Some of the sessions have been a little dry, but the conversations and ideas are as rich as ever. One day left on the agenda, hopefully more good stuff will come from that.