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?

I’ve been using Twitter as a form of microblogging for quite some time now - and what I really like about it is that you constantly get to meet new people from different backgrounds with fresh ideas and different perspectives. For those who are willing to play this game, it comes close to a virtual BarCamp. Quite inspiring.

I just wanted to mention this once because I often have the impression that not everyone really understood the meaning of blogs - and a microblogging service like Twitter (as opposed to a Tumbleblog with no comment-feedback = no conversations) is a very social, albeit also limited blog version. “Yeah sure”, you may think, “what’s so new about that?”. Nothing, actually - just the pure fact alone of meeting new folks online is something that may be underrated some times.

And for this purpose, Twitter is much better than traditional e-mails, forums, Skype/IM, #irc and even Facebook. Why? Because it’s 1:1, on a personal level.

Oh, and if you’re already busy hiding your papered 1.0 business cards in this fast-paced world, create your own QR code and stick it to the back of your phone - as this post suggests. Neat!

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.

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.

He’s married with two lovely kids now and has already been working abroad for 5 years for an international organization.

There’s this age difference of 3 years between us and although he always used to be the youngest in our class, the age difference never mattered.

Today he told me he feels like being 40 years old whereas I feel like being something like 26 or so.

The truth is somewhere there in the middle.

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.

During the past few weeks, I had to think of content which shall be published on a website that will be launched soon. I think it’s even easier to write a proposal for a project because then you know only a few recipients will be targeted and you can streamline and adapt the content for their perspective. With websites though, there’s this 24/7/365 readership out there that closely follows all your steps and mistakes - and everyone has a different opinion on issues you are writing about. This generates conversations - which is good and wanted.

The difficulty really is to find a politically correct way in between all those opinions and still hit the nail on its head with precise definitions.

What I like about blogging is that I can just put my own content online without thinking too much about how it could offend others, how I wouldn’t have to double-check content with my boss who will even find the smallest typo and that I can actually cover any subject that I like.

Also, it’s interesting to see how services like Twitter are used to express feelings or moods, while blogs are then used to cover subjects that have a slightly longer Halbwertszeit. That’s an interesting development, I think. Seeing how these new services are used and how the general opinion on blogs has changed in the last two years. From personal diaries to corporate blogging -how nice is that!

Back to the content management: while thinking about the ultimate content for this project I am currently on, I came to realize that it doesn’t really matter what’s online - as long as there are enough conversations going on. Editing content with such an assumption in mind, the approach to getting your message and content across to the readers becomes much easier.

The person who designed this billboard may have agreed with me about the beauty of this kid (who btw reminds me of Jirani), but just after taking this snapshot tonight, I immediately realized what bugs me about this advertisment for an upcoming fundraising campaign to be aired on tv on November 22nd:

poorly dressed + small + black + kid = poverty?

As long as such stereotyped messages are used to raise attention for the fact that still a lot of people are living in poverty, I will keep on hearing phrases like “..but you are white, you’re supposed to be rich!”.

Not yet convinced? Then do a quick image search on Google with the keyword “poverty”….

Everyone of these 6,6 billion people out there, however, needs to go to toilet. Every day.

I wonder why ppl spend so much money on good cars and other items but actually never really think about improving their sanitation needs. Same attitude applies to ppl using public toilets. How come many people often don’t care about clean sanitation facilities?

Waterless instead of waterfree because you’ll always need some liquid to clean the system, but still: water is such a valuable resource - too valuable to flush it down the toilet. And while some systems require a liquid in order to transport any faeces and urine (~ waste water, sewerage), the urinals for men could easily be switched from flushing urinals to waterless urinals. These technologies work in any country and culture (!), are already available (PDF) at different technology levels (simple & cheap <=> complex & expensive) and are just as “smelly” as any other flush toilet (or even less!).

The image on top left comes from a brochure @ Urimat.com, a very inovative company that just won numerous prices for their urinal designs. Please note the read arrow which highlights the advertisment area. Now just think of the adopt-a-light concept and you’ll get the idea: public toilets that offer free sanitation and are financed through advertisment and a possible sale of urine as fertilizer (in case of waterless urinals with urine diversion). With an average exposure time of 40 seconds, these ads make sense and are read by most (male) customers.

2. cotton (ear) swabs with paper sticks

Cotton swabs or Q-Tips made out of rolled paper instead of extruded plastic. Not that the paper approach is such a new invention, but most supermarkets still only sell the plastic version so far. I bought this package as pictured above the other day for EUR 0,55 - the plastic version next to it was 10 €-cents cheaper.

My interest in these is because while working on a treatment plant, I came across HUGE amounts of plastic sticks from Q-Tips in various pumpes and pipes which had to be cleaned daily because of these plastic items some people out there for some strange reason still keep on disposing of through the toilet. I’ve blogged about this earlier here and here, and since you’ll never be able to change the human behaviour, the only solution obviously is to change the way these products are made. Rolled paper is more likely to dissolve in (waste) water than plastics, and bioplastics may at this time still be too expensive for such a usage.

(the Wikipedia entry says that the rolled paper version is still the most common but since I often only see the plastic version, I wonder on which facts this assumption is based? plastic sticks aren’t good, i think).

3. mobile tooth brushes

Ok now this is pure luxury, not at all sustainable and I can’t see any environmental friendliness, but these mobile, (one-way) toothbrushes are quite handy for those moments when you just need them. I wonder why their sale is limited (in Germany) to airport restrooms only. One brush with paste sells for EUR 1,-. I bought the one in red and gave it to someone special :-)

tbc…

• 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…

Ganz unabhängig vom Inhalt und des immer noch schrecklichen Layouts bei MySpace, gibt es eine Sache in dieser virtuellen Welt, die mich immer wieder aufs Neue abschreckt: die Verwendung von kitschigen Fantasienamen.

Während mein ehemaliger Mitbewohner noch relativ harmlos und pflegeleicht in seiner Welt aus MezzoMix Softdrinks, Pringels Chips, fettigem Essen und diversen Computerrollenspielen jeden Tag von morgens bis abends geduldsam vorm Rechner saß, konnte ich mir bei ihm wenigstens sicher sein, dass er kein Doppelleben als “süße Maus24″, “Seesternchen”, “Waldfee”, “Prinz”, “Ferrrari43″, “Zaubermaus”, “Frühlingsblume48″ oder dergleichen in einer der diversen Online Welten geführt hat. Dann schon eher als “Balduin”, “Gondolf” oder “schwarzer Ritter”, denn der gute Mann Junge war Sci-Fi Fan. Rollenspiele halt. Alle Levels, alle Schwierigkeitsstufen, alle Charaktere.
Ach, wir hatten ja auch mal einen Nachbarn, der tagsüber nur geschlafen hat, und dann nachts, jede Nacht!, in sein Multi-User-Dungeon Spiel abgetaucht ist. Das sind aber in sich geschlossene Welten.

Aber zurück zu den kitschigen Fantasienamen, zu denen ich mich eigentlich hauptsächlich frage, wie die Leute dazu kommen? Haben die keine Fantasie? Screennames sind ja schon eine seltsame Erfindung, aber selbst jetzt, nachdem ich fast genau 11 Jahre im Inet unterwegs bin, scheint es mir manchmal wie 1996 vorzukommen.

Irgendwann muss das Reservoir an dämlichen Benutzernamen doch erschöpft sein?

…than taking the train from Frankfurt to Bremen (Germany, ~440km).

In other words: it’s cheaper visiting my friends in Spain than seeing my family over the weekend in Bremen. Crazy.

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

Streetart, a normal graffiti in a metro station in downtown Frankfurt. Nothing special.

Upon seeing this same figure somewhere else in Frankfurt, I realized once again that this graffiti also perfectly illustrates what maybe someone like David Weinberger tried to explain in his recent book “Everything is Miscellaneous” (see TBG Ethan’s post on this):

Suppose I would like to know more, find out the name of the artist who made this graffiti, know more about the origin of this figure, get some insight into the not-so-obvious context it comes with. Maybe this graffiti is part of some streetart project, something similar to Banksy’s famous projects? Well, is it?

Unless of course I blog on it or upload it to a photo community like Flickr, adding tags and give it some reference/context, this pic and the information given on it is just a bunch of binary data. But how do you tag this pic if you don’t know anything about it?

What about an image search? Something like Google’s image search doesn’t work this way. You will always need to type in words that describe this picture. Keywords, further information, something that makes this identifiable among the huge repository of other pictures.

Next thing I’ll have to add to this blog is the tagging of my articles (yeah, I know…), even tried doing so some time ago but then forgot about it as other things came up that seemed to be more important. However, tagging makes sense. Most of the targeted informations I am obtaining through the internet these days are found by using tags. Social bookmarking websites are the best thing introduced on the net since the introduction of instant messenger services during the late 1990s.

Coming back to the tagging of visual informations: given the fact that most of my friends have an eye memory where they remember things visually, I am wondering if there are any services / algorithms so far that help to make use of this visual approach instead of using words/tags only (?).

I started blogging in June 2005 because of a) Mzeecedric, who encouraged me to do so, b) i had an idle website and c) another community website refused to publish a story of mine (much unlike the Kenya Times :-), so I opted to publish my stuff on my own website. And although I sometimes feel the urge to write in my mothertongue, most of my entries have been in English so far.

That’s 2 years of this still burning desire inside to share a lot of small and a few huge things with the world out there. Sharing, and also a desire to write about people, describing situations, often, not always, trying to portray a glimpse at another world. A subjective view, my thoughts on a few things of interest.

My favourite entries of course are these DoItYourself (DIY) projects like the water filter and/or the hinge issue with Irene’s notebook - both entries I am still getting lots of hits for on a daily basis.

Interestingly, the water filter issue - as I sometime later on realized that there’s another NGO in Kenya actually promoting the filter system I built - served as another hint for me to formulate an idea I’ve since then been working on. Have you ever wondered about the work of some NGOs, active in the sector of environmental protection, that just reaches a few selected groups? Capacity building, as they so often call it, still is an interesting subject.

But I digress.

I think it’s the silence of these warm summer nights, paired with the reflective mood on the train tonight that made me pull out my (paper!) notebook and put down a few lines I wished to directly type into a still non-existing PDA instead. And it may also be influenced by the book I am currently reading:

Michela Wrong’s “In the footsteps of Mr Kurtz” - a book I’ve bought in July 2001 and had left in the shelve since then, waiting for the perfect reading moment to arrive.

“New Zaire Inn” in Garissa, Kenya, later on renamed to D.R.C….

While Michela has a disputatious way of reporting her stories and apparently isn’t always welcomed by her hosts, I like this particular book. She actually describes the scenery in old Zaire pretty vivid, and what I - of course - love is that special part about les sapeurs - these men who dress in expensive fashion clothes and aim to be different any given moment.

The Congo.

As a blogger, I of course associate this with “007 in Africa” and am reminded of those hectic days in 1996/97 when a completely confused former president Mobutu, who had for long already lost any reality for his role as president of a nation that has always been in the waiting line, flew into exile. Ahhh. Memories.

That’s 10 years ago! It feels like yesterday.

Waiting 6 years before eventually reading Michela’s “brilliant account of Africa’s most extraordinary dictator” (the Economist) wasn’t such a bad idea afer all. The distance provides the needed room which is required to enjoy movies like this one.

Building websites these day - do we still have to use a huge CMS, or will Wordpress substitute all these website needs we had in the past?
What I like about using WP instead of any bigger CMS is the ease of installation and training future content editors.

How do bulky Nokia S60 phones actually match with recent fashion trends in form of skinny jeans / cigarette pants as portrayed by hip THE bands?
Just where are you supposed to put your phone if your trousers don’t even leave enough space for your keys?

“Second Life? Get a first…” [via Life 1.0 conversations over a Stöffche with my mate Té, the 61440 dude]

to be continued…

A print ad on polo shirts which are decorated with flags (I’ve just added the white arrows).

Interesting to note, though: you would probably never come across such a shirt with a German flag on it, unless it is a soccer shirt. That is, I also can’t imagine anyone wearing such a polo shirt.

There’s something wrong with this country since 1945 1919, I think.

Trying to call someone in Nairobi from abroad is easy and cheap, lakini most jamaas there - it seems - are used to 10 seconds conversation: no long greetings, a very short smalltalk and then an abrupt ending.

“Hellooo?”
- “Eh, hello, this is JKE calling.”
“Oh, r u in Nairobi?”
- “No, I am calling from Germany…so, how are you?”
“Oh, here everything is just fine.”

… (~ 20 seconds)

“Ok, goodbye & thx for calling.”
- “Ah…?”

-click-

Irritating, especially since I am the one who is calling and paying for the call.

AOB: came across this textbook on “Swahili for Starters” yesterday while strolling through our local (university) library.

I just had to borrow something as all the books I went there for were already taken by someone else and since the really interesting stuff (as pictured below) wasn’t available for lending.

Kikuyu-English Dictionary, by T.G.Benson, Oxford @ Clarendon Press, 1964

(and the best thing I saw there was a Lingala-English dictionary…*sigh*)

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

Politics suck, but biographies and achievements of great leaders in opposition are interesting, indeed.

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.