webstuff – Page 2 – Kikuyumoja

FarmVille ni…

Story by KBW correspondent
Publication date: Aug 25th, 2009

FarmVille is a new Kenyan game on Facebook where you can grab land, excel in overgrazing farmland and overstocking sheep & cattle, buy luxurious decorations and spend the rest of the time idling with a sundowner in your hand.

A report by the KenyaTimes recently revealed that most employees in Nairobi CBD are spending their lunch break in front of computers, playing FarmVille. FarmVille is said to have 9 million users worldwide, a quarter of Kenya’s current population.

A personal computer, commonly referred to as an IBM-compatible device, is a machine often see in offices, hidden under a dust cover. The first personal computer was brought to Kenya by an US-American bible translator family in 1979.

One employee of Kenya Paraffin, Lanterns and Candles (KPLC) who wants to remain anonymous, told us that Kenya currently experiences a power rationing program due to an excessive use of Facebook.

Facebook is a very successful website on the internet (mtandao wa intaneti), often used as a dating site and for subversive political and digital activism. The website includes a microblogging service called “status update” which has recently substituted the blooming Kenyan blogosphere.

Another popular microblogging service called “Twitter” (ndege kelele) has meanwhile been condemned by the Government Spokesperson Dr. Alfred E. Neuman who said that “it can not send SMS” to him. In a related matter, Dr. Alfred recently anounced that those without telephone network should sms him directly so that he can forward the matter to the relevant ministry in charge of terrorcommunications.

A delegation of Kenyan MPs, who is currently touring the United States, recently wrote a letter to the Office of the President, asking for a national holiday to celebrate FarmVille Day. This, as they explained in their open letter, will also help those urban citizens who have in the past failed to secure their own upcountry shamba due to lack of funds and competition in their extended family networks.

A group of young Kenyan writers also published an open letter, claiming that FarmVille actually comes from the United States of America and was introduced to Kenyans by visiting UN interns and PeaceCorps youth who used their daily allowances to access the internet from remote villages. This, as they claim, is “clearly evident as there is no mobile version of FarmVille”.

A group of talented programmers from JKUAT is meanwhile working on a mobile version of FarmVille. The project is financed by Sufericom.

In other news, a Mr. Kamau from Muranga’a was today injured in a battle with Mr. Ezekiel Oluoch, an official from the National Bureau of Statistics who had approached Mr. Kamau for Kenya’s fifth national census. In a heated debate, Mr. Kamau refused to state the actual number of his lifestock.

The fifth Kenya National Census is an inititiative by the GoK to allocate farm land on FarmVille according to family size and fixed assets. In an unexpected move, the World Bank and outgoing ambassadors recently called for a country wide introduction of FarmVille so that no Kenyan will have to suffer from malnutrition in future.

4 years

It’s almost 4 years ago that I published my first post on this blog.

The facts:

Fellow blogger Mzeecedric inspired told me in 2005 to start my own blog. Thx, bro!
The initial motivation arose out of frustration – a very popular German social network had rejected a few of my texts for publication so I’d told myself: “F… them. I’ll come up with my own site.”
SEO kitu gani? I am still using the same WordPress template when I switched from using (the standard WordPress) Kubrick template. Am btw still searching for a suitable & modern alternative but people keep on telling me they like the Kikoi banner. And I couldn’t even take another shot of the said Kikoi as I’ve meanwhile used it on another project. Recommendations for an alternative WordPress template with lots of whitespace are highly appreciated!
Renamed this blog only once – from “Kikuyumoja’s Realm” to just “Kikuyumoja”. From https://kikuyumoja.com to https://kikuyumoja.com.
916 posts, 46 categories, 363 tags, 3.107 comments. Still need to improve that tags thingy for older posts. Categories? Blogroll? That’s so 2005. But I still use them.
4 years of using WordPress – an experience that has landed me at least two decent jobs related to the creation of blogs as well as some other unpaid WordPress blogs. Those new to WordPress and the taxonomy still prefer categories over tag clouds btw.
I am still blogging despite the invention of microblogging services such as Twitter.
I still haven’t lost my blogging mojo.
I’ve always tried to keep it personal instead of blogging on one specific subject range, e.g. fellow blogger Erik blogging mostly on Africa & technology (and rugby), Sokari on gender violence, racism, sexuality, HIV/AIDS and cancer, Daudi on sports and politics, and so on. It’s a balancing act for me not to blog everything that crosses my mind, but at the same time I am not too selective and try to keep a healthy mixture. I don’t know if I am that succesful with such an approach, but the truth is: I wouldn’t know how to classify this blog other than “private” or “personal”. At least, that’s how I’ve tagged my blog (and those like mine) on my Google Reader. How do you classify or categorize this blog on your linklist (if at all)?
Also, I wouldn’t want to limit myself to one specific range of subjects. I know that it’s better to be a “theme blog” by covering only a few things (e.g. “this is a chocoloate blog where I only write about chocolate products”), but I chose not to be that. I do participate on other, theme-related blogs where I contribute to water, sanitation, health, environment, climate, technology, etc. subjects so this need for a categorized view of the world (Weinberger’s second order of order, I presume) is already covered by those sites.
Other than the commentators, I don’t know much about the many lurkers out here. Who are you? And why are you reading my blog? Please comment! Thank you.
This blog has been part of the Kenyan Blogosphere almost right from the start. And this although I am based in Germany (ok, been working and blogging from Kena in between) and will always remain being a German to an extent where I will require a work permit for jobs in Kenya. My Kenyan side probably is that I know more about Kenyan politics & history than the average Blueband Generation kid out there that grew up with [name of US-American sitcom] on KTN and then quickly left the country for the US or the UK for studies only to develope a need to rediscover their cultural heritage aborad because they’re also being asked about that, e.g. during marathons or once Kenya is back in the media with a negative story (hunger, poverty, AIDS, slums, scandals, natural disaster, tribal clashes, etc.) Don’t want to insult anyone here – guess it’s just a matter of interests. It’s like those immigrants in Germany who are much more German than I am (which isn’t that difficult).

Blogging is easy. Go to WordPress.com (or any other blogging platform), choose a username, register a blog and start writing. And publish it.

Do it anonymously, put your name under it -just do as you feel. But make sure your voice is out there.

My mother once asked me “JKE, who’s supposed to read all this stuff??”. – “Well”, I replied, “…I don’t know. But some apparently do.”.

That would be you, dear readers. Without you and your comments, I would probably never have taken it to this level. I owe you big times!

—

Four other things I’ve also learned during the last 4 years:

1. A blog post without a photo is like chicken soup without chicken. You feel that something is missing. So here’s the mandatory and totally random picture:

vQxdw8WwRmeyp41yCYXKSINAo1 500

2. The world is changing faster than expected. And we will need much more visionaries out there who are able to think out-of-the-box and and are willing to take a risk. Even if it means that everyone will start laughing about them.
I wouldn’t say I am a visionary, but I’ve followed my own path during the last 4 years and am happily working freelance now on projects I really like. I like my work and what I do. Do you?

3. Things I value the most: time, inspiration, freedom.

4. Everyone likes a good story. Had this colleague at work who kept on sending me links to “potentially interesting news” for our newsletter: “Here, this link is interesting”. – “Yeah, thx…”, I replied, “but where’s the connection and where’s the story to it?”. Silence.

Twitter taught us that news may be limited to 140 characters only. 140 characters that will either be read or ignored.

Now, scientists can sometimes be very complicated. Blogging really helped me shrinking news to a necessary length – and I am still only at the beginning. I wish that colleague would twitter.

Epilogue
SEO is a horrible buzzword, suitable for bullshit bingo. Thinking about this blog post, I keep on adding new stuff to the list of facts. 4 years are an interesting timeframe to draw a line and look back. Alas, this aim to categorize the blog with something else other than “personal” still remains the hardest part for me.

Google Squared

I am starting to like Google Squared.

EntwicklungslanDE

Bitte lesen. Danke.

Aus einem Kommentar:

“In einer Gesellschaft, in der Unternehmertum gesellschaftlich mindestens genauso hoch angesehen ist wie Bildung und intellektueller Erfolg, werden vorrangig die Chancen des Internets gesehen (USA, Schweden).

In einer Gesellschaft, in der klassische Bildung das Maß aller Dinge ist und einem Ansehen und Einfluss garantiert, werden vorrangig die negativen Aspekte des Webs hervorgehoben. Wie in Deutschland.”

Genau das denke ich nämlich auch.

[via facebook, btw – h/t Cedric & Silke]

tags, tags, tags…

I don’t know if something like the following already exists out there, but I was just going through my feeds on Google Reader as I had recently developed an interest in Japan-related blogs (Gaijin blogs, as I’d call them – much more interesting than traveller blogs) and thought about a website that lists sites in the way humans sort them.

For instance, I grouped/tagged all Africa-related sites as “afrosphere” and European sites with no particular topic as “Eurosphere” on my Google Reader. It may not be the smartest solution, but it helps me to quickly identify where something belongs to (again, according to my own understanding which may be different from yours).

You may also see from my folders that it’s sometimes difficult to caterogize one website into a unique folder. For instance, Steve often writes about the musical Golden Afrique on his blog – so I didn’t know where to save his feed: afrospehere or ngoma?

Google knows about this problem and consequently enabled users to save their feeds in more than one folder. In dubio pro reo – so I saved his blog in both folders.

I even read the wonderful “Everything is miscellaneous” by David Weinberger the other day and think that it makes sense to tag all content. However, it’s still my own tags/keywords – and sometimes I’d like to know what kind of classification others are using on their readers.

deliciousjke

One fine way is to check out delicious.com – that social bookmarking service I’ve been using for quite some time now – and see the tags ppl have used on their saved bookmarks. The screenshot above is a search for “Kikuyumoja” – lists 35 search results.

So the idea is to come up with a service that takes bookmarks / links from various resources (e.g. social bookmarking sites, feedreaders, etc.), looks at their tags and combines these with a link:

Kikuyumoja.com – my blog – would probably create a tag cloud like:

Kenya Germany mobile_blogging cool twitter Africa social_media blog moblog water ecosan internet mobile gprs Safaricom umts Nokia WordPress eee imagineering …

…and so on.

Again, I don’t know if something like that already exists, but the idea behind such an approach is not to display my own categorisation (because otherwise I would just come up with a tag cloud on the sidebar of my blog) – but instead a user / reader generated tag cloud: I am not interested in my own stuff, but in yours.

In other words: in case you’ve saved my blog on your feedreader – how did you tag it?

Technically spoken, I imagine a Yahoo pipes app – but how do you access those private tags on feedreaders?

Twestival, or why Twitter is the better alternative

Today is Twestival day and I am also attending the local gathering of Twitter users – which also happens to take place in my favourite pub here in Frankfurt (aptly named “the place to be“).

Twestival is a world-wide, almost simultaneous event (live streaming) and attendees are encouraged to donate some money to Charity Water, an NGO active in Ethiopia.

Somehow in a Prof. George Ayittey-way and having previously gained some experience on NGOs, the water business and having a different perspective (of an African/European intellectual) on it, I do of course feel a bit discomforted with such mass-donation events that a) promote water as a sexy (and innocent) cause and b) provide absolution to some Westeners who “want to do good”. Sorry, but sustainable approaches just don’t work that way. I would rather prefer institutional changes than the drilling of wells for areas on which we do not even have groundwater maps. But maybe that’s just me and my scepticism.

On the other hand, I somehow adore how they are making use of social media tools to mobilize the masses. Maybe this is what it takes to reach the masses. And this is also very cool:

“Tweet some facts” via Twitter.

I think we should also use this for ecological sanitation projects. Using social media to mobilize the masses. Kudos to CharityWater for this really smart approach!

—

One of the reaons for the success of Twitter and other micro-blogging services, I think, is also the lack of alternatives.

Yes. Even in 2009, there’s still no decent mobile blogging client except for Twitter & Co.

What I am looking for is an application designed for a smartphone that enables me to quickly post an update to my website, with annotated images, maybe also video content and the ability to edit all of this as well as moderate comments. All of the previously mentioned apps for Symbian S60 phones and plugins for WordPress.org installations just don’t do the job for me. And I don’t know about this on the iPhone. Is it any better? Would be a reason to switch phones.

So, even though Twitter is just a micro-blogging service with a limitation to 140 characters / message, it helps to serve the basic idea behind blogging: connecting people through conversations. And besides, with this character limit it is also compatible with another popular service: SMS.

—

I really like the idea of combining social media tools with the sector I am active in: sustainable sanitation.? Maybe that’s just the way forward for me.

MobilePress

FireShot Pro capture #43 - 'MobilePress - Enable The Mobile Web' - mobilepress co za

Following my other mobile blogging related posts, both my colleagues @AfriGadget – Frerieke & Erik – adviced me to take a closer look at a wonderful (new) WordPress plugin called MobilePress.

“MobilePress is a WordPress plugin that will render your WordPress blog on mobile handsets, with the ability to use customized themes.” – We’ve seen this feature with others before, but – as the author correctly points out: “Plugins exist, but, at best, contain sneaky ads and backlinks and are not all together well written.” I do share those feelings regarding the WordPress Mobile Plugin as mentioned earlier.

Despite of MobilePress being just the right choice for the mobile accessibility of your WordPress-based blog, I am still using the out-dated WPhone Admin Plugin because MobilePress (currently) lacks one important part: it automatically chooses the right rendering option based on the browser.

Now – I would like to choose that myself! WPhone does that by providing a “use mobile admin interface” checkbox on the WP login screen.

Mzeecedric and I recently had to look for a solution to a low-bandwidth blog-access issue and ended up using WPhone. I would, however, prefer to use MobilePress (also because it’s from SA, yay! :-) once such a “use mobile admin interface” functionality is integrated so that blog editors can actively choose a low-bandwidth login to the WP backend while using a normal browser.

(It’s btw interesting to see how a plugin is used for another purpose – something else than what it had been designed for. See M-Pesa in Kenya and how it is used these days.)