Category: webstuff

sanaa, again…

Fellow blogger Ed Cross dropped me an e-mail, informing me about his page on contemporary African art “African Works“.

Well…saniblog.org came in between, but otherwise: I’d love to open an open, multi-authored blog dedicated to art works from East Africa. What I’ve seen online so far are just single artists being promoted by someone or themselves, and often it’s just limited to one specific artist and his/her well-selling works. With a blog as the contemporary publishing platform / tool, up-coming artists and those who are already well established could at least present their work in a much better way. All you’d have to do then is to register as an author and upload some of your works.

Currently, at my site, it just lacks another empty mySQL database, a lonely weekend aka 2-3h of creativity and a suitable domain name which could suit everyone involved. Sanaa.org/.net are already taken by someone, but I think a Kiswahili domain name would still be very attractive. Any ideas?

(I really really have to change my webhoster one day soon…have been with 1&1 since 1998 and all they given me are high montly costs but also good 99,99% reliability. The package is limited to 3 mySQL dbs only though, and even their domain costs for the .net/.org range are wayyyy above the competition. Yani – moving sites = time & pain = costs).

Lessing

“We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women who have had years of education, to know nothing about the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers.”

“Reading, books, used to be part of a general education.”

“And we must remember that this respect and hunger for books comes, not from Mugabe’s regime, but from the one before it, the whites. It is an astonishing phenomenon, this hunger for books, and it can be seen everywhere from Kenya down to the Cape of Good Hope.”

“Yet despite these difficulties, writers came into being, and there is another thing we should remember. This was Zimbabwe, physically conquered less than a hundred years before. The grandfathers and grandmothers of these people might have been storytellers for their clan. The oral tradition. In one generation – two, the transition from stories remembered and passed on, to print, to books. What an achievement.”

“Writers are often asked, How do you write? With a processor? an electric typewriter? a quill? longhand? But the essential question is, “Have you found a space, that empty space, which should surround you when you write? Into that space, which is like a form of listening, of attention, will come the words, the words your characters will speak, ideas – inspiration.” (source)

As long as someone with a Mercedes has a better social standing than a university professor, as long as books are still very expensive in some parts of the world, as long as tv is the “new” medium for those who have been without such entertainment for a long time, as long as the old generation will still mistake LOLcats & Jackass videos on YouTube for the new digital world order – as long as these conditions persist – blogs will fill in the gap where publishers have just failed in the past, wikis will do what encyclopaedias have failed to deliver and multimedia online will provide what many controlled institutions are trying to hide from the masses.

will work 4 bandwidth

I’ve said it before: the moment, bandwidth becomes available at reasonable rates in Kenya, I – and I guess a lot of other KenyaTourists (KTs) – will resettle to Kenya. Ama?

“The entry of the cable is expected to cut bandwidth costs, currently standing between $6,500 (Sh435,500) and $7,500 (Sh502, 500) per megabyte to around $400 (Sh26,800) per megabyte.” ??? (src)

Seriously, with this initiative by the WB / GoK to subsidise broadband costs in Kenya for the Business Processing and Outsourcing (BPO) Sector, let’s hope that things are improving a little bit faster and that it will help to create a healthy competition within the Kenyan ICT sector + enabling them to compete with other regional players.
If you’re already on broadband, you may be interested in this video where the CEO of Kencall, Nicholas Nesbitt, talks about the relatively high monthly costs of running a call center in Kenya today. Other videos on regional players (aka the competition) are available here.

Imho, it will eventually come down to a few big players who are a) able to afford all these membership fees to this and that political lobbying group, b) able to afford 24/7/365 power supply to their machines and c) able to afford a serious admin team who will make use of *secure* software so that business doesn’t stall just because someone distributed a virus or other malware.

However, the following quote from the above mentioned article really impressed me the most:

To ensure more Kenyans access the digitized services easily, the government is also facilitating installation of Digital Villages countrywide.

This will save citizens the agony of traveling to urban centres to access the online government services and encourage growth of the sector.

To me, this is exactly what people like Prof Ayittey are trying to explain: helping the “Atingas” to promote their business in rural areas as they are the ones who contribute the biggest part to the economy.
And for me, as an environmenatlist/marketing guy for proper sanitation facilities, anything that helps to reduce urbanisation (= by creating local incentives, even if it’s the availability of enough bandwidth in rural areas) is the right approach to promote growth in rural areas. We urgently have to create a good framework for the next generation so that they want to stay in their home area.

On another note: what happens to the Raila/Kibaki virus once the elections are over? Is there any expiry date on them? :-D

linking policies and copyright issues

…UNICEF says on their legal page:

If you would like to link to UNICEF’s web site, we ask you to agree to the following, and contact us (choose subject ‘Permission to link’ in the dropdown menu) to let us know for our records. You may link to the homepage or to a deep content page.

Yeah, right. You want me to contact you whenever I am linking to your site? What about search engines, linking to such sites that require prior contact to the site admin?

BoingBoing has another, much better approach on its policies page:

Boing Boing has a linking policy.
After years of making fun of “linking policies” that set out the terms under which a website can be linked to, Boing Boing has decided to create a linking policy of our own. Here it is — now, abide by it!

Boing Boing doesn’t believe in linking policies. They’re dangerous, have no basis in law, and they break the norms that make the Web possible. They’re a wicked, stupid idea.

That said, if you believe in linking policies — that is, if you believe that people who make websites should be able to control who links to those sites and how — then have we got a policy for you:

No site with a linking policy (other than a policy such as this one, created to deride and undermine the idea of linking policies) may link to Boing Boing. Ever.

I like that.

The real problem seems to be that most organisations, institutions, companies, etc a) do not have the capacity to understand the Web, b) employ legal advisers who hardly ever have to deal with Web-related disclaimers or copyright issues for online content and c) – unfortunately – often haven’t even heard of something like the CreativeCommons licencing tools.

My experience is that most authors of online content aren’t even aware of these licencing tools, and – if in doubt – leave it to their legal team (if any) who just put everything under the “all rights reserved” label. That’s just very frustrating!

My question: is there any *official* disclaimer for web pages (linking policies, etc.) that’s just as convenient to use as the (CC) tools & provides this free and open approach as seen on the BoingBoing page?

Today is World Toilet Day

…and I will update this entry once I’ve figured out what to write for my new side project:

http://saniblog.org – the world’s first blog on sanitation!

Karibuni! :-)

Update: Hello World! …seriously, there’s nothing much to add. I really hope to move any future content on sanitation on this external blog and will also try to attract other authors on that site. You know, I am also active on a mailing list which deals with ecological sanitation – and many of the participants are scientist. Which is why most conversations are only related to scientific matters. Interesting, yes, but still a closed group. Who would want to talk about sanitation all day long? People talk about IT on lists like Skunkworks KE, because computers are interesting. And this although they are somewhat expensive and often just a beautiful waste of time :-). And sanitation? Everyone has to go to toilet – but just so few talk about >toilets< in general. Did you know there are over 950 results when you do a Flickr groups search on “toilet”?

So, obviously, there’s a place for this – and the internet being an ideal place for conversations, why not lifting this stigmatized niche to a better platform through the use of modern conversation tools such as blogs? Sanitation to me isn’t only about providing basic toilet facilities to some developing countries (sic!), but a matter that everyone will pay attention to on an almost daily basis. Flush toilets, based on water to flush away (transport) the faeces & urine into a sewage system, aren’t that ideal.

Matzerator
my favourite machine on the plant: a grinder pump that chops up all bigger pieces like Q-Tips, tampons, condom, hair and other stuff ppl keep on disposing through the toilet system. I used to clean this on a daily basis… (i was told the second day that gloves are available :-)

I’ve worked on a sewage treatment plant, put my hands where others wouldn’t even want to enter the room and quickly realized that this basic issue of proper sanitation does not necessarily depend on the smartest technical solution used (there’s no “one-fits-all”-solution), but instead only depends on what people want to use when relieving themselves. Sanitation is dignity. Not a slogan, but reality.

If saniblog.org helps to elevate the matter of sanitation from a closed group of scientists and their cryptic conversations onto a normal level where this matter could raise more attention – heyyyy – that would be awesome!

Markets are conversations. And sanitation is a huuuuuuge market!

mobile blogging, part 2

Mobile blogging…as in blogging directly from the phone or another portable device other than notebooks. Why would someone want to blog from a phone?

Well, computers in the form of desktop personal computers or laptops are still expensive. Despite of relatively high initital costs, an uncertain power supply and restricted internet access not only in “underdeveloped” countries for conventional computers, interesting stories are often best caught through the use of mobile devices. Another very important reason is that many consumers today are using mobile phones as the mobile phone sector is a fast growing market. We do not necessarily need to have a look at the unstable political situation in a country like Burma/Myanmar to understand the importance of being able to directly post content to the internet through a mobile device – but it serves as a good example to illustrate what should be possible with todays technology.

Obviously, the process of mobile blogging may be split up into a) the creation of content/media and b) uploading everything to a website/database on the internet.

As mentioned in my previous post on this subject, I initially assumed that it would all depend on the right gadget.
An advanced smartphone with a dedicated QWERTY keyboard does of course add comfort to the process of entering longer text, but it isn’t necessary to use one in order to get your stuff online. Hence it comes down to the right software solution on both the phone and online.

Another interesting observation is that manufacturers of mobile phones have in the past often only put an emphasis on giving users the ability to pull content from internet to their phone. Apple’s iPhone is a very good example for this as it comes with a media player which plays YouTube videos and a flexible browser which even display the URL. But also other phone manufacturers like the big players Nokia and SonyEricsson implemented RSS-capable browsers into their phones that automatically pull the required content from the internet without any computer in between. Now compare that with other mobile multimedia devices such as an iPod or a Creative mp3 player, which in the past always required a computer in between to synchronize content. With todays mobile phones, you can directly pull content from the net via GPRS, EDGE, UMTS or WiFi. Sexy.

The internet, though, and especially the Web 2.0 approach online lives from user generated content. I think that the use of the internet through a mobile platform will become more and more important in future, especially since mobile phones have become the leading platform for IT in developing countries.

And this upcoming development where we’ll see global players like Google distributing a sound software solution which combines and contains all these different services (telephony, messaging, streaming of multimedia content and uploading it to a site online) is reason enough to believe that we’re just at the very beginning of mobile services. Especially those that are I) easy to use (~usability) and II) don’t cost anything extra to the user – because he’s the one who creates content. Mobile phone operators seem to have understood that so far, which is why everyone wants to jump on the train of providing the right platform for content generation.

Anyways, I promised to deliver a small – not complete – overview of decent phones that already add some comfort for compiling mobile blog post. If you think there’s any phone that should be part of this list, pls feel free to drop a comment below. Thank You!

Ok, let’s start with Nokia ‘s range of phones:

1. Nokia N95

nokia N95

Since I am using this phone, I can acknowledge that it’s a great phone with a good camera but lousy built quality (compared to other slider phones), a slow camera (autofocus), weak battery runtime, chronical shortages of RAM which limits true multitasking and a simple T9 keypad – which of course doesn’t offer the same comfort as a QWERTY keyboard. However, since it is one of Nokia’s flagships and just offers a wide range of services at once, I included it here in this list. The N95 also connects to Nokia’s SU-8W bluetooth keyboard:

SU-8W

The downside to this external solution? Relatively small keys, a bluetooth connection that will further drain the battery on your phone and a huge price of at least EUR 100,-. That’s a lot of mbeca just for a keyboard.

The new N95 8GB version (N95-3) as well as the improved version for the US-market (N95-2) come with an improved battery and more RAM and some other minor changes that don’t affect its blogging capabilities.

2. Nokia E90

E90

Woooohaaaa! Expensive, bulky and a little bit buggy, which is why Nokia took it from the market for some weeks. Since it’s also based on the Symbian S60 platform (as opposed to the previous “Communicator” models which were based on Symbian S80 platform), it also runs the same programs as other S60 3rd edition phones. Comes with a sweet QWERTY keyboard (as pictured above), 3,2mpix cam (which is ok), two displays (!) and average battery runtime.

3. Nokia E70

nokia e70 silber

 

Fellow blogger Kirima is using such a phone for surfing the inet from his rural home. I like this phone, even the previous models that came with a foldable keyboard like this one were nice (although they are known to be having some software issues…).

4. Nokia E61/61i/62

b146174

Sigh. The E61 (no camera, joystick instead of joypad) and the E61i/62 are very nice for mobile blogging. Especially the above pictured E61i which comes with an average 2mpix cam and a perfect QWERTY keyboard as well as the whole connection range of GPRS up to WiFi. VoIP included. Sweet!

5. Nokia E51
P200710221455597981427318

Best Nokia release imho. A small, brick-styled (candy bar) business smartphone with a 2mpix cam, the S60 platform and VoIP capabilities. This phone will sell quite well, I think, despite of its humble appearance. Comes with a T9 keypad.

6. Nokia N93/93i

nokia N93i

I played with the N93 and the N93i in a shop last weekend, and while N93 is still better than the N93i, both phones are actually only good at recording videos because of their stereo microphones (important fact) and extremely good lenses + optical zoom. No QWERTY keyboard although of course you can also connect the above mentioned bluetooth keyboard.

7. Apple’s iPhone

iphone bastel anleitung

…delivered to you as a printable cut&glue version (pdf), because that’s the best way to handle this design object. :-)

Seriously, the iPhone is a great innovation and comes with a VERY unique user interface. It lacks a few features that other phones have but has its own market and will therefore be just as good as other phones. I like the iPhone although I’ve figured out for me that it does not have what I need in a phone.

No exchangeabooool battery, no keypad or keyboard = no tactil feedback while pressing the virtual keys on the display, no MMS (not really needed if e-mail is used instead), lousy camera. I think the iPhone is good for WiFi environments – so if you’re in the USA and hopping from one Starbucks WiFi hotspot to the next – then this is your phone.

Have to ask fellow bloggers Christian and Erik on their mobile blogging experiences. And what about the iPhone that was on display @ Skunkworks Kenya earlier this week ?

8. SonyEricsson K800i

46654

SonyEricsson’s sweetest phone ever (except for the T39m, yes :-)!
Comes with a nasty little joystick that often tends to retire within the first three months, but satisfies its user with a very decent 3,2 mpix cam and the best T9 keypad from SE ever. Included in this list because I see many ppl using this phone as a camera and music player. Actually had plans of buying this as a substitute to my N95.
The K800i comes, like most other new SE phones, with a little program that enables direct uploads to blogger.com (= Google). More on this later (part 3) as Nokia also supports the “blogging” platforms offered by Yahoo!.

Hmmm….SonyEricsson => Google and Nokia = > Yahoo! ??

9. SonyEricsson P1i

sony ericsson p1i

The SE P9i comes with a full QWERTY keyboard, a 3,2 mpix cam, WiFi and a stylus similar to those found on Windows Mobile phones.

10. SonyEricsson M600i

sony ericsson m600i

Obviously, the M600i comes without a camera but with a QWERTY keyboard.

11. HTC phones….

This list will never be complete, and while I am just confused about which HTC phone I should add to this list (Aegeus, saidia mimi tafadhali…si i hear u r back online anyways :-), I will update this post during the next few days and even deliver a part 3 which will cover the other side of the game: the software solutions that make mobile blogging possible.

Pls stay tuned!

this post does not fit into twitter, although..

…it isn’t that much longer than 140 characters.

Ok, enough with that IT humour. What’s really funny is that I just saved a link to an interesting story to my delicious account and forwarded it to a friend of mine at the other side of the globe – only to realize that he had already saved the same story 11 minutes ago on his delicious account.

AOB: a) I wish there was some sort of an iTagger plug-in for the “eZ-Publish” CMS. ; b) all tags on flickr/ipernity images – are they stored in an external index file, or rather within the meta section of the image file itself?

Seesmic

Seesmic (.com) – interesting new video platform with ads and, more importantly, an online editor. Broadband – here we come!

mobile blogging, part 1.5

As long as part 2 on mobile blogging is in the pipe (blogging…as in “publishing content online”), check out this story on the “Mobile Journalism Toolkit“.

An impressive setup with the right, self-made (!) add-ons to improve the N95’s performance. Now I only wish Nokia would improve the firmware on the N95-1 and even add some extras to the S60 browser.

(note to myself: i should become a journalist so that I can get my hands on fancy gadgets instead of saving my mbeca for these gimmicks..)