One big happy(ish) family

A few years ago I posted a comment on a friend’s blog (which sadly no longer exists) in which I remarked that the Kenyan Blogs Webring reminds me of a typical African extended family. Fluctuating from supportive to destructive, from connected to disjointed, from sane and united to crazy and dysfunctional. Those family members who always believe that there is someone in the family out to get them and thus they constantly whisper conspiracy theories while looking over their shoulders? Well KBW has them too. Luckily we have a lot of sane, sensible and funny family members too.

Every once in while I get reminded that some people have way too much time on their hands! In the past 12-18 months I have been slowly switching webhosting companies as I search for more reliable, personal and courteous service. The webhosting company I left was called BlueHost

and the webhosting company I now use is called A Small Orange.

(Some of you sharp ones will have figured out by now where this post is going!)

Bluehost’s primary colour is, naturally, blue. A Small Orange’s primary colour is, naturally, orange. Kibaki’s Party of National Unity primary colour is blue and Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement primary colour is orange. If this was not proof enough that I am Odinga’s number one fanboy, the mere fact that I choose a Webhosting company with the word orange in its name and now display a button with an orange is proof enough for some that mentalacrobatics.com is embedded within Odinga’s camp. Hehe.

People, sometimes a webhost is a webhost and not a declaration of political affiliation! Honest!

|  Email This Post | 7 comments Saturday, February 2nd, 2008 at 3:42 PM

Citizen Media - Kenyan Election 2007

A big thank you to all Kenyans both here at home and abroad who are blogging this election. Whether it is the live blogging of results or sharing your thoughts and fears it is good to hear so many voices. Thank you also to all of you who have left comments and sent emails over the election coverage on this blog or on something you may have read on KenyaUnlimited. Comments and interaction are an integral part of the blogging process; your efforts are also appreciated.

What we are doing is revolutionary in terms of local news coverage and in generating local web content; imagine the impact we will have on coverage of the 2012 election. There are a couple of reasons why this blogging effort is important:

• We are showing that citizen media is alive and well in Kenya.
• We are showing that Kenyans regard the Kenyan citizen media is a valid source of information.
• We are showing that citizen media can react and publish faster than the main stream media in Kenya.
• We are showing that you do not have to be “on the inside” within the ECK nerve centre at KICC or within a major media house to report on what is going on with the election with authority.
• We are showing that the internet is a valid tool for spreading and sharing information.
• We are showing that the Kenyan street is aware and articulate.
• We are creating local and original web content.

And perhaps most importantly (for our brothers and sister in the main stream media)

• We are showing that citizen media and the main stream media can not only co-exist but even compliment each other.

Now a call to arms literary rather than literally, if you have a blog write your thoughts about this election. Whether you are in Kenya or not, whether you are Kenyan or not. We need more voices from the wanainchi writing about their country. If you have left a comment or sent an email and do not have a blog, please start one. If you can send an email believe me you have enough technical skill to write and post a blog post. Register at WordPress.com for free and you’ll be on your way. Then register on the Kenyan Blogs Webring (KBW), which is also free, and you will have a wide readership from your first post.

This is very important for those of you who have asked me to remove certain KBW members from the webring or remove their posts from the KenyaUnlimited Aggregator as you do not agree with what they are saying. Many of you already have own blogs yet I notice that your own blogs are silent on the issues you raise with me. If someone writes something you disagree with by all means let your voice be heard as you present your counter view, and the best place to do this is on your own blog (which if you are a KBW member will appear on the same aggregator where the post you objected to appeared).

Finally, I have been getting many requests asking if you can reproduce the content on this blog in your newspapers, aggregators etc. Everything on my blog is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence.

This means you are free to:

• Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work
• Remix — to adapt the work

Under the following conditions:

• Attribution. You must attribute the work to me. A link to the original blog post with a line saying written by Mentalacrobatics or written by Daudi Were should be fine.

I think that is fair. You can read a short version of the license here or if you are very particular about these kinds of things you can read a full version here.

kenyaelection07

|  Email This Post | 3 comments Sunday, December 30th, 2007 at 10:24 AM

Global Voices

I have joined the Global Voices Advocacy team as one of the sub-Saharan reporters in their network of bloggers and online activists throughout the developing world that is dedicated to protecting freedom of expression and free access to information online.

I have also joined Global Voices as one of the sub-Saharan reporters. My focus on Global Voices will be to highlight blogs, bloggers and blogposts which cover any human rights issues in Sub-Saharan Africa.
In effect I am a foot solider under the joint command of two of the most engaging bloggers out there, Sami, Head of Advocacy at Global Voices, and Ndesanjo, the Sub-Saharan editor at Global Voices!

Global Voices Advocacy …
… seeks to build a global anti-censorship network of bloggers and online activists throughout the developing world that is dedicated to protecting freedom of expression and free access to information online. The aim of this network is to raise the awareness of online freedom of speech issues and to share tools and tactics with activists and bloggers facing similar situations in different parts of the globe. The network is meant not only to provide support to its members, but also to produce educational guides about anonymous blogging, anti-censorship campaigns, and online organizing. By collaborating with software developers, activists, and bloggers, the network hopes to design new and more appropriate tools to protect our rights on the Internet.

Global Voices aims to

1. Call attention to the most interesting conversations and perspectives emerging from citizens’ media around the world by linking to text, photos, podcasts, video and other forms of grassroots citizens’ media being produced by people around the world.
2. Facilitate the emergence of new citizens’ voices through training, online tutorials, and publicizing the ways in which open-source and free tools can be used safely by people around the world to express themselves.
3. Advocate for freedom of expression around the world and to protect the rights of citizen journalists to report on events and opinions without fear of censorship or persecution.

If you come across or know of any blogger, blog, blogpost I should be aware of please let me know, I will be very grateful.

If you are interested in writing a regular round-up of Kenyan blogs for Global Voices, following in the footsteps of brilliant pioneers such as Mshairi and Afromusing, please get in touch with Ndesanjo.

|  Email This Post | 1 comment Tuesday, November 6th, 2007 at 2:07 PM

Who owns the African blogosphere?

Colonialists would often turn up at an African community and ask, “Who does that land belong to?” pointing to the vast fields around the village. Many times the reply from the villagers would be, “It does not belong to anyone.” The colonialists would then promptly set about fencing and craving up the land amongst themselves, which would enrage the Africans, which, in turn, would confuse the colonialists as, after all, they had been told that this land did not belong to anyone.

These exchanges highlight the differences in the cultures involved and the different understandings of what initially looks like a very simple situation. When the Africans tell the colonialists that this land does not belong to anybody, the colonialists would take that to mean that the land is unoccupied. “It does not belong to anyone” is taken to mean it is ownerless. That was a misunderstanding of what they had been told. For when the African said, “This land does not belong to anyone”, what they mean is this land does not belong to any single person or family. This land is the property of the community under the stewardship of those who currently occupy it. The Elesi of Odogbolu, a Nigerian chief, told the West African land commission in 1912, that he “conceived that land belongs to a vast family of which many are dead, few are living and countless yet unborn”. In other words, “this land does not belong to anyone” meant this land belongs to everyone. It is occupied by us, but we do not own it, we are merely the current stewards holding it for future generations.

In my talk during the Digital Citizen Indaba I touched upon the issue of the African blogosphere and ownership asking, “Who owns the African blogosphere”? I used the above example of our ancestors’ attitude to land as the basis of my understanding. In my opinion the internet is a space through which discussion takes place and blogs are the tool through which we utilise that space for discussion. In other words this space we have carved on the internet is our land and bloggers are the occupiers of that land. Like our ancestors I believe that this land does not belong to any of us, it belongs to all of us.

Why is this important? First of all this space belonging to all of us means that there is room for all of us and for all our opinions in that space and we all have an equal right to it. For example those who feel unrepresented in the main stream media can use this space to get their message across. Those who feel left out of the national conversation can use this space to get their message across. Ndesanjo in his keynote address emphasised this highlighting that several Africans who happen to be gay had used this space to express themselves through blogs, several Africans who happen to be white or of Asian origin had used this space to express themselves through their blogs.

Another example, last year during the time of the first DCI there was a passionate, and at times, heated debate about whether a blogging conference organised largely by South Africans, who happened to be white, and held at a university named after Rhodes, had the right to call itself African. I felt then as I do now that, yes, they had the right to call it a conference of African bloggers. I feel no one has the right to stop other bloggers from organising themselves in a way they feel fit. Once you start putting restrictions on how bloggers organise themselves then you are on the slippery slope that ends up with putting restrictions on what bloggers can write about. For if you think that these guys do not have the right to organise a conference for African bloggers do they have the right to write about African bloggers or as African bloggers?

I should clarify the difference between those who objected to the content of the conference and those who object to the very notion of the conference. The DCI crew never claimed to be organising a perfect conference and gave us the opportunity to give our feedback on what they did right and what they could do better. This year you can see they took the suggestions on board. A big issue last year was the DCI venue did not have wireless internet access, this year we had wireless internet access. Last year we raised the issue of representation amongst the speakers in terms of geographical location and content. This year we have spent a lot of time examining the role of language which was led by Tanzanian bloggers with their central role in the Kiswahili blogosphere. We also looked at cyber activism is Ethiopia and Zimbabwe as well v-blogging, photo-blogging and open source. Space to give feedback and raise issues about the content of a conference should always be available. Feedback I have no problem with. What I object to is those who feel that the conference itself had no right to exist in any form.

That is not to say that all bloggers must agree with all other bloggers all the time or even most of the time. In fact we do not have to agree at all! I hope that having disagreements and differences of opinion does not mean we can not sit down together at the end of the debate and appreciate each other. But if that is not the case, the good thing about this space we are carving on the internet is that it is basically limitless. If you do not like the way people are doing things you can start your own thing. Just do not try to stop people from doing what they are doing by placing artificial restrictions based on your opinion of what is and isn’t for they have as much right to this space as you do.

digital citizen indaba | highway africa

|  Email This Post | 9 comments Tuesday, September 11th, 2007 at 11:52 AM

Digital Citizen Indaba 2007

The second Digital Citizen Indaba is in full swing at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa. The conference was opened by Professor Banda who welcomed us to the DCI. Then Global Voices sub Saharan editor, Swahili blogosphere pioneer, Tanzanian blogosphere pioneer, and KBW member Ndesanjo Macha got things moving with his Keynote Address.

I spoke with on the Democratization of the Digital Citizen in the morning session on Fractured Identities. I shared the floor with my Tanzanian brother Ansbert Ngurumo. Our panel was chaired by Professor Guy Berger.

Check out the DCI wiki which is updated regularly throughout the day for a summary of all the talks, the DCI flickr stream for evidence that bloggers are the best looking people around!

digital citizen indaba

|  Email This Post | 2 comments Sunday, September 9th, 2007 at 1:54 PM

8 Things

My Scandinavian connection, Serina, tagged me and precedent dictates I respond! Besides she is a Rising Voices buddy so how could I not eh? There can not be much left unknown about me that is of interest to the wider world so let me hit you with 8 random things loosely related to Kenyan blogs. Now this started out as a simple list and has instead grown into a long post. Let this serve as a lesson for those who dare tag me! Hehe.

But first I have to post The rules:

1. We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
2. Players start with 8 random facts/habits about themselves.
3. People who are tagged need to write their own blog and their 8 things and post these.
4. At the end of your blog post, you need to choose 8 people to get tagged and list their names (scared yet…..you better be!)
   Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they are tagged, and to read your blog.

And my list of 8 things:

1.) KenyaUnlimited is rocking a brand new spanking aggregator. Have a look and let me know what you think, how fast it loads where you are, and any problems you may encounter. I am especially interested on those who’s posts should up on the old aggregator but do not show up on this one.

2.) Related to number 1 above, KenyaUnlimited has a new aggregator help page. If you have any questions about the aggregator and aggregator policy, please read the help page. We have answered the most frequent questions we receive about the aggregator on this page. If you still have any questions drop the Admin Team an email.

3.) Facebook rocks! There is a group for Kenyan Bloggers on facebook. Other notable Facebook groups include the Afrigadget group and the Free Oiwan Lam group amongst others.

4.) The Digital Citizen Indaba blogging conference is on again at the Highway Africa Conference this year. Registration is open and it is free. You can also apply for a scholarship to attend. (Warning: this conference may actually require you to think and participate.)

Coming soon to a town near you an African Bloggers’ Conference and a Kenyan Bloggers’ Conference. Watch this space and get involved! Ask not what bloggers can do for you but what you … etc etc

6.) I feel like registering a group called the “Do More Collective” (DMC). Increasingly I hear Africans telling other Africans, to get up and, “do something”. I admit even I have been guilty of that. I feel that is wrong and here is why.

In the online world in general and the blogosphere in particular, just as in the real world, there are people who get up and decide to contribute and get on with it without a fuss. Because of their nature they end up taking more and more on and usually excel. This is not new, if I think back to my school days, my sports captains were usually amongst the brightest students, and were usually also prefects and probably sang in the choir and headed the school community projects as well. The Americans have a term to describe these characters: All Stars.

I find that instead of asking people to, “Do something”, to be fair I should recognise that they are already doing a lot and instead should be asking them to, “Do more.” Take the example of my brother Ndesanjo. This guy is the force behind the Kiswahili blogosphere starting it AND putting it on the map in a big way, he is also is pushing the Kiswahili Wikipedia, is Sub-Saharan editor of Global Voices, was one of the wise heads that formulated the Tanzanian Bloggers Association, is passionate about citizen media and developing tools to allow people to share their stories and still finds time to run his own collection of blogs (and I haven’t even mentioned his “real” 9-5 job).

It is ridiculous to walk up to someone like that and to tell him to “do something” what you really should be saying is, “we need your help to do more!” I am sure this is true of many of us online and I have many more examples I can throw at you.

We need to recognise that even though someone way not be working on our pet project or on what we may personally feel is THE most important thing around, they are probably already contributing in a big way to the empowerment of The Continent and Her People. Forget asking people to, “Do something” instead ask them to “Do more”.

7.) Since I moved back to Kenya a year ago the number of people reading my blog has gone up, but the number of comments has gone down. That in itself is not news. What is interesting is that some people who used to write comments before now send me SMS instead. They SMS within minutes of a post going up on the blog. I would say around 80% of the comments on my blog posts come via SMS. The Skunkworks team at the University of Nairobi Tech Day reported that a programmer was developing software to blog (and I guess comment) through SMS. Now that’s what I need! I tried the Email2SMS service by Safaricom but that died after a few days.

8.) The number one question I get asked by new bloggers is: How do I get more comments?

The easy answer:

1. Write original, good, content
2. Visit other bloggers and leave original and intelligent comments
3. Link to other blog posts in your posts
4. Use tags to get picked up by blog engines such as Technorati.
5. Be patient, it takes time to build up an audience

The less obvious answer:

Do your thing. Write your posts. Make your blog a reflection of you. Forget chasing comments. They are not a true indication of how popular, how widely read or how influential your blog really is. For example, if the first five comments on your blog are

1. I got here first
2. Damn I got here second
3. Boy oh boy number 1 and number 2 are fast, how did they get here first
4. hehe fast rhymes with first - written by number 3 above
5. I swear I was first but blogger ate my comment

And no one has commented on what you actually wrote or what issues you raised in the post, how do those comments add value to the price of oranges really? OK sure some people love getting those comments and it can be said they add to the sense of community, sure. But really, you should be chasing after those. However, this after all is my opinion.

At the other end of the scale check out Ethan’s excellent guides/blog posts/transcripts of the TED Global conference. Every blogger, journalist, columnist, researcher who writes about TED Global consult Ethan’s posts. They are an authoritative, well written, accessible online resource. Because so many bloggers link back to his blog, these posts are essentially the blogger equivalent of a peer reviewed professional article in a professional journal. Yet the posts do not carry a ridiculous amount of comments. The posts do carry a lot of influence though.

Forget chasing comments. Do your thing. Free your mind!

|  Email This Post | 11 comments Friday, July 27th, 2007 at 12:20 PM

KBW - 3 years old - The Year of Emergence

In the early morning hours of the 5th of July 2004 the Kenyan Blogs Webring was born. Today we are three years old. Happy birthday KBW! It seems like only yesterday that I was sitting down to write the post celebrating our second birthday. Time flies when you are having fun!

Thank you to all KBW members for making this one of the most vibrant online communities on the internet. As always it has been an amazing experience.

The Year of Emergence

Emerge: become known or apparent;

The emergence of Kenyans built for blogging

When I think back over the last 12 months what I notice is that this year has been a year of emergence for KBW and her members. If you will forgive the farmer in me for a moment, in our first two years we were finding our feet, exploring this blogging thing, figuring out if we wanted to do it or not, we were germinating.

The most frequent support question we would be asked in the Admin Team during the first two years was, “Why should I start a blog?” or “What is a blog?” or variations on that theme.

In the last year we mainly get asked, “I have a blog, how do I join the webring?” or “How do I get your aggregator to syndicate my content?” or variations on that theme. They “why” and “what” questions are decreasing, the “how” questions are increasing.

That is a good sign and KBW members have played a big role in convincing Kenyans to blog. These days when someone asks me why they should blog I simply point them to the KenyaUnlimited aggregator. I can almost guarantee you that they will read something that they either agree with whole heartedly or disagree with completely, that fuels an urge in them to get to a keyboard and start typing to contribute to the debate.

In this way we have emerged from within ourselves. Where else will you find a community composed of Maasai Market traders, IT geeks, undergraduates, pastors, self styled “sex therapists”, financial journalists, university professors, professional sports players, political commentators, rural farmers, many times many of these all rolled into one person?!!

Emergence within KBW - Internal

This is where we crunch the numbers.

• In our first year we signed up: 69 members – for a total of 69 members
• In our second year we signed up: 171 – for a total of 240 members
• In our third year we signed up: 293 members – for a total of 464 members

293 new members. Remember this is not a web forum where we have one central site where each member writes a sentence here or a sentence here. These are bloggers, generating new and unique content (in the most part) every single time they write. 293 new people giving us their unique insight on the issues they feel are important, in the way they want. You are effectively talking, in web 1.0 terms, of 293 new webmasters and web content editors joined together in a single community. Now those are numbers to be proud of. This has been achieved without a single penny spent on advertising; the only emails we send out as KBW are to bloggers who are already members.

However what is increasingly clear is that the majority of these new members had heard about KBW either through word of mouth, through reading a KBW member or simply by bumping into us online. Many start a blog so they can join KBW rather than joining KBW because they already had a blog.

If this rate of growth continues soon we will be signing up more than 400 bloggers a year, that is over a blog a day!

On the technical side, we have moved from an ordinary shared hosting account, to a more advance shared hosting account, to our own VPS, and soon to our own full fledged dedicate server.

KBW in the world - External emergence

This past year has also been marked by KBW and KBW bloggers being recognised outside our own community and emerging as leaders in some of the most interesting projects that use web 2.0 Here are some examples of this:

1. KenyaUnlimited was Kenyan’s ambassador on Blog Day 2006.
2. KenyaUnlimited was nominated as a Finalist in the 2006 Black Weblog Awards.
3. At the Digital Indaba held at Rhodes University, South Africa KBW was frequently mentioned as an example of bloggers organising themselves into a online community.
4. At the Global Voices Summit 2006 in Delhi, India, KBW was again highlighted as an example of how to organise a blogging community.
5. At TED Global again the importance of the KBW to the African blogosphere was frequently mentioned and clear to see and on and on.
6. Three dedicated women, KBW Admin members Mshairi and Kui led by KBW member Sokari are the forces behind the African Womens’ Bloggers website and webring.
7. KBW members, lead by the indefatigable White African, together with JKE and Afromusing are pushing AfriGadget to amazing new heights.
8. The most radical, innovating forces in ICT in Kenya a.k.a the geekosphere a.k.a Skunkworks-KE are active members of KBW.
9. The Kenyan main stream media, while still feeling threatened by blogs (why??!!), are beginning to understand that ignoring us is a mistake, ironically the main stream media outside Kenya can not seem to get enough of Kenyan bloggers.
10. ICT magazines within Kenya have started carrying regular blogging columns for example KBW member Al Kags’ regular column in ICT Village magazine.

I could go on for hours about this, The Year of Emergence.

Remembrance

As we shared good times, as mentioned above, in these past 12 months we have also shared some sad times, in August we learnt that Kachumbari author of Kenyan Villager had passed on. As the tribute to Kachumbari on KenyaUnlimited reads, “Gone for now but forever a member of the KBW family, Kachumbari’s presence shall be missed.”

The Kenyan blogging community through the Pamoja blog on KenyaUnlimited led the online tributes for the victims of Flight KQ507.

KBW in the community

Sylkwan has used her blog to mobilise resources for St. Francis Children’s home in Karen/Langata, Nairobi and JKE has done the same for The Nest children’s home in Limuru. In the past 12 months I have been lucky enough to visit both homes in the company of other KBW members and it is fantastic to see what positive change a few individuals can make when they decide to take a stand. The staff at St. Francis and The Nest are an example to us all.

Challenges

As many of you know KBW and KenyaUnlimited are run by a team of three volunteers. This year, in many ways, we have been victims of KBW’s success. As more and more bloggers sign up and join the webring we spend the vast majority of our KBW time dealing with support questions and various sign up queries. It is not unusual for KBW Admin Team members to spend 2 hours a day everyday of the week dealing with various support queries. Then take into consideration that the three of us have full time jobs, are located in three different countries and in three different timezones! While the primary task of the Admin Team is to provide this support and we enjoy it (in the most part) we have noticed that other KBW projects, especially those which are manpower heavy have suffered.

For example, last year it took a team of 6 of us to run the Kaybees. Towards the end of the process four of us basically gave two full days to counting and verifying the nominations and counting and verifying the final votes, sometimes roping in boyfriends and girlfriends to help with spreadsheets! LOL. The main, in fact the only, reason we have not held the Kaybees this year yet is because we understand immediately that we would be spread too thin with the team as it stands. This has also extended to other KBW projects such as Kenyan Bloggers’ Day.

In the past we have expanded the Admin Team by sending out invitations to one or two bloggers. This time we have decided to do something different and instead send out an invitation to all of you! We shall soon be advertising Admin Team positions on KenyaUnlimited. If you are a member of KBW and want to contribute back to the blogging community, want to get involved in some interesting and innovating projects, like helping people and are dedicated we would be grateful to hear from you. Watch this space and the Admin Team blog as we shall soon be putting up a profile of what we are looking for and what you can expect as a member of the Admin Team.

Finally

KBW members – thank you!
Non KBW Kenyan bloggers – join us!
KBW supporters - members or not, especially those from far and wide who are always ready to lend a hand, share advice and are constantly encouraging us, thank you. An extra big shout out to the Global Voices crew, from php and cron jobs code, to translations, to moral support we owe you big!

Thanks

PS/ You would think that having had a year to prepare I would have started writing this post in good time instead of 2pm Nairobi time on the bleeding day eh! Any typos, missing links (no not that one), broken links please let me know!

|  Email This Post | 12 comments Thursday, July 5th, 2007 at 7:01 PM

African bloggers in the US press

Shashank Bengali the African correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers has written an article on the African blogosphere for his newspaper group. An edited version of the story was carried by the Miami Herald today. Shashank also runs a blog called “Somewhere in Africa” which is full of interesting read such as this post on the blogger/skunker/techie/TEDster/nyama choma lovers/penguins* meet up on Madaraka Day3 weeks ago.

(*Ask Riyaz about the penguins)

Aside: It is hard not to laugh nervously when a professional photographer is taking your mugshot in one of your regular cyber cafes! That may (or may not) explain why I look strange in the photo!

|  Email This Post | 5 comments Sunday, June 24th, 2007 at 9:50 PM

In defence of bloggers - the ultimate primary source

Thinker reminds us that …

Blogs, email and text messages, while lending themselves to informing, also lend themselves to abuse.

… in his post that argues it is irresponsible for us to report the blast in Nairobi as bomb or indeed suicide bomb unless we have official confirmation from the police. Agreed, it would be irresponsible for us to report the blast without checking the sources of the stories.

When I first heard the story on local radio stations I turned to Reuters which is a reliable news outlet and generally has an impeccable record as far as the accuracy of its reporting goes.

Reuters report now reads (bear in mind these reports are constantly updated):

A senior policeman at the scene said the explosion, which also left a mangled corpse in the street and sent passers-by flying through the air, seemed to be a suicide bombing.

My own blog post on the topic is full of qualifiers, apparently this, apparently that. I even put a paragraph at the end of the post cautioning that this is all speculation at the moment as we await the facts.

A quick look at the KenyaUnlimited Aggregator shows many other Kenyan bloggers qualified their reporting too.

Let me bring in another angle. The most common complaint I have heard today from Kenyans abroad is that the the Daily Nation and East African Standard websites had almost no information for a long while. The most frequently updated Kenyan news website these days is the KBC website, however earlier this morning when I checked it was down.

I would argue that it is stories like this that rather than showing the danger of blogs, HIGHLIGHT the importance of blogs and other citizen media. While the MSM was stuck in its procedures, bloggers wrote about what they had heard, seen or were told. There is nothing wrong with quoting primary sources. The historians amongst us can confirm the importance with which primary sources are regarded on any historical event. The eyewitness account, the man on the street as it were.

If you wanted to know what Kenyans were thinking and feeling at the time the blogs were a very good place to start.

As for waiting for an official police statement before commenting on this blast, to that I would ask: where is the lengthy police statement on the Mungiki crisis? Where is the lengthy police statement on the Mount Elgon clashes? Both were major incidents in the past month which claimed more lives that the blast this morning, yet we haven’t seen the same coordinated response to dishing out information as we have on this blast. Are we to await the official statement on those events as well before stepping in with our take on events? How long are you prepared to wait?

Isn’t it telling that Police Commissioner Hussein’s lengthy statement appears on the website of the Office of Government Spokesperson (OGS) and not on the Kenya Police website which carries a 3 sentence press release by the Police Spokesman?

Why would the OGS jump in on this story when Mungiki and Mount Elgon were much more serious events yet he restrained himself? I would argue it is because the OGS quickly realised that this was an international story which would generate interest from around the world.

Their intention was not to inform, their intention was damage control. I will agree with the Commish on one thing, however, in my opinion, the disaster management procedures worked well, after the initial shock everything seemed to click.

I firmly believe that the take up of the story by Kenyan bloggers helped generate this international interest. Don’t believe that bloggers have that much influence? Then explain why the “Blog Search button” is next to the “Advanced News Search” button on Google News or why Reuters has started featuring African bloggers prominently on its news site. In a round about way, the noise bloggers generated about this story is one of the reasons The Commish and the GOS rushed to get out that press release.

Hopefully if Kenyan bloggers keep the noise up on Mungiki, Mount Elgon et al and the Commish and the GOS will rush to release a lengthy press release on those stories as well.

|  Email This Post | 10 comments Monday, June 11th, 2007 at 11:42 PM

TEDGlobal and bloggers

In a CNN interview last year Emeka Okator, the programme director of TedGlobal 2007, was asked, “How do you shed light on the brighter side of Africa?”

He answered, “It’s coming from the bottom or primarily from the citizen media type, the bloggers, who are covering Africa to an extent it has never been covered before. There’s strong belief that the rest of the world will catch up as this process accelerates.”

Emeka understands the vital role that authentic, uncompromising, voices from Africa that are expressed through blogs play. Probably because he is a energetic blogger himself. It is wonderful that there is a healthy mix of bloggers amongst the TED Fellows. I’ll highlight the KBW members who are here apart from myself; Afromusing, Bankelele, Kenyan Pundit and White African. Ndesanjo is here as well running things on his home ground. Outside KBW Jea Brea and Andrew Heavens are here too.

There are couple of other Kenyan bloggers who have promised to send me their URLs and I will share them as soon as I get them. We also have a number of bloggers from other countries and I will do the same with the links.

KBW members let me assure that your blogs have a wider readership then you may imagine. I have met some people here that have never been to Africa before but read the KenyaUnlimited aggregator regularly. Many of the other Africans here talk about the power of the Kenyan blogs on the internet and are inspired to go out and start their own blogs and aggregator. Perhaps we should look out for NigeriaUnlimited, MaliUnlimited, etc soon!

At some point in the next few days we will sit down and brainstorm about the African Bloggers’ Conference. Please feel free to share any thoughts you have on this with us.

TEDGlobal2007 | TEDGlobal

|  Email This Post | Add comment Tuesday, June 5th, 2007 at 1:41 AM

A tale of two children’s homes

In line with what is now a Mentalacrobatics tradition my submission to Kenyan Bloggers’ Day is a podcast. This one is called “A tale of two children’s homes”.

 

 A Tale of Two Children's Homes [5:20m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

For more on the information on Kenyan Bloggers’ Day check out KenyaUnlimited.

For more information on The Nest Home check out their website.

As far as I am aware St Francis Children’s home does not have a website yet.

The bloggers mentioned are

Slykwan – St Francis Children’s Home
JKE – The Nest
White African
Afromusing
Ntwiga

(Apologies for the poor quality I was laughing because I had forgotten how ridiculous my voice sounds and had to do the whole thing in about 30mins with no editing time. I am also committing a cardinal sin in not listening to the whole broadcast before uploading it. I am pressed for time!)

|  Email This Post | 2 comments Monday, June 4th, 2007 at 4:09 PM

10 days to TEDGlobal

10 days to go before TEDGlobal kicks off and the anticipation is building like crazy. I’ll say this about these TED guys, they look like they sure know how to organise a conference. Well that’s easy to say 10 days before everything begins but if their organisation on the day is as good as it has been thus far then things will be great.

This conference is unlike any I have ever been to before in that I have no idea, absolutely NO IDEA, what kind of conference to expect. There is a wealth of information on the conference but it just highlights that I should expect the unexpected.

One thing I do know for sure is that I will be rooming with one crazy dude called Hash a.k.a White African. Now really it does not get any crazier than that. I wonder what TEDGlobal Program Director Emeka Okafor will do once he realises that he has put two techie and blogging members of the Front Row Union in the same room. (Hash, I hope you play tight head because, bruv, I’m a loose head!) If we don’t blow up something while trying to plug in all our gear into the one wall socket in the room, we’ll probably be busy forcing encouraging all kind of interesting people to talk to us. I notice that Yvonne Chaka Chaka has stopped organising her calendar to take in my conference dates instead Youssou N’Dour will be doing his thing.

Other KBWers who are representing are:

• Afromusing
• Bankelele
• Kenyan Pundit
• Ndesanjo

Any others out there (I’m sure they’ll be a couple attending chini ya maji a.k.a undercover)

I’ll post some more details on the proposed Madaraka Day (June 1st) KBW, Tedsters, Skunkworkers, techies, wanainchi, anybody, everybody meet up over the weekend. Come one, come all.

(Isn’t it interesting how many of the people who branded us traitors/sell outs/neo-colonial appeasists for going to the Digital Indaba in South Africa in September last year because it was “white” are happily gobbling up all that TEDGlobal can throw at them with not even a little sense of irony? Hmm the contradictions, the contradictions )

Tags: TEDGlobal

|  Email This Post | 7 comments Friday, May 25th, 2007 at 4:05 PM

7

I was tagged by some strong willed people, to ignore them would be dangerous, so here we go with 7 things. Not 7 things you do not know about me which would just be boring especially as I shared 6 things you do not know about me just the other day. So instead here we go with:

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.

|  Email This Post | 6 comments Wednesday, May 16th, 2007 at 1:35 PM

Bits and bobs

A Kikuyu, a Luhya and a Persian are standing outside Nakumatt Prestige at 8pm. Which one is selling popcorn, which one is eating popcorn, which one is watching?

I am an information junkie. I used to be one of those people with a million different email subscriptions flying into my email inbox each day. News lists, global security information lists, sports, technology, you name it I had it. One day last year I revolted and unsubscribed to all of them except two. Why? First of all it was information overload! Secondly the growth and wide availability of RSS feeds and other ways to get information means I no longer need to fill my email inbox to get the information I want. Now I am signed up to only two daily email lists on my main email account and both are vital reading and if you don’t have them you should get them!

One is The Global Voices daily digest (blogs) written by David Sasaki and his bunch of merry men and women. The other is The Fiver (football) written by a bunch of nutters in Fiver Towers. (OK I admit I do have one or two other weekly email subscriptions that such a pillar of society such as myself has no business reading, step forward Holy Moly!) What lists out there are worth a look.

So which RSS Feeds am I reading or do I think are worth reading, or do I feel I should be reading? All is revealed on the MentalGator. Yeah I noticed some of you noticing my site pulling your feeds and was bound to oust me before long so I might as well publicise it. It is quite small, I will try to keep it under 30 feeds, unlike the monster that is the KENYAUNLIMITED AGGREGATOR! It is rough around the edges, needs a serious css over haul and some options need changing but it will do for now. If this all works out then, I’ll change the software that powers the KenyaUnlimited aggregator to this one.

It’s been a while since I shook with laughter while reading a blog post but Greg Black got me laughing and holding my head at the same time while I was reading this.

The guys at Very Sawa Technology Studios are on to something with the launch of Jahazi. When you have White African, Kobia, JKE, and the Skunkworks crew all ooohing and ahhhing over one of your products its time to start thinking about an IPO.

And finally

KBW exists. And KBW exists primarily because its members want it to exist and contribute to help it exist in various ways, not because Mentalacrobatics started it or the KBW Admin Team helps sustain it, although those are factors as well. If KBW members do not want KBW to exist it will not. It really is a simple as that. That is why, at the end of the day, my opinion on each and every attack on KBW is not that important and why I will not comment on each and every blog post that mentions KBW negatively.

If KBW loses credibility then bloggers will simply leave KBW and no others will join. In the same way, if the Admin Team can not be trusted then KBW members will simply stop conferring with, contributing to and indeed trusting that Admin Team.

I can tell you honestly that when I fire up Thunderbird each morning the KBW admin email address is the most active of all the email addresses and of those messages new member registration and new members requesting assistance take up a healthy number. Do not take my word for it, look for yourself.

KBW does have its share of yahoos. What is healthy is that we all have different opinions on what constitutes a yahoo, and believe me I have my opinion as well. I can take the personal attacks, they stopped bothering me a long time. (When cartoons email your parents to inform them that their son is confusing the youth of Kenya on behalf of StateHouse and should be arrested – you learn to laugh at life – otherwise you can go mad).

This does raise interesting questions on the issue of ownership of the Kenyan blogosphere. Methinks I have just found the right topic for my next podcast.

I was talking last night with another veteran of Kenyan online communities and we were reflecting about the back-in-the-day days. If it is beef and “online war” you are after let me tell you right now KBW is the wrong place to look. We are but a bunch of amateurs.

In 1997 as an innocent 1st year undergrad I joined an online community called KenyaOnline. Walalala. VITA! This was just before the 1997 general election and I tell you MPs, aspiring MPs, their cronies, even MINISTERS (apparently writing anonymously – remind you of anything) were all throwing, what the KOL community called, online rungus at each other. I must admit I found it brilliant to start of with.

By the time 2002 had come along and those same wazee, wabunge and wamweshimwas were still throwing insults at each other it had become tiring. However things mellow out and KenyaOnline is still going strong in its current incarnation on yahoo groups.

Any of you who were around for the drama on mlevi.com, rcbown.com – remember when rcbowen was THE Kenyan page on the internet – if you weren’t in his guest book then you basically didn’t exist online – and even at the height of drama on mashada.com then you know that KBW is a relatively stable place and actually quite quiet in comparison.

There many who like to cultivate a them and us mentality about this whole online thing. The KBW Admin Team is always accessible, if you have any concerns then you know where to find us.

With our numbers growing and our membership diversifying, with the power or blogs increasing and recognition of bloggers growing day by day I am confident, as I always have been from that day 1 when I was the ONLY member of KBW, that this project that we are all involved in, is here to stay.

|  Email This Post | 3 comments Sunday, May 13th, 2007 at 5:53 PM

Reuters and African blogs

Reuters recent launched a new online Africa page. What I find most exciting about this is Reuters’ decision to include content from blogs on the country pages. So for example if you check out Reuters Kenya page today in addition to all the news stories you will see links to content from blogs as this picture shows (click on the picture to see a larger screen shot of the page):

Check out Ethan’s post and Rachel’s post for some background information and a wider commentary. As Ethan says and I agree, Reuters Africa team “gets it” on the importance of blogs.

Kenyan blogs are now getting featured regularly in the international media while the Kenyan main stream media drags its feet.

The blog posts, as can be seen by the screen shots, come from Global Voices. Yet another reason you should get involved with the Global Voices. The Global Voices sub Saharan editor, Ndesanjo, is looking for bloggers willing to do regular round ups on the Kenyan Blogosphere. Drop him a line at africa AT globalvoicesonline DOT org for more information on the requirements and commitment you’d be expected to make.

|  Email This Post | 1 comment Friday, March 9th, 2007 at 2:26 PM