Two key items primarily drive the user interface design for Maneno: low bandwidth and ease of use. Given that a great deal of the future target user base will be people who have spent very little time on the internet to date and probably less time blogging, having a system that is as straightforward to use as possible is quite critical.

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     While creating a simple manner in which to enter text for an article is pretty easy to do, images pose a much bigger problem. First, they're often large in file size. Secondly, getting them on the net can be a process of many steps involving uploading them to a site such as flickr, then linking to them, then seeing that the size is wrong, then having to code them, then hopefully getting it all right, eventually. We now have in a place a system that will hopefully make all of this a lot easier.

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     When writing a new article, you can choose to upload images from the same page and embed them in the post, all in one action. There are no page refreshes. This is no needing to be an HTML coding expert. The system automatically re-sizes everything to the proper width. You just choose your image, click submit, and once it arrives Maneno, you click to embed it. Naturally, this is all multilingual with the interface in the current eight languages of Maneno. It's also heavily cross-browser compatible and won't crash Firefox like other uploaders I've used will often do. There is a limit of five images per post though. We did this out of bandwidth considerations as well as space considerations. If this function becomes quite popular down the road, we'll look to expand the limits as is possible.

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     This is obviously a very new feature and it's doing things in a rather new way, so if you have any problems, please let us know. Otherwise, happy image uploading! EDIT >

It's been in the works for the last two months as we coordinated the translation work from the very adept Mr. Oumar Bah and now, we're happy to announce that the Fula language version is live on Maneno! It's the 'FUL' option at the top for those who may know the language via a different spelling, such as 'Peul' in French.

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     Fula (or Fulfulde as it is known in the language) is spoken primarily in West Africa with around 16 million speakers or so according to Wikipedia. Although, it is the case that the amount of speakers could be as high as 50 million, as a commenter mentioned below. Given the number of dialects and the spread of the language, hard, fast numbers are hard to come by, but it is generally assumed that the Wikipedia article is far too conservative in its total.

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     The amount of countries that this language is spoken in to at least some extent is massive (take a look to the left), which is why we're very happy to have it as a language interface option. We hope that there will be a far reach with this language as Oumar is extremely well-versed in the Fula language mechanics. He compiled the first Fula-French online dictionary, which he is also looking to publish.

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     If you look at this language version of Maneno, you can see that there are similar issues as with the Bambara version in that there are a a number of characters which are outside the typical ones in the extended Latin alphabet. These should all have native supported on the internet, but that can support can sometimes be lacking. Thankfully, due to the Bambara experience, this was much less of a problem this time around, although Internet Explorer 6 simply will not display these characters, so upgrade if you can.

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     Again, we thank Oumar for all his work as well as Claire Ulrich who worked to connect us with Oumar in the first place. EDIT >

We've had it up and running for some time now, but we're happy to officially state that the Bambara version of Maneno is now fully functional. This is all due to the ongoing work of Boukary Konate in Mali. He has toiled constantly on this version to make it work and we thank him a great deal for it.

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     It hasn't been easy to get this working. Earlier, we wrote about the problems in implementing this language interface. If it hadn't been for the SIL keyboard, it just wouldn't have been possible. And this is a shame really as there is no reason for this character set not to work.

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     One other nasty thing we discovered is that the Bambara characters simply will not work on version 6 of Internet Explorer. This is bad as around 20% of the Maneno traffic uses that browser and as Boukary found out, a great many of the computers in Bamako still use this browser that was originally released in 2001 and has been a kick in the face to web developers ever since. Explorer 7 and 8 are fine as are any versions of Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Safari. Leave it up to Microsoft to ruin the party...

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     If you happen to be visiting Bamako anytime soon, bring a new copy of Firefox to install anywhere you find a machine dragging along with IE6. It'll make life a lot easier from a linguistic point of view. Otherwise, take a look at the Bambara version of Maneno. Hopefully it will reach out to more native speakers of the language and open up access to get more of the language online as opposed to just French or English. EDIT >

Last year, when Maneno was in the early stages of planning, we had the pleasure of attending the Global Voices Citizen Media Summit 2008 in Budapest, Hungary. It was a glorious series of days talking and interacting with people from around the world who are heavily invested in citizen journalism in some form or another. While the topics were broad and many impressively stuck out, there were a number of comments from those involved in the translation efforts of Global Voices Lingua.

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     During the sessions, we had heard from people at Google who worked in the machine translation section, as well as other people working to make language translation an automated event. This is all well and good, but given the heuristics and methods we have currently, it is simply never as good as a human translator. To those representing these technology initiatives, the human translators raised the issue of, "Why is it that all new translation technology attempts to replace the human translator as opposed to augment what they do?"

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     If I recall, there wasn't too much said from the speakers, but my own personal reaction to this is that because a great deal of the technology is created in the United States, which is an inherently monolingual society, you get this general approach. Working between two, three, or even four languages on a daily basis is not a common occurrence, so it's beyond the horizons of most companies and developers in the country. Thus, the reason for attempting to bypass the problem with technology altogether as opposed to trying to improve the situation at hand.

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     Google does have some mighty useful tools though when taken in the frame of reference that they are machine translation and not to create entire translations. That being the case, we've made some large changes to our translation system on Maneno. A big, noticeable change is that we've streamlined the translation composition page even more. Those translators we heard talked about having a simple, side by side page where they can easily work on the translation. We've worked to make this possible and think that what we have is getting quite good, although we're always open to feedback on it.

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     The other noticeable change is the addition of what we're calling the 'Translation Assistant'. This is a very simple window you can open on the translation page that interacts directly with the Google Translate API. It's there in case trying to remember a couple of words from the source article is just not happening and a translator wants to do a quick lookup in the target language. The Assistant is not there for translating entire articles, but just as an aid to a human translator as it should be.

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     We were also working to embed Google's Translate Gadget as well. This would be in case you're viewing an article that is only in French, but maybe you only speak Swedish or Chinese. By using the Gadget, you'd then be able to get a better-than-nothing machine translation in to your language. The issue was that putting it on pages was confusing and took away from the whole purpose of our translation system, which is to make it easier to have human translators write proper translations of articles in order to link between the language sphere silos. The code is ready to go and we'd still like to include it, so if anyone has any feedback, leave a comment or contact us directly to give your thoughts on what you think would work best.

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     Otherwise, happy translating and we hope that these aids make the transition between languages an enjoyable one. EDIT >

We're happy to announce that we have now deployed a version of the Creative Commons license for use across Maneno. While all aspects of www.maneno.org are covered in the license, individual blogs have the choice of using the license or not which is controllable in the blog admin section for users who are logged in.

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     Let's back up a couple of steps though and talk about why this is important by first asking: What is Creative Commons? Creative Commons (or CC) is born of the "copy left" movement which means that they work to release broad copyright licenses focused more on providing replicable access to works as opposed to shutting them off to replication as previous copyright laws did. Basically, instead of having to write up a legal agreement for everything you do, you can apply a CC license based on how many rights you wish to retain and how many you wish to release. In a nutshell, these are licenses for the digital age where everything is infinitely reproducible.

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     These licenses are a great thing to come about, but they have a couple of problems which we are working with at Maneno and I talked about at the Creative Commons Salon. The first is the linguistic problem. As you can see, this license exists in a great many languages. We are working to have more translations based on the African languages that Maneno has available. That problem is the easy one and should be dealt with in time.

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     The bigger problem is that for these licenses to be enforceable, they have to have be legally ported for each country in the world as each country has different laws. Given this map, you can see the problem we face given the geographic focus of Maneno. With the exception of South Africa, there are no other countries in Sub-Saharan Africa with a CC agreement in place. So, technically there would seem to be no point in having these licenses on Maneno. Why did we do this then?

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     We did this to try and spread CC licenses to more languages so that not only do these languages have more traction on the internet, but so that CC also has more traction in these languages. We are hoping that this will then lead to the more important step of these licenses being ported to these countries. It's a chicken and egg problem wherein we're hoping that the more exposure Maneno gets in these countries, the more exposure CC will get, and both will gain a gradual foothold for the blogging communities of Sub-Saharan Africa.

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     The primary agreement we have deployed with links to the various translations of it is the Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported. We chose this license as it is a very protective one once implemented in a country. Also, as far as we know, specific country licenses supersede the unported version, so even though someone in say Zambia opts to use this license on their Maneno blog, their works are protected in a full legal sense in somewhere like the United States which has ported the license to the country properly. The license we chose is one of many options that CC offers. If people wish to choose others, let us know and we'll see what we can do to make this happen.

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     In the end, it's all about creating better access for Maneno bloggers to tools which should be shared globally. EDIT >

It has been some time since we posted our original Theme options for blogs on Maneno. Since then, we have gone back, looked at them, deleted the ones that weren't very good, and added a great number of new ones that we think are a lot of fun. You can view them all on the Themes page and change the option for a blog by clicking on 'Your Blogs' in the admin menu.

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     As you will note, we chose names that have a meaning in different languages, mostly African languages. Here's a quick explanation as to what these all mean:

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     Baobab is a very distinctive type of tree that is native to Africa, found particularly in Madagascar and that was made famous by the book The little prince.

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     Bozinga is the color 'blue' in Lingala and is a simple, blue theme.

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     Inyoni means 'bird' in Zulu.

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     Lejos means 'far away' in Spanish.

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     Mboq is the color 'yellow' in the Wolof language and this is a simple yellow theme.

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     Mbuni is the Kiswahili word for 'ostrich'.

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     Mosio means 'lime' in Lingala and this theme is simple, bright greens.

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     Okapi are adorable four-legged animals living only in the DR Congo related to the giraffe.

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     Serif is the name for a type of font and is the basis for this elegant theme.

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     Lastly, there is the theme of 'none' which is very basic and has little decoration, but is useful for people who are working on a low bandwidth connection and don't need one of the fancier themes. It's the one we use in this Site blog.

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     We hope you enjoy this new supply of theme choices. If you want to tell us what your favourite is, you have any suggestions or would like to contribute a theme, please contact us! EDIT >

Last week Maneno participated in the San Francisco Creative Commons Salon as we are in the process of deploying Creative Commons licenses to Maneno blogs for the authors choosing. The CC Salons, which take place in more than 15 different cities around the world, are open forums for people who are interested in global participatory culture, and are usually focused on building a community of artists and developers around Creative Commons.

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     In this Salon, that took place on April 15th at the coworking space PariSoMa, we presented Maneno to a diverse audience that seemed to be quite excited about what we are trying to achieve. We talked about how African bloggers are largely not part of the conversation about Africa, and about the skewed portrayal of Africa in mainstream media as shown by comparing the coverage of Europe and Africa on any given day on a random news outlet. Because of that we wanted to make blogging a lot easier for Sub-Saharan bloggers with a platform like Maneno, as well as promoting their content for greater exposure.

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     This brought us to what makes it different from other existing blogging platforms, which is a question we always get when introducing Maneno to any audience. So we described the the technicalities of Maneno and how well it works in slow internet environments. People seemed very interested in our upcoming feature that will allow blogging through a mobile phone either via SMS or MMS, since in Sub-Saharan Africa a lot more people have phones than internet access.

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     We also talked about the multilingual nature of the platform, of course, as it is something that is very important for use. There are over 2,000 languages Sub-Saharan Africa, but sadly most of them have little or no internet presence. Also, having realized the big divide that exists between African bloggers that write in different languages, we wanted to make it easy for authors and readers to translate interesting posts in more than one language. In this day and age, with the globalization of internet, there is a danger of linguistic isolation which we'd like to avoid by bridging the gap between different language bloggers.

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     At the end of our presentation many people wanted to know more, and so we answered quite a few questions. One that we've been getting quite a bit and that we find a little amusing every time is about what would African bloggers write about. It reminds us of that talk that Kenyan businesswoman Jane Arunga gave in a conference about aid evaluation, in which she explained how somebody in the US had asked her something like "Africans Have Cell Phones? Who Do They Call?". In case our answer isn't obvious, we said that we expect African bloggers to write about the same things that bloggers in North America or Europe write about: what's important for them.

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     Alongside Maneno, two other projects that are global in reach were also presented at the CC Salon. Although they both have the word Global in their news and are both focused on video, after listening to them we realized they are actually quite different. Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee presented Global Oneness, that offers a library of short films as educational or advocacy materials, and David Harris presented Global Lives that is filming 10 people from different countries around the world for 24 hours straight to screen them simultaneously in a dome-shaped, Burning Man-esque video installation. Check them out, they are quite cool.

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     If you want to see some more pictures of the event, we have uploaded them on our Flickr photostream. EDIT >

If you read as many blogs about Africa as we do, you might have noticed that a great number of them are written by expats. Some of them are traveling there for just a few weeks or volunteering for a couple of months, while others are working there for a longer period of time typically for some kind of non-profit/development organization or humanitarian/aid group. These blogs can be a great introduction to Africa from outsiders describing their first impressions and cultural shocks, but they often have a very short life span and they rarely reach a very big audience beyond friends and relatives of the author.

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     We designed Maneno to be the most useful and effective for bloggers in Africa. And while we hope to attract mostly local bloggers to write about their countries, we are aware of the popularity of blogging amongst expats as a way to keep in touch with their homes. With all that in mind, we decided to create a collective blog open to any expat based in Africa for a shorter period of time that would like to blog about his or her experience while there. Instead of creating a blog that will die after a little while, why not write for a group blog that will be around for much longer and that most likely more people will read?

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     This blog is Expatria, and you can easily join it when you sign up for a Maneno account. So far there have been two contributors: Jaya Murthy who wrote an Ode to the DRC after spending 5 years working in the Eastern part of the country, first in South Kivu and then in North Kivu; and Lunatrix who is currently in Senegal for some PhD research and is writing about her experiences there both in English and in Spanish. Check out for example her latest post on Gay Rights in Senegal. EDIT >

I've said it before, but I'll say it again: one of the main goals of Maneno is to have a lightweight download footprint. We been making good strides in keeping the site small to download, yet fully functional. Of course, this might not be enough for some folks who are having to make do with extremely narrow internet connections and high latency. It would seem to be a simple thing to just get rid of all the images on the site or take away functionality to make it lighter to download. But, not everyone has the same needs when it comes to a light bandwidth site.

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     Because of this, we have introduced a connection speed selector. You can choose your speed when you join or modify it through your profile page. This a very new feature and it will evolve over time to best fit peoples' needs, but currently there are four settings:

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     1 Fast (>256kb) - All of the site functions are available.

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     2 A Little Slow (128kb-256kb) - This blocks a couple of minor scripts and some other items. There are no visible changes, but the download size is a bit less.

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     3 Slow (56kb-128kb) - This takes out a great deal more in addition to #2. You won't see the individual blog themes. Images on the home page are taken out. Site graphics are removed. Articles will only have a small, thumbnail image. The WSIWYG editor for writing articles is removed as well.

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     4 Very Slow (<56kb) - This is quite extreme. In addition to everything from #2 and #3, you won't see any article images (unless a user embedded them in the text). In time, more components will be reduced to have Maneno still be functional, but be quite plain and work almost completely as text-only with a target page size of around 5kb.

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     All of these settings are available now, although #4 isn't complete yet. Play around with them and see what you think. Like I said, we're still working on it and will be refining it, but soon, it will hopefully allow access from even the smallest trickle to this platform of an internet connection. As always, send us a line through the Contact page if you have any feedback. EDIT >

In constantly striving to create a more accessible platform, we at Maneno are always on the lookout for new languages to make the site available in because let's face it, English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish versions are great, but we feel that the true strength of the site will be having the native languages of Africa available as well. Because of that, there is the Swahili version and soon (hopefully very soon) we will have a version in Bambara. In case you haven't heard of this language, let me assure you that this is not an April Fool's. This is a West African language that is spoken by around 2-3 million people. Naturally, it doesn't have a strong online presence, but we're hoping that this can change in the future because of efforts like this. I mean, if Slovenian, which is spoken by 2.4 million people can have a Wikipedia with over 100,000 entries, why not Bambara?

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Implementing

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     When it comes to integrating African languages in a website, one such as Swahili is overall, rather easy to implement. It uses a strictly English, Latin alphabet for the base of its characters. Bambara however gets considerably more complex. There are a number of characters which are in addition to the Latin base such as ɛ, ɔ, and ɲ (or ŋ depending on the dialect.) Typing these characters is a problem because there is no native support in Windows or the Mac OS.

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     By way of my pain, I would just like to point people to Sil, a group which has created a keyboard for Bambara and other languages, albeit a keyboard that is only for Windows machines. That takes care of the typing. There is still the issue of the displaying. For that, you need to encode your pages as UTF-8 which amazingly, actually supports these characters, although possibly not in every font for the web, so your kilometerage may vary. There is also the issue that any translation file needs to be created, from the start as a Unicode file. Regular files will just end up mashing up the extended characters.

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     That is a quick overview of the problems. I hope that it helps others who might be trying to do something similar with Bambara or other languages on the web. Obviously, once we launch this version of the site, you can be sure that we'll let everyone know about it as we think it will be pretty darned cool to have! EDIT >