Along with the invitation system mentioned yesterday, we have been finishing up functions for the main Articles pages. When we launched the very early version of the site, there was this blank space on the right of all the article pages. No, that wasn't a design goof. It was a placeholder for future functions. Well, those functions are now here.
For starters, you can put in your Twitter username to have your last three twits pull in to the page. Just remember to use only the part that comes after twitter.com/. For example ours is http://twitter.com/maneno, so we just use the 'maneno' bit. After Twitter, there is an open Widget field. This is for anywhere you can cut and paste code to bring a function of another site to your site. For instance, in the Siteblog, we've got our Flickr feed. You can put just about anything else in there you like as long as it it's less then 165 pixels in width. Lastly, we've got the Archives functioning. These automatically categorize a person's posts by month and year for easy browsing to the past.
These are just a few functions that we're putting out now. Over the next few months, there will be more and more for people to use as we develop the site. As always, we're always open to user suggestions, so contact us if you think of something that would make the site even better for users in Sub-Saharan Africa.
After a bit of tooling around, I'm happy to say that we've got author invitations fully functional for blogs. For many people who have a one to one relationship with their blog (they're the only person writing on it), this won't matter so much. But, for folks who want to have a few people lending their voice to a single blog, this is a very important feature to have in place.
If you're sitting there wondering, "Huh, why is this news?", it's because, as we've stated before, we're building Maneno from the ground up. This means that being true to our goal of having a lightweight, multi-lingual site, we had to create an invitation system that was in line with that. I think we did pretty well and made it a bit flashy in the process. Give it a try if you're looking to have a few people write on your blog.
I'd like to mention that while this was on the to-do list for awhile, we jumped to finishing it up when the folks at Social Media for Social Change said that they wanted a group blog for an upcoming event in Kenya. We were happy to give them what they needed and hope it all works out. We really look forward to reading the articles that come out of this event next week!
A few days ago, we were lucky to be featured in a post at the very popular blog White African. Maintained by Hash, aka Erik Hershman, internet guru on African tech and all sorts of cool ideas and innovation in and for Africa, it has been one of our favorite blogs for a long time. We could hardly contain our excitement when we read his positive feedback, as he's also one of the bloggers and internet entrepreneurs that we most admire. He said:
What Maneno is trying to build could be a really effective hosted blogging tool for Africa.
In addition to the boost to our motivation to continue improving Maneno, Erik Hershman's post also gave us the initial exposure we needed to get more people to sign up to Maneno and to test the system, so we can keep fixing problems, improving some functions and adding new features. For all that, we are very thankful to Erik.
His writeup was also picked up by a couple other bloggers that we'd like to mention too.
Kouya Chronicle is a blog that often focuses on translation issues in the developing world, since its authors are Eddie and Sue Arthur who spent twelve years in Côte d'Ivoire translating the Bible for the Kouya people. Here's what they wrote about Maneno:
If you are an African based blogger, or would be blogger (indeed, if you live anywhere with poor bandwidth) you should take a look at Maneno
Tinderblog is a blog about technology in developing regions (ICT4D, as some like to call it), maintained by Chris Wilson and Jim Jepps of Aptivate. Although we didn't know their blog until they wrote about us, we have included it in our feed readers and are now following it quite frequently. They devoted a very interesting post to describing the use of Maneno, with the title Maneno: The future of CMS (hopefully). The post is a reminder of how empowering people in developing countries with online publishing tools that are not adapted to their needs, equals unusable tools. That's exactly what motivated us to start Maneno, and reading the last paragraph of the post felt like we are working in the right direction:
Although Maneno is still in a beta version it works like a dream and looks very impressive. It seems just the ticket if you are setting up a new site with little knowledge of design and want to ensure potential readers in Africa actually get the opportunity to read what you have to say.
Many apologies all around if you went in to post an article and thought, "Huh, why is the system telling me to post it tomorrow when it's not actually the right tomorrow for where I am? Whose tomorrow is this?" Yes, that didn't make a lot of sense. You see, the Maneno system is based upon proprietary development that we have been using and refining for our own personal blogs. This system only had to run in one time zone where we lived. Yeah, we know, excuses, excuses...
With Maneno, things are a bit trickier and the fact that we live most of the time in PST(GMT-8) or CET(GMT+1), the servers are in EST(GMT-5), and we really wanted the site to be in GMT made for a real mess. Suffice to say, all that is behind us now. The system has now been told to behave itself and run in GMT and ignore everything else. This only makes things the perfect timezone for 12 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, but when you have a continent spanning four time zones, you just have to pick one. There is also the benefit that GMT sits on one of the time axises for the world, which is always handy for random calculations that we won't bored you with right now.
In addition to this getting in to place, there is also a 'now' option when writing posts. The date option is still there if you want to post something in the future, but the 'now' allows for whatever you post to go up right away with no delay and no confusion.
As always, if anything seems strange with this, please use the contact page to drop us a line and let us know. And thanks to all who have joined recently. It's been great to see Maneno getting put through its paces!
Yesterday our friends from Ushahidi launched their software in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the conflict in the eastern province of the North Kivu has flared up in the last two months in violation of the peace accords signed in January. It's a very complex conflict with a number of actors involved (see a breakdown of the armed elements at the Stop Genocide blog) and a lot of confusion and misinformation about the events unfolding. The mobile phone number to send SMS reports to is +243992592111 and their DRC website to visualize the reports is http://DRC.ushahidi.com.
In case there's someone that hasn't heard about Ushahidi, which means 'testimony' in Kiswahili, is a tool for incident reporting in times of crises that was created at the beginning of this year in Kenya as a response to the post-electoral violence. Ushahidi allowes anyone to submit crisis information through text messaging using a mobile phone, email or web form, and to visualize it on a map or timeline.
The idea for Ushahidi was first put forward by Kenyan blogger and activist Ory Okolloh of the blog Kenyan Pundit, who amidst post-electoral violence in her country expressed a wish:
Google Earth supposedly shows in great detail where the damage is being done on the ground. It occurs to me that it will be useful to keep a record of this, if one is thinking long-term. For the reconciliation process to occur at the local level the truth of what happened will first have to come out. Guys looking to do something - any techies out there willing to do a mashup of where the violence and destruction is occurring using Google Maps?
A couple of days later a few people stepped in, including Erik Hershman aka White African and a dream team of Kenyan bloggers -David Kobia, Juliana Rotich and Daudi Were. The Ushahidi engine was used again in South Africa in May during the xenophobic attacks on immigrants. Now, a few months after the birth of Ushahidi and its successful use in Kenya, the Ushahidi team has been improving the software (with the help of a bunch of volunteers throughout the world) and developing it further for its use in different countries such as the DRC. Working against the clock once more, the Ushahidi system has now been put to good use once again to to record instances of violence in Eastern Congo.
But what's the point of such a tool, someone might ask? When it was first used in Kenya, Ory Okolloh explained the purpose as follows:
Well, Kenyans have demonstrated their capacity for selective amnesia time and time again. When this crisis comes to an end, we don’t want what happened to be swept under the rug in the name of “moving forward” - for us to truly move forward, the truth of what happened needs to be told - Ushahidi is our small way of contributing to that.
It looks like their main obstacle at the moment might be not currently having their DRC platform available in French and/or Kiswahili (only in English), so that it can actually reach the Congolese people on the ground. Also, the incident report gathering is relying on input mostly from groups on the ground, but getting the word out might be hard given the confusing situation and the lack of communication infrastructures in the region (plus the aforementioned language issue). However, we hope word of mouth will work as it always does and in the next few days more and more people will start sending reports. Spread the word.
For those looking to bring a little more personality to the blogs that they start on Maneno, I would like to point out our Themes. After you start a blog, you can go in to the management section in order to put a different skin on your blog. It allows you to stand out a bit and have your blog on Maneno be your blog.
Currently, we're not allowing customization of the CSS (web page style code) to change minor items. We do allow people to create their own themes which we can incorporate in to the list of choices. I would also like to mention that if you work for an NGO or other group that is focused on African issues and you're looking to start a blog, let us know! We can customize the look of our blogging system to closely match your site and if you're blogging on Maneno, you'll get more exposure through our portal and promotion of the site. Contact us if you'd like to talk more about either of these prospects.
We have just created a bunch of Maneno badges to embed in other sites. They allow you the reader to spread Maneno if you like what you see and want others to know about it, by simply adding one of the badges to your current blog or personal site.
If you go to Spread the words, you will find the code for the various badges that you can simply cut and paste to whatever site or blog you are running. So, while we'd love to have you blog on Maneno, we're also just as happy to have you promote it as well. In time, we'll be including a few (I really don't like this word but it has caught on...) "widgets" to allow dynamic linking to the site and its content. One thing we were thinking of was a widget that pulled up the latest featured stories or newest stories that you see on the homepage. If you have other ideas, feel free to pass them on and we'll see what we can do to try and make them happen.
A couple of weeks ago we announced the Beta release of Maneno after a month of frantically working of a lot of small details that needed refining. And while Beta is still a work-in-progress, we are fastly progressing on a better functionality of the site and on translating the whole platform in a bunch of languages.
Today we are extremely happy to announce the Kiswahili and French versions of Maneno, which we hope will become two of the most popular languages of choice of Maneno users in Sub-Saharan Africa.
For the Kiswahili site we have to thank profusely our dear friend Deogratias Simba, based in Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), for translating everything into his mother language in such a generous way. We'll tell you more about him soon, since he's not only a professional translator and an editor with his own publishing house, but also an author and a terrific blogger in Swahili.
The French translation was done by ourselves, so please get in touch with us if you find misspellings or inaccuracies as it is bound to happen.
And if anyone is interested in translating Maneno in other languages spoken in Sub-Saharan Africa, even very small ones, we would be very proud to add more versions to the site. So again, please get in touch so we can give you more details!
The always great, App+Frica posted an article today in regards to how web services are failing the world market. Take a look at the article, it's a fine read and even though it's just opinion, for anyone who has traveled outside the US and Europe (especially the US) you know that a great many sites simple drag along or fail altogether (as Meskel Square noted awhile back) when you try to access them from abroad.
For being the second most populous continent in the world with nearly one billion people, it's amazing how, as it becomes crunch time for all the Web 2.0 endeavors, that they're blunting their efforts in Africa. They obviously see no market there because they view Africa as poor, or hopeless, or [ergh...] the "dark continent", or one of the countless other cliches people pick from. Not all industries don't see it this way though. For instance, the mobile phone companies see a region where there is the potential for tremendous growth because every single person doesn't have a mobile phone yet.
While not wanting to beat the topic to death, I refer back to the previous post about Proudly Entering the Beta, wherein I laid out the goals that we're trying to accomplish with Maneno. We're not approaching this from the standpoint of developing a platform for the US and EU first and then, maybe if it works, let Africa have it. If it doesn't work there, well, too bad. This thinking doesn't work and it's why so many companies are caught off guard and suddenly need to pull back.
Beyond the points made in the previous article, I would add that we're working towards being a non-profit. We're not doing this to make a buck or corner a "developing market". That business plan doesn't work. It's broken and will most likely continue to break more over the coming years.
We're also working to promote this site and to actively pursue readers, exposure, and participation. We're not passive about this, because as App+Frica's timely article shows, it really is time for new thinking when it comes to web applications for Africa.
While the term "beta" has been massively overused in the whole Web 2.0 shebang, it still has it's purposes. For instance, the version up to this point was Alpha. It was rough and there were a lot of things still unknown about it. With this Beta release, people who might have checked it out before should check it out again. The site looks and interacts on a completely different level now. It is much more complete and now we are working to refine elements to it.
The focus of the site has been honed as well. In what we're deeming, Stage 1, we're focusing on creating a blogging, communication, and media platform for Sub-Saharan Africa. Many people might be asking, "Why? There's already Wordpress, Blogspot, and a slew of others." This is true and when it comes to large blogging systems, many of these do an excellent job. The main issue with them is that they're for the web at large as viewed from developed nations. The web in developing nations is a much different beast.
To that end, we're really focusing on a few key points:
- Number One is localization. We're really working like crazy to get Maneno translated and functional in six languages. And by localized, we mean every part. Someone will eventually be able to only speak Swahili or French and be able to use the entire site without anything popping up in English. It's not as easy as it sounds because the internet by definition is English-centric (due to the parts that make it being developed in the US in English), but we're working to make this possible.
- Number Two is download speed. Web 2.0 came up with the brilliant plan that any website can have pages that are up to one meg to download. While this can work for those in the US, the further away from the server you get, the longer the website takes to load. And of course, if you factor in that most people in the world are not on broadband internet, then you run in to real problems. With Maneno, we're working to keep the pages as small as possible in order to keep up accessibility for everyone. Right now, the home page is about 60kb and we're striving to shave even a little bit more off that if possible. Compare that to a normal Wordpress blog home page, at about 225kb (if there aren't any images to the articles) and you understand why we're trying to make this difference.
- Number Three is an eventual plan to allow alternative updating to the site. In other words, users won't have to use the web to write articles. This is also a very key point as internet connectivity is paltry over the vast majority of Sub-Saharan Africa. There are a few options out there which we're exploring now, but this will be an eventual feature that we'll add to the site, so more on it later.
- Number Four is article translation and refers back in part to the localization aspect, but is its own entity. We're working to create a better blogging translation system. We know that people in Sub-Saharan Africa usually speak at least two languages and usually a great many more. We want to be able to have the Maneno community be able tin interact and help share articles to as wide a public as possible.
There are all kinds of smaller details but these four points are the main ones. We're working to have all of this come together in to a system that will work to inform better than any before it and have the ability and elasticity to not only last for awhile, but be able to change and incorporate other good things that come along on the web. After all, this isn't just an installation of Wordpress, Typepad, or Drupal; this is an application for Africa.
