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.
