After the wonderful writeup about Maneno by our friend Ndesanjo Macha at Global Voices Online, we were contacted by Jamillah Knowles to participate in her radio show Pods and Blogs on BBC's Five Live. We knew Pods and Blogs quite well since our colleagues at Global Voices had participated in it on a couple of occasions, and we had listened to the podcasts of the show which are available at their website a number of times. So we immediately said yes, and only a couple of days later we were recording our segment via Skype. And here it is.
Pods and Blogs is an hour weekly radio show dedicated to covering the news as it's seen by bloggers, podcasters and the citizen media. On the website they say that it's a radio experiment that attemps:
to report the news members of the public are creating, discussing and sharing across the world thanks to the internet.
After a writeup at White African, who is one of our most favorite blogs, we have recently received some more love from other blogs we are big fans of. Here's a second little roundup of our star appearances in the blogosphere:
This is another blog that we're subscribed to, as it focuses on humanitarian news with a special focus on technology. The author is Jon Thompson, who has worked for Doctors without Borders and International Medical Corps in a bunch of countries in Africa and elsewhere. A couple of weeks ago he wrote a post about a great tool for browsing the web in low bandwidth environments called Loband, and of course we had to leave a note. On the comments thread, one of the guys behind Loband to responded the following:
We’ve been thinking there was a need for something like that for a while [...] We came up with a target page size of 25KB using estimates of the bandwidth you get on the desktop in African universities.The 50KB typical page size of Maneno is fantastic, especially when you consider the average web page size is now over 300KB (which would have a 2 minute download time on a 20Kb/s connection).
So a few days later Aid Worker Daily devoted a post to Maneno, in which he gave some more positive feedback:
It looks like a great product and it seems like a perfect tool for that mass of aid workers that start blogs primarily to keep their friends back home updated and to let their families know that they are still alive. It has very low bandwidth demands and offers a clean and simple interface. Please check it out and let us know what you think [...]
We'd love to hear it too!
Global Voices doesn't need a presentation: it's the best blog about blogs around the world. We love it and we've been involved with it as authors for quite some time. So we were very excited when we saw that Ndesanjo Macha, the Sub-Saharan Africa editor for the site, had decided to write about us collecting what several other bloggers had written - including Aid Worker Daily and White African. Since one of the key efforts of Global Voices is translating blogs from around the world to bring them to a global audience, the multilingual nature of Maneno was appreciated:
Considering the multilingual nature of the region, Maneno was built to allow for multiple language versions of articles to “sit atop one another for immediate access.” The interface of the platform is also translated into different languages to remove linguistic barriers.
TechSoup is a well-known and respected technology resource that offers a variety of information and services for nonprofits, so we were more than thrilled when they mentioned the Global Voices article on their blog:
While internet connections in the developed world are no longer charged per megabyte or tiered, this is often not the case in Africa, not to mention basic accessibility in more rural areas. A mobile accessible version is forthcoming as well. I often question ventures that seem like "reinventing the wheel," but a user-centric system that increases the availability of information to more users may be welcomed — and necessary — in this case.
