We've been in Beta for some time now as we work to develop the Maneno platform towards a number of goals such as more powerful domain hosting, an open template architecture, and most importantly, an Open Source release for anyone to download, use and contribute to. The only problem with Beta is that it's been overused a great deal in the web community and it really doesn't tell you anything except that a piece of software isn't a finished product and that's not really very exciting.
With that in mind, a few days ago, we removed the Beta from all our pages. No, we're definitely not in a full release yet, but we wanted something better than having that tag there until Version 1.00 comes along. Instead, we're using a numeric version system that you'll now see at the bottom of the pages. That number is the current production version of Maneno that you're using, which is starting at 0.50. We're looking to give more insight to our development upgrades and include people in on the news as we'll post the Release Notes here in the Siteblog every time we have a release.
Shortly, we'll be releasing Version 0.51 "Alloco". This will be a very exciting release as it is a complete overhaul to our admin section to allow easy management of members' blogs as well as include a large slew of helpful widgets and functions. There will also be some new blog design functions that will allow anyone from a new internet user to a seasoned web developer take any of our basic templates and add a degree of their own spice and personality to them. This release is looking to be a lot of fun.
We're happy to announce that we now have Maneno t-shirts! We aren't selling them, though. If you love what Maneno is doing and want to get one, then you should make a donation to Maneno. Why are we doing it this way? Because then who sees you wearing it will know that you're one of our great Maneno supporters. But, most importantly, it allows people to pay what they would like above the cost of our shirts in order to help us fund the projects ahead for Maneno:
For the first half of 2010, Maneno is going to be based in Côte d'Ivoire. From there, we will continue to work on building out and promoting the Maneno platform, as well as introducing more people to the world of blogging and citizen journalism by facilitating BlogCamps with our local contacts. These camps will work as casual gatherings to train people on the ins and outs of social media and to work on promoting blogs and articles from their daily lives.
Due to the upcoming, historic national elections, Côte d'Ivoire will need more camps than ever before. But we will also be conducting BlogCamps in the neighboring West African countries of Ghana and Mali where the blogging communities are growing.
Additionally, we are working to coordinate training and Maneno platform deployment for Konakry Express, which is a blog portal working to spotlight information on Guinea in the aftermath of the September 28th massacre. For those who aren't aware, there was a coup d'etat in Guinea last year with the political transition and impending elections proving difficult, violent, and non-transparent. This portal will work to amplify local voices who are on the ground, getting reports directly from them.
So, if you want to help us fund these initiatives, donate for your shirts today. We do need to impose a minimum donation of $20 (+$5 shipping) to the US & Canada and $20 (+$10 shipping) to Europe. For anyone else in the world, work out the best estimate and if you ask us to send it, we will. Note: for orders of up to 3 t-shirts we'll only charge you shipping once!
And if you can donate more to provide seed funding for these projects in our second year of operation, we would be eternally grateful.
When you submit your donation, just write in your mailing address and size needs in the notes box or contact us directly. The 100% preshrunk cotton shirts are available in US Men S,M,L,XL,XXL and US Women S,M,L
Google AdSense (the other side to AdWords) has something of a hit and miss deployment when it comes to Africa. While it would be an excellent method for African bloggers to get a bit of money to cover their internet expenses, Google doesn't offer payment options for any country in Sub-Saharan Africa. This is rather nasty on their part and hopefully over this next year, we'll start to see some momentum towards a better solution in that department.
By way of a test to see how clicks and more importantly, content, shapes up on a site that only has African content, we've deployed a small AdWords box to the home page of Maneno. This wasn't done to create some kind of massive monetizing scheme as we expect the overall payments from Google to be quite small. It was done purely as an experiment.
We want to see what happens when AdSense is confronted by the multiple language versions of Maneno. We want to see what happens when the Google servers see that you're coming from a different country outside those in North American and Europe. And most importantly we want to see what type of ads will be displayed.
The beauty of the AdWords system is that is displays ads based upon contextual relevance, which is a large part of the reason why it became so popular due to the ads being related to what users read on the page. Maneno authors write in a more balanced manner about Africa talking about a great breadth of topics that go beyond the doom and gloom angle. This is very much different from what is portrayed in traditional media outlets such as CNN and BBC. Because of this, will the AdWords be more like what you see in the US or say, France, or will we just see ads for charities about saving children, animal safaris, or voluntourism?
We're putting forth all these questions because we want to hear from everyone who views these ads and work to get a greater pictures of AdWords in Africa, since it is currently one of the most dominant ad delivery systems on the web. Please feel free to leave comments or contact us directly to share your thoughts.
And naturally, as these ads are a bit of a bandwidth hog at 25kb, if you set your bandwidth throttling to Very Slow, they won't display. We don't want this trial to be a bandwidth burden.
