Hblog

Blogging for your countrypeople

I met Ory Okolloh last week. Ory is this cool Kenyan gal who studied at Harvard Law School and is now going back home for a year before starting in private practice back in the States. We had a great chat talking about Ory taking on the Creative Commons challenge in East Africa. One way or another the conversation turned to blogging. An avid blogger herself, Ory told me about this cool site called 'Kenya Unlimited' that brings together a community of over 100 members who blog about, from, around, within Kenya. This simple site has done wonders for the Kenyan blogging community, nurturing Kenyan bloggers by welcoming them and showcasing them on the site and providing a directory of bloggers (The Kenyan Blogs Webring Members) with one thing in common: their connection with Kenya. This is a great idea - and comes back to an idea that I've been thinking of for a while now: only when there is a community of local users established, will creators in developing countries continue to produce digital content. Without that community, African creators are a lonely bunch and will turn away from the digital medium in favor of media with a greater response. I've been trying to get someone to develop a South African webloggers directory or portal - any takers?

Blogging on fire in SA

Just when I thought it would take a major war or dictatorship or land invasions or something to get blogging started in SA, and I started hearing about all these awesome local blogs. I think the craze started around the same time that the Mail & Gaurdian online launched their 'Blogspot' tool.

The tool is crap (it will get better) but the awesome thing is that it was launched by one of the most respected newspapers in southern Africa - and does a lot to raise the level of community among bloggers here.

Before this, there wasn't a local engine out there, so bloggers remained pretty dispersed and isolated (using Google's blogger, or homemade versions). Now I'm finding new bloggers every day. I met these very interesting 'Jo-blog' dudes who are being interviewed for an open source software tv program last week. After telling me that they didn't really need to use the license because they break copyright law every day and don't care if others take their posts and do the same, they eventually agreed to use a creative commons license. In fact, they decided to dedicate their blog to the public domain with the cc 'public domain' license in the end.

This is huge. It's the first private dedication in SA that I know of. It made my 1 hour rant on a hot Friday afternoon to these guys worth it.

(I promise not to talk about Creative Commons again... from now.)

Joi Ito

I met Joi Ito, weblogger extroadinaire, today. Joi lives and works in Tokyo - and pretty recently started a venture capital company called Neoteny which, in fact, funds the weblog platform (Typepad) that I use for this blog :) Joi wants to work on African blogging projects which is very exciting indeed - there is a growing team of people who think it's a good idea - we both think that it will at least be a good experiment. I read about Joi's history here and felt better that he didn't always have the direction and drive that he has today.

(She sighs with relief and reaches over for another sip from the Chivas bottle.)

BlogAfrica

BlogAfrica is a great collaborative initiative between Geekcorps, AllAfrica and Ethan Zuckerman from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. They are going to be running blogging workshops in African countries and hosting blogs for free. The success of the project will probably depend on the success of a few high quality blogs that are then incorporated into traditional media. It will be great to track the kinds of conversations that develop around these blogs. Viva African voices finally being heard! Viva!