[NOTE: This is different than the original time we asked for your help. We found out that was only to give us stars, but that vote doesn’t count towards the real ballot. Please go vote again!]

Ushahidi is an African initiated project used in Kenya to map reported incidents of violence during the post-election crisis. Our goal is to increase the scope and capabilities of Ushahidi so that it can be used by others around the globe who find themselves in the similar crisis situations. We need your vote in the NetSquared mashup challenge for a chance at winning some money to use in further development.

How to vote:
1. Create an account (or Login if you already have an account) at NetSquared.org
2. Vote for Ushahidi by clicking here, then click the red “Vote for My Mashup” button.
3. Vote for at least 4 other projects. Here are four that I recommend, but you can choose whichever you like. Just make sure you choose a total of 5 minimum.

• Assetmap.org/Uganda
• Rosetta Project - Minority Languages in Google Earth
• Agri Mashup: Data Utilization in Inclusive and Sustainable Agriculture at the Base of the Pyramid
• CorpWatch - Government Data on Corporations

4. Click “View/Cast Ballot”, or click here: [www.netsquared.org]. Be sure Ushahidi is listed as one of your chosen projects.
5. Click “Cast Ballot” on your screen. That’s it!

Thanks, and we’ll keep you updated on the outcome!

We’ve entered Ushahidi (background story here) into the $100,000 Netsquared Mashup Challenge for further development. We’re really excited about this opportunity for a number of reasons.

First, we’d love to get experts involved to help us with planning and development work.

Second, if you go help vote up our application (LINK), we have a stronger chance of being selected. Going and voting for us at this point is the biggest help you can be at this point.

Third, even though the crisis in Kenya appears to be over (thank God), we’re continuing to build out Ushahidi in order for it to be used in future crisis related situations around the world.

Here’s their explanation of the challenge:

This year’s NetSquared Conference will bring together a unique mix of people from the public and private sectors to develop and release Mashups designed to provide deeper insight into the social issues affecting communities around the globe.

Those “people” are you — members of the NetSquared universe working on behalf of communities everywhere and the technical experts who care about these issues.

If we’re successful, we’ll learn something about cross-sector collaboration, meet new and interesting people, and build a unique gallery of Mashups that citizens, schools, and community-based groups everywhere can learn from, replicate, and build upon.

So, there you have it. Head on over to Netsquared, register and vote. I know it’s a hassle to have to register before you vote, but we would greatly appreciate it if you did. Better yet, if you’re interested in helping to extend Ushahidi even further, let us know!

Let’s see if we can make a global product out of an African initiated project…

[update: I’ve had a couple emails and messages asking where to vote. Once you’re logged in, you should see the following. Just click the + sign.]

The last couple days has seen the launch of 3 new websites from established African bloggers and developers. Impressive work to say the least!

I Have No Tribe

A website dedicated to positive discourse on the Kenyan conflict. From the mind of David Kobia, part of Ushahidi and behind the now-closed Mashada forums. David showed it to me on launch as a prototype late last week, it’s amazing to see that it already has poems, thoughts and prayers from Kenyans all over the world.

Don’t tell him, but I think he’s just having fun with his newfound love of map mashups…

Nudjit
A high-tech gadget blog from some well-established South African bloggers (Justin Hartman, Gregor Rohrig, and Nic Haralambous). I’m a gadget guy, so I’ve already added it to the reader and to AfriGadget’s blogroll.

“The site aims to inform, entertain, and alert South Africans about the gadgets that are available to us. Our gadget reviews don’t just highlight the technical aspects but will also judge how well they work, where one can get them, and if our local technology infrastructure can actually support these electronic toys.”

Kabissa
Kabissa.org has launched their brand spanking new website. Kabissa is a social tool for African civil society organizations. What does that mean? Well, it’s a social networking tool for African organizations focused on social change in Africa.

This is another site created by individuals who are well-respected within the African digital scene, Tobias Eigen and Sokari Ekine.

David Kobia, part of the team behind Ushahidi, is the creator of one of the most widely used Kenyan forums: Mashada. I just got an email from him that is rather disappointing:

As you may already know, I’ve been having quite a problem regulating Mashada.com, despite having recently hired people to moderate the forums. It is starting to become a reflection of what is going on on the ground in Kenya. I’d hate for it to hinder our current efforts since I’m directly connected to it, therefore I’m having to shut down the forums until further notice. Facilitating civil discussions and debates has become virtually impossible.

The post-election violence in Kenya is horrible. Most of the people who use Mashada are part of the Kenyan diaspora based in the US and Europe, but also a healthy amount from Kenya. So, the vast majority of people using it are seeing and hearing about the atrocities happening to their friends and family and are rightfully upset.

However, that does not excuse the rampant and vitriolic discussions that have been taking place online. Choosing to resort to verbal thuggery, taunts and threats is not the answer.

It is disappointing to watch the devolution of life in Kenya, but to see it being mirrored online by Kenyans around the world makes it even worse.

I understand the frustration. I get that. What I don’t get is how any of the people involved think that this will make anything better.

We can do better than this. We can be better.

Vuma Kenya! Concert in Boston
A group of young Kenyan professionals in the US has been working hard over the last 2 weeks to put on a fundraising concert in Boston. The event will take place on February 02, 2008 (7:00 pm) at the Roxy downtown. If you’re in the area get there! If not, you can donate through the website at www.vumakenya.org.

I’ve had a chance to be on a couple of the conference calls with these guys, and I can tell you that they are passionate and committed to making this a success. The group is politically ambivalent in this initiative, choosing to band together in times of crisis rather than fracture over tribal or political differences. Let’s support them and hope that we see more of this in Kenya too.

Catch the Africa Cup of Nations on AfricanPath
Joshua Wanyama of AfricanPath has been hard at work growing his site. African Path will broadcast the Ghana 2008 Africa Cup of Nations from January 20th till February 10th, 2008 online. The games will be available as both live feeds and as saved games for those who missed the live broadcasts. In addition a forum on the African Path Village will provide an ample platform for all soccer fans to discuss the games. Enjoy the games!

2008 South African Blog Awards
Nominations for the 2008 South African Blog Awards are starting up on February 11th. Here’s hoping that there is a lot less controversy than last year. If this blog post is any indication, then I think it’s off to a good start.

It would be interesting if someone were to put together a pan-African version of this type of thing too. Beyond the general ego boosting that these events have, I tend to find a lot of really neat niche blogs that I didn’t know existed through the nomination process.

A couple of us have been doing interviews and trying to get the word out about Ushahidi to as many news and media outlets as we can. Why? In hopes that by reaching out and talking to a broad selection of media more people will hear about it and that the news of Ushahidi will trickle down to the Kenyans who need it most.

The BBC recently did some interviews with those of us involved with Ushahidi. You can listen to the piece at the link below (4:30 long):

BBC Audio Interview on Ushahidi

BoingBoing and the TED blog each did a write-up about Ushahidi and the TEDsters involved with it.

Well known VC blog VentureBeat has a story on Ushahidi, as well as Global Voices on the broader picture behind cyber activism.

On Business Daily
Good Magazine

We’re trying to spread the word even further. If you know anyone at a media outlet in need of a story, consider helping by directing them towards Ushahidi. This is a newsworthy cause that only gets better the more people know about it and use it.

Sometimes there’s nothing more that you can do at the time than report what you see. That’s the idea behind the project that Ory thought up while reporting on the Kenyan elections. Basically, let’s create a mashup that people can report into on incidences of violence that they see.

Basically, you have an incident - that hopefully someone gets a picture or video of. A report on what happened and who was involved, and a location. That information is submitted and then populated into a map-based view that is easy to search by location and/or category.

It seems to me that the easy part is the mashup. Many past examples of map mashups pull from a database (or RSS feeds). In this case, a new database would need to be created. It too could have an RSS feed for “new” reports though and become the nexus for cataloging post-election incidents in Kenya.

An Example:
Below we see a reported atrocity in near Eldoret, Kenya shown on Google Maps. Imagine if this was done with all such incidents of violence throughout the country.

(click on the flames)

View Larger Map

An image of what happened:

Something like this, but more centralized and easy to access by anyone around the world.

Here is a running list of blogs to keep updated on. If you have another one, send it in and I’ll add it to the list.

Kenyan Pundit
Joseph Karoki ***(new picture blog)
Thinker’s Room
Mentalacrobatics
Gerald Baraza

Images from Joseph Karoki’s blog

African Path
Mzalendo
Shirel
Afromusing
Nick Wadhams

Jesse Masai
Kumekucha
Chris Blattman
Cold Tusker
What an African Woman Thinks

Mimmz
Farmgal
Kenyan Jurist
Panda Shuka
Gathara’s World

Lovely Money
Odeg
Gukira
Ryan Sheely
Jesse Masai

Shashank Bengali
Crystal Balls
Kenya Imagine
Rob Rooker
Udongo

African Rhetoric
Jikomboe
Kenya Patriot
Africa News
8 Months in Nairobi

Bankelele
Toxic Tribalism
Baldilocks
Lost White Kenyan Chick
Amani Kenya

Eyes on Kenya
Jewels in the Jungle
Shailja Patel
Paza Sauti
Concerned Kenyan

Breaking News Kenya
Updates on Kenya
Sukuma Kenya
Siasa Duni
Kwani Blog

A Future Minded Kenyan

A couple of Facebook groups have popped up:
Peace for Kenya - Videos and Pictures
Praying for Peace in Kenya
Kenya’s Post-’Election’ humanitarian crisis

Global Voices - Excellent overviews from the Kenyan blogosphere by Ndesanjo: (1) (2)

Africa News - Newsletter with an overview of the movies that were made by their mobile phone reporters in Nairobi.

[hattip hajjzak]

I was doing some research trying to find an obscure suffix for a domain today and got sidetracked into trying to find all of the African TLD’s (Top Level Domains). I couldn’t find a list that had just the domain suffix for each country in Africa, so created my own:

If I’m missing any, let me know. If you want a full list of all the country TLD’s around the world, try here.

If you write an African blog and are taking part in today’s Blog Action Day, please let me know. I’ll continue to add to this list as the day goes on.

• The NEST Home - We’re Not Just Talking…
• AfriGadget - Where the World Sees Junk, Africa Recycles
• Afromusing - The Flow of Flotsam
• Crisscrossed - E-waste, the Downside of the Growing Web
• Migrations - on African Bird Migration Changes
• SA Rocks - SA Environment Started it All, Let’s not End it
• Blue Dreamer - Illegal Logging
• Kenvironews - Poverty and the Environment
• GottaQuirk - Saving the World, One Blog Post at a Time (and 1, 2, 3, more)
• Bazungu Bucks - Everyone’s Cryin’ Mercy
• Szavanna Blog - Introducing Ben Saunders
• No Bad Days - Top Priority for the Next Home we Buy
• Jenty’s Photo-a-Day - Bradly on Air Pollution
• South of West - A Convenient Excuse
• The Tattler - Leonardo DiCaprio… The 11th Hour Review
• Web AddiCT(s) - We are the Green Generation
• The Empire Collective - Spudware, 80% Potato Starch Cutlery
• Kikuyumoja - Some Things I’d Like to See More Often
• Lost White Kenyan Chick - Great things happening to save Kenya’s fragile environment
• Scribblesheet - The BBC’s Reporting of the Environment

[UPDATE: For more extensive coverage, make sure you read Juliana’s post on Global Voices]

Afrotechie is a blog written by Andrew Heavens, of Meskel Square, it’s an excellent blog that covers the gamut of news on the African tech scene.

His most recent story is about the way the governments of Sudan and Ethiopia are blocking certain websites. It’s a fascinating read that discusses how the motives behind the action move the government’s hand.

In Sudan it’s religion. In Ethiopia it’s politics.

This highlights the very reason why technology can make such an impact in Africa - it can be used to bypass inefficient and corrupt regimes. For every government action to block web and mobile communication, there’s a technologist waiting to bypass their often ham-fisted actions.

Blog Action Day is an initiative started by a bunch of international bloggers who want to see what will happen if we all write about the same general topic on one given day. In this case, that day is right around the corner on October 15th. The topic for this year is to write something about the environment.

I’ve decided to commit AfriGadget to the task of writing one story about the environment. If you have a story of African ingenuity as it relates to the environment, I’d love to hear it. Leave a comment here, or send me an email through the contact form.

Of course, you can participate yourself by committing to write a piece about the environment on October 15th as well. Let’s see if we can get some good African representation.

I just got an email from one of the editors at Deutsche Welle asking me why there are no Africans taking part in their annual Best of the Blogs awards. I hadn’t heard of the awards, so I headed on over there to find out what was going on. It turns out that the Best of Blogs (or The Bobs) is sponsored by some pretty big players (Technorati, Global Voices, Toshiba and O’Reilly to name a few) and looks legitimate.

What’s wrong with this picture?

When it comes to how Africa is portrayed on the web, we are partly responsible for what the rest of the world sees. We have no right to be upset when Africa is excluded when we won’t even take the time to promote each other, the countries we come from and the ideas for which we stand.

There are a great number of exceptional writers throughout Africa. I finally chose to submit one of my favorites - Chippla’s Weblog, but I could have just as easily chosen any of the excellent bloggers elsewhere. With all of the bloggers in South Africa and Kenya alone, it’s a small wonder there hasn’t been any submissions yet from those 2 countries.

(small correction: it looks like there are a few blogs representing North Africa from Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco)

Africa is massive. Made up of 54 countries who don’t work together sharing information that frequently, and with governments who are more concerned with “other matters” than sharing the accurate mapping of their country. Companies in some of these countries do go about this themselves, and charge a high price for their product.

How does the “average person” then get access to geographic data about off-the-path areas? Google Earth of course.

Being a self-proclaimed map addict, I love playing with Google Earth and enjoy trying out different features. Tracks4Africa is an organization based out of South Africa that has integrated their services into Google Earth. Their goal is to focus on the rural and remote areas of Africa that aren’t well defined and who’s roads, bridges and villages shift over time.

Using GPS devices, the Tracks4Africa community when touring Africa do meticulous record keeping of their travels. From this huge repository of high quality GPS data we have created a super accurate GPS map called the T4A Map. But the T4A Map is more than that, it is the collective navigational experience of the T4A community over the past 7 years. It shows Africa the way it is and how it is constantly changing.

To show how useful the service is, I went into Google Earth and zoomed in on what appeared to be a rather remote section of southern Tanzania, near Ngajira in the Ruaha National Park.

Google Earth showing the remote area - NOT using Tracks4Africa:

The same area shown with Tracks4Africa data embeded in the map:

Crowd Sourced Mapping of Africa
I find what Tracks4Africa is doing incredibly interesting because of the way the are going about it. Anyone who is in any area of Africa can take part in the mapping of the area that they know. It does require having a GPS system in order to store the coordinates, and then the ability to email that data to the Tracks4Africa organization.

The important thing to see here is that the amount of data that they are collecting would cost a for-profit business millions of dollars to put together. Even then, Africa is large and the ability to get to all remote areas for mapping purposes would likely prove too expensive or difficult.

Instead, you simply ask everyone who travels around Africa to send in their data. Of course, this tends to be expats or tourists with the equipment, but other organizations and individuals can take part if they have the GPS tools themselves. It’s inspiring to see, and kudos go to Google for making it more available through access on Google Earth.

Google Earth is not being used to it’s full potential in Africa - yet. Imagine when everyone starts sending in the data for other data points in Africa besides roads and tourist lodging. I for one, would love to see the data for mobile phone towers being submitted and having the ability to start plotting mobile phone coverage on our own, instead of relying on cell phone company data.

Here are a couple of websites created by Africans for the African community. The first two are social networking-type sites, while the third is a personalize homepage.

It’s good to see individuals trying new things for specific niches, and even though some are built using prepackaged solutions. As John from Bwanji mentioned in a comment recently, using prepackaged solutions is the easiest way to get something out the door in a cheap and timely manner. However, it does constrain the product’s roadmap over time.

Bwanji.com is a Zambia’s social networking website. Bwanji is a community site dedicating to connecting Zambians. There looks to be about 3000 users taking part in it. I’d be interested to know what the percentage of users from the diaspora are compared to those within Zambia. On Bwanji there are the normal tools for interaction; a photo album, the ability to gather friends, a blog engine and forums. All in all, it looks like a healthy community and a useful tool.

Akopo, a blogging, chat and games platform, was created by another fellow African blogger: Nino. It was created using the LifeType open source blogging platform, and seems like it has quite a bit of traction (hopefully Nino will fill us in on the numbers). Though most of the blogs seem to be in French, there is an option to create a blog in English as well.

Afrikeo is a dynamic website homepage site, built using the Portaneo Posh tool. The default page comes loaded with African news feeds from Muti and Afrigator, and the BBC. If you’ve used tools like Netvibes or iGoogle before, you’ll recognize an interface that allows you to move modules around, add feeds from your favorite sites and create new pages for additional content.

If you’re a budding Ansel Adams and would like to make some money off of your better photographs, there are a number of options to help you sell your photos. These sites will sell your photos (and sometimes vector art) and share the revenue with you. Don’t think that you can submit just any old image though, most of these services have editors to make sure the quality stays high.

These are also great websites for designers to know about (as I’m sure most already do), since you can find more interesting images to use than you will find at the normal stock photography sites.

iStockPhoto
One of the more established sites, iStockPhoto has been around long enough to have a really solid inventory of images. They have a section for movies, Flash, vector files and normal photos. If you’re looking for something eclectic, you can probably find something here.

Lucky Oliver
One of the newcomers to the show, Lucky Oliver is both original and high quality. I’ve had a chane to meet one of the founders, and his vision for Lucky Oliver is something that will make designers and photographers happy - keep an eye on these guys. I use them regularly, and highly recommend becoming a part of their community as either a designer or photographer.

Shutterstock
Shutterstock gives you vector and normal images, just like the other two listed. How it’s different, is that you pay on a monthly or yearly subscription, not on a per image basis. They seem to have a good selection and if you need a lot of images, this might be a good service for you.

Spy Media
SpyMedia is a place where you can take advantage of being in a good, or lucky, situation. Say you’re out at a show, a sporting event or catch something newsworthy with your camera - well, now you can sell that image directly to news outlets. Members can place “bounties” on getting a certain type of picture, or a picture of a certain person. Fulfiling that bounty allows you to get paid. A similar service to this is Citizen Image.

[UPDATE: Here is another great micro-stock photo review, an article on why micro-stock photography is displacing traditional photography business models, and a blog post from a professionals perspective.]

Zookoda, my favorite blog-to-email application was bought out by PayPerPost in late April. (they’re listed in an earlier “Top 10 Tools for Bloggers” post”

I’ve written about PayPerPost before (here and here), it’s a way for bloggers to make money by writing about products and services. PayPerPost is the platform that brings advertisers and bloggers together.

From DigitalMediaWire:

Zookoda, a company that provides a technology solution currently used by over 10,000 bloggers around the world to update their readers via email whenever they issue a new post. Over 2.3 million people opt-in to blog newsletters powered by Zookoda technology. “We now have 5,500 advertisers and 22,000 blogs in our network, says Ted Murphy. “Zookoda helps building traffic for our bloggers which in terms gives our advertisers more exposure.”

This is big news, it means that PPP is moving towards a more holistic presence among bloggers. I wouldn’t be surprised if they added a blog stats feature as well, it would allow them to present a full package to bloggers.

Ted Murphy, founder of PayPerPost, did mention to me that the Australian founder of Zookoda is with them for a little while. He still won’t tell me the price, but I guess that’s fair. Anyway, good luck to PPP, and congrats to Zookoda.

[update: well, this was a lot more interesting during the conference session. I’m not sure I want to keep it rolling the whole time, I’ll replace it with an image of the session I think.]

UStream.TV is a great new service for videocasters. Here’s the session I’m sitting in right now being live blogged by Robert Scoble:

Pretty neat actually. I wonder how the bandwidth gets handled on dial-up though.

Here’s the static link to the Chris Pirillo ustream.tv feed.

This week I’m in San Francisco at the Web 2.0 Summit. I just found out that Colin Daniels (Youngblood) of the Sunday Times is here as well. It makes me wonder how many other Africans are at it?

If you’re

Here are the sessions that I’ll likely be attending.