In 2006, I created a project with a friend who had taught in Botswana. Called "Blogswana," the project was designed to teach students at the University of Botswana how to employ social media to tell their own stories. It was very popular - with Africans. All the funding sources, public and private, however, seemed to believe the same thing: Why fund tech when everyone knows Africans need industrial baby formula and fly whisks? Why teach social media when no one in the "Dark Continent" knows how to use a computer?
Well, the entire continent of Africa begs to differ with that cartoonish picture. Having covered African technology extensively here, and having been invited to speak at the continent's largest digital technology conference, I wanted to find out what Africans themselves were doing in terms of utilizing the social web to short circuit the abiding desire of the West to draft Brad Pitt and Bono as the voices of Africa. I found the Kuyu Project.
ESRI and the US Department of the Interior announced a new website today that makes it easy for anyone to view 30 years of global satellite data and changes in vegetation world-wide. Called the ChangeMatters Viewer, the project democratizes access to the multi-billion dollar, multi-decade, multi-agency project of monitoring global ecological well-being from space.
ESRI, a giant geodata company that works closely with government, is the clear leader of the Geo 1.0 technology world. It believes the 30-meter resolution imagery will be helpful for mapping regional trends in climate change, agriculture, wildlife habitat, forestry, regional planning, coastal zones and national security. It certainly makes me want to ask the people behind planning at the Portland airport (pictured above) why there's been so much vegetation lost along the river north of my house over the last 30 years.
Australia has begun employing the Web as a major tool in gathering, preserving and sharing the cultural traditions of its native peoples. The religious, personal and individual stories of Australia's native peoples, their visual art and worldviews are globally acknowledged to have a powerful presence. However, as with most now-minority peoples around the world, the forces of centralization and modernization have taken their toll.
Now, Web technologies are allowing the peoples in question to dynamically capture and pass on the wisdom and experiences of their culture as a whole and those of their elders in particular. Here are two particularly exciting examples of how technology has been used in Australia to achieve these goals.
Something I've believed since I began work for ReadWriteWeb is that nothing we write about here exists in a vacuum. No matter how obscure or specific or rarefied, every story we tell is about someone somewhere doing something. War, the economy, revolution, social movements - everyone everywhere is affected by everything. So when I saw what my best friend, Kelvin Holland, had done, I saw, among other things, a story about us.
Lo these many years ago, Kelvin and I met at what became Ask.com. He wound up as the Head of Testing and I ran corporate projects. He now works in the DC area as the web producer for a history publisher. It was there he met Al Webber, a jazzman of the old school. Al recently passed away, but not before technology empowered Kelvin to capture, preserve and share a part of the man's ineffable essence.
It's not like open field farming. OK, it is a little bit. Marcin Jakubowski, of Open Source Ecology, has taken it upon himself to release the blueprints for 50 farm machines in open source. According to his TED page, this is one element in a more ambitious project.
"Using wikis and digital fabrication tools, TED Fellow Marcin Jakubowski is open-sourcing the blueprints for 50 farm machines, allowing anyone to build their own tractor or harvester from scratch. And that's only the first step in a project to write an instruction set for an entire self-sustaining village."
Mobile carriers in the U.S. will soon have expanded Family Locator solutions in place that offer far more controls than simply tracking family members' whereabouts. Instead, these services will offer tools that allow parents to stop teens from texting while driving, stop "sexting" from occurring and stop kids from communicating with unwanted parties. Parents will also be able to read the content of text messages, preview mobile photos before being posted publicly on the Internet or sent to friends and will be able to specify what types of applications can be downloaded to kids' phones and when those apps can be used.
Visa is launching its own version of the location-based discount, in a move that rivals Facebook Places Deals, Foursquare and other mobile social networks hoping to capitalize on a shopper's physical presence in order to offer them bargains. But in Visa's case, no "checkin" is required. In fact, neither is a smartphone.
Instead, the credit card company is experimenting with SMS text messages containing offers which are sent users who opt-in to the new program. In its initial phase, clothing retailer The Gap is Visa's only partner. Discounts are sent to consumers in predefined zip codes and demographics after qualifying transactions are made with their Visa cards.
Hundreds of Libyans are reported killed in clashes between rebel forces and the Libyan army in the city of Misurata - a conflict that international press is working hard to keep in the light of international attention over the past several weeks.
Today news has emerged that one member of the press has lost his life in the conflict. Tim Hetherington, taking photos for Getty, was among a group of press struck by fire from Libyan forces. Two of Hetherington's colleagues are in grave condition. Why are we writing about this tragic event on a technology blog? Because I thought it was notable that in the long history of war reporters risking their lives to tell terrible but important stories, we now know some of Hetherington's final thoughts before his life ended. Not because he filed a story with the news wires, not because his photos were published in the newspaper, but because he had access to a lightweight public messaging system on the iPhone he carried in his pocket: Twitter.
Today, Facebook announced the launch of several new tools aimed at making the social network a safer and more secure experience for everyone involved. Some of the tools, like the redesigned Family Safety Center and social reporting buttons, are designed to combat the ongoing issue of cyberbullying, which primarily affects the younger Facebook population. Meanwhile, other new tools will be helpful to everyone, like the option to enable an advanced security feature called Two Factor Authentication and the improvements to HTTPS.
All of the new features are available now, says Facebook.
Mideast Youth has launched a new bilingual online platform for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people in the Middle East. Ahwaa.org, created by Mideast Youth, is "a bilingual tool for LGBTQ youth in the Middle East that leverages game mechanics to facilitate authentic, high-quality interactions."
"By creating Ahwaa, we're crossing a red line in the society," said Ahmed Zidan, Mideast Youth's Arabic Editor, "trying to tackle and address the ignorance of the stereotypes here, and at the same time acknowledge the problem of homophobia and try to solve it. It's absolutely deadly here for the mainstream! But for the civilized small communities here, liberals and seculars, our friends come out to us. I have a handful of homosexual friends. Their families don't know, but as close friends in a small circle of special communities, homosexuals come out!"
