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Since the Kenyan army has gone into Somalia in October (during my trip to Kenya), the main Islamist group Al-Shabaab has used Twitter in its propaganda war against the Kenyan government.

It's latest tweets, posted yesterday on @hsmpress, include photos and descriptions of two Kenyan government officials they've kidnapped, Fredrick Irungu Wainaina and Mule Edward.

When people discuss "company culture," they usually do so in terms of employment or sales. How will the way this company has developed to solve problems affect my chances of successfully working for them? How will the timbre of their daily work influence the approach I take to sell to them? But in Africa, the company culture of three big tech firms continues to influence how they treat both an emerging market and the growing human resource they have to draw from in the continent.

I spent a day talking with leaders from IBM, Microsoft and Google about their operations and goals in Africa. We spoke in their offices in Kenya, increasingly important as a gateway to East and Central Africa, as well as to the content as a whole. It turns out that each company's culture has significantly tinted how each sees Africa, and how they operate.

It never occured to Simon Mwaura that, just because he wasn't Bill Gates, he shouldn't have a house like Bill Gates. So, using scrap metal, cannibalized parts and found wire, he built himself a Xanadu of his own in Nairobi.

The self-taught indie security consultant, who specialized in shop security for small businesses in the Kenyan capital, made his house fully mobile-phone controlled. If someone broke in while he was out, for instance, his house would send an SMS message to the local police. But most important of all his innovations was the tea machine.

In sixth grade, our class was given an assignment. Pick a country, learn about it, give a short talk and be able to answer questions. Also, fashion a placard for your desk featuring the flag of the country you've chosen. I chose Kenya. Why? It has lions and its flag is cool! (I'd remind you I was in sixth grade, but it has lions and its flag is cool!)

In the years since, I've realized that Kenya, and the other 45+ countries of Sub-Saharan African, have something else. Technology. Kenya's capital Nairobi is the capital of tech in East Africa. Unfortunately, the sheer weight of media imagery featuring charismatic megafauna and famine overwhelm any clear and nuanced picture of the exciting present and possible future of Africa. So I'm going to Kenya to see if I can't capture some small part of that bigger picture.

Yesterday, Kenya became the first Sub-Saharan African nation to institute a national open data program.

"The Kenya Open Data Initiative (KODI) goes live this morning," White African wrote yesterday, "in a big event that includes President Kibaki, as well as many politicians, government officials and local technologists."

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.

If you like the idea of a quilting bee but prefer your bits electronic instead of fabric, you might be interested in a "ladies mapping party." 70 Kenyan women were, and showed up to a Google-sponsored ladies mapping party at Nairobi's iHub in February.

The women used Google Map Maker, and their specific local knowledge, to fill in schools, health centers, market centers, community development projects, restaurants and roads in a country too often neglected by cartographers.

Kenyan Blogger Ory Okolloh has been hired by Google to oversee that company's policy in Africa.

Most people outside the continent imagine Africa as being the size of a France or two. (In reality it's the size of the U.S., China, Japan and most of Europe.) So it's a big job for a big company that has big plans over a big area of the world.

Forcing those who would rather not to recognize you is the ultimate in revolution, a revolution from non-existence to being. And that's just what the residents of Kibera, the second largest slum in Africa, have done. Under a project they've called Map Kibera, they've publicly mapped a home the government previously depicted as wild forest (the meaning of the slum's name) and put it online.

Using OpenStreetMap (that thing is fast becoming the phlogiston of social entrepreneurship), the 170,070 inhabitants of this slum adjacent to Kenya's capital Nairobi have rewritten the nation's official maps and in doing so, have made their own recognition a fait accompli.

Jordanian student sentence to two years in prison for IM. Imad Al-Ash got two years in prison for the last refuge of the scoundrel, lèse majesté. (If you want a quick rule of thumb for tinhorn dictatorships, check to see if lèse majesté is on the books.) During the five months leading up to his sentencing, the Jordanian secret service tortured the kid. He had allegedly sent an IM criticizing the King of Jordan. Maybe the Queen should consider extending her vaunted public "patronage" of education to encompass the less stylish area of NOT ALLOWING HER HUSBAND TO TORTURE PEOPLE. But what do I know? I went to a state school.

Kenya introduces toll-free SMS to report hate speech. In advance of the August 4 elections, the Kenyan government is prosecuting hate speech. Given the horrible inter-ethnic violence, it's understandable. But given how every thing becomes a weapon in this sort of a fight, it's worrying. When the next election's done, who believes such a thing will be rolled back?