Chai

Citizen Uganda projected to win California and New York

Administrator — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 23:31:32 -0600

In the past some pundits have claimed that Citizen Uganda is just a flash in the pan, but now we know that is not true. According to the latest poll by Google Analytics, Citizen Uganda is projected to win California and New York, and might still pull out wins in Alabama, Massachusetts, Texas and Virginia. These wins in big states are significant and most analysts believe that CU's campaign will be see an injection of funds following such a strong showing in these significant states. With that capital, CU will be capable of mounting a serious challenge to the established blogs. The pundits now feel that the race is too close to call. With more states due to vote in the coming weeks it is possible that this will go down to the wire.

Oh yeah!

Okay so maybe we are not in the running for the American primaries, but CU has been nominated for best design in the 2008 Uganda Best of Blogs Awards. And just like Kanye, we plan to flip out if we don't win. So if you want to avoid a scene, we strongly suggest you get over to The Kampalan and cast your vote. For CU.

Seriously Tho', it has been a great couple of weeks here at CU. We got some great press on Global Voices (much appreciated) and we certainly appreciate the nomination on UBOB (congratulations to the other nominees) so we think it is time to crank things up a bit here.

But we need some help from you.

If you have some great articles, photographs or political cartoons you want to share with the world, we want to hear from you.

Umm, I don't know. What is in it for me?
We promise to credit you by name (we won't publish you otherwise), and on top of that you get a free ad for one month to your blog on the Notice Board. If you do not have a blog, we shall post an ad to a charity of your choice. It's up to you. Just contact us if you are interested or check out the contribute page for instructions on how to submit content.

But I have my own blog
Yeah, but is your blog going to win California? Texas? New York?

Didn't think so.

Kenya's violence in Images

Paschal — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 13:08:35 -0600

These images are taken by Kenyan bloggers and photojournalists in the country over the past three weeks.

The RSS feed is coming from Kenya Post-Election Pictures 2008, a Flickr group.

Google ads does not know best

Administrator — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 23:50:04 -0600

Google ads may seem like an easy way to make a little money off your blog or your site, but those webcrawlers cannot always put two and two together. This is a shot of the Monitor website today. Given what is going on in Kenya at the moment, now may not be the best time to advertise a study abroad program in that country.

Keep that in mind.

Design in Africa: le design de shock

Administrator — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 01:53:53 -0600

A little bit of context: It's not that this guy has anything against Canadian designers. It is just that he was speaking to some people from Design Africa, a trade development initiative of the Trade Facilitation Office Canada and its African and Canadian partners.

Check out the rest of the videos on this series.

Don't believe everything you see on CNN

Paschal — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 13:50:00 -0600

Jay Smooth lays into CNN, and reminds us all that questioning media is not just healthy, it is essential.

And you're over ten, and watch CNN and believe everything
you're in too deep
Damian Marley, lyrics on In 2 Deep on Welcome to Jamrock.

Kenyan Elections

Paschal — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 02:20:10 -0600

You should by now know that parts of Kenya are on the brink of full-blown violence following the announcement that Mwai Kibaki has won the hotly disputed Kenyan elections. The Economist has posted an analysis of Kenya's unsound election.

Much thanks to DEMOSH who posted images of the Kenyan elections on Flickr.

Creative Marketing

Administrator — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 18:01:02 -0600

This past summer I was in Toronto for a couple of days, and saw an artist working on a chalk drawing on the sidewalk. His work was impressive, so i guess it was a matter of time before someone approached him for a marketing gig.

With all the artists and album launches in Kampala, maybe...

But then again maybe not. If an artist were able to find a piece of sidewalk, the chances of getting arrested for vandalism is pretty high. Still, one hopes...

Visualize the News: the marumushi newsmap

Paschal — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 13:59:01 -0600

The web is full of great little apps that demonstrate innovative information architectures and designs. I was having a conversation with Silumesii from Pencilcase Studios about web designs and he showed me this neat little web app by the folks at marumushi.com in Tokyo. They developed a flash newsmap that presents the changing contents of the Google News news aggregator in something that looks like a tag cloud. Each headline is tagged with a category and contained in a color-coded container. The color of the container denotes the subject category: red for world, purple for health, green for technology, etc.

By hovering over the container with your mouse, you can find out how many articles feature this headline in the Google News news aggregator. The flash app refreshes its feeds every couple of minutes, adjusting the size of each headline according to its significance.

The user can select from only 11 countries, of which Japan is strangely not one. African news did not make the cut either, but that is not surprising.

I love for this web app, primarily because it represents a willingness to reconfigure the presentation of news in a format that accounts for relevance and timeliness. I would love to see something like this for the African region. Does that mean I am going to try and build it? Well, I am no expert in flash or xml, but I am curious, and that's usually how it starts.