A couple weeks ago Ellen Petry Leanse and Kaushal Jhalla announced that they wanted to put on a Barcamp Africa for afrophiles living in the San Francisco area. They’re both good friends of Ushahidi and we liked the idea, so David and I jumped in where we could (David created the logo). Ellen is also happens to be very well connected in the Bay area, she used to work as an Apple evangelist back in the day alongside Guy Kawasaki, and was directly involved in the success Ribbit has seen lately.

Due to that connection with Guy Kawasaki, the next thing I knew I was being asked for a list of potential blogs and news services to be a part of a new Africa category on Alltop.com – Guy Kawasaki’s news aggregation site. Being a technology blogger first, most of my contributions were in that field. Many of them taken directly from my RSS feed reader, as there hasn’t been a blogroll here in years (due to a glitch in my sidebar that I never fixed…).

Few other people I know had access to, or cared enough, about Africa to get Guy to create the new Africa.Alltop.com. However, Ellen has a strong desire to see increased innovation and change happen, and she is particularly well connected and knowledgeable in technology. Her connection to Africa was solidified as she and her son were caught in Western Kenya during the post-election violence in Kenya earlier this year (an amazing story that I hope everyone gets to read sometime). She comes directly out of Malcolm Gladwell’s “Tipping Point“, I’m just not sure which category she fits in yet.

I’ll be interested in seeing how the list on Alltop grows and morphs over time. For the time being I’ll use it as a supplement for my daily Africa news. I’m just happy that African news and bloggers are gaining additional attention outside of the traditional African blog echo chamber.

If you think there is a good pan-African blog that was missed, or just a really good African blog with a wide readership, make sure you suggest it.

Sidenote

As is increasingly true, the best place to follow each of these individuals/events is on Twitter at:

Twitter.com/chep2m – Ellen
Twitter.com/ksjhalla – Kaushal
Twitter.com/guykawasaki – Guy
Twitter.com/barcampafrica – Barcamp Africa