Since I’m on a map-kick, I thought I’d link to one more cool online map tool. FlashMap is Google Earth and MSN Maps in your browser, instead of as a desktop application. You can easily scroll in to see a close-up of any area in the world.
WhiteAfrican
Where Africa and Technology Collide!
Category: Web Stuff (page 40 of 45)
Web 2.0 at it’s best – repurposing and mashing up technologies. WalkJogRun.net is a Google Maps mashup that allows you to mark running or walking trails in your area. Anyone in the US & UK can then find trails in their area. It’s built on trust, that everyone will act responsibly and mark real trails in their areas. It’s consumer driven, the site owner provides the infrastructure, but the users create the content. It’s well designed, providing value adding features in a simple way.
Other things I like:
- It gives all the distances
- You can upload trails to Google Earth
- You can email a trail to a friend
- They’ve got a great logo
I’m a map addict. For whatever reason, I really enjoy reading and digging into a map of a specific area. I came across Planiglobe (via LifeHacker), which creates vector graphics of any area on the globe. This is very helpful for someone like myself who likes to customize things for use in websites or presentations.
Here’s the map as an Adobe Illustrator file
Here’s the same map after it’s been cleaned up a little.
As you can see, it’s very easy to manipulate and fix up to a usable format.
The guys over at Geek Culture have figured out how a Steve Jobs Apple keynote really goes down…
I’m heading to O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology Conference (eTech) in March. The best part about these conferences are the new ideas you hear from others, and then the way those spur you on to hatch your own hair-brained plans. Great stuff! Anyway, it being in San Diego just adds to the fun. I haven’t been back to California in 6 or more years.
I plan on blogging from it, of course.
A few days ago I started an “Africa” tag at 1000tags. Since that time a small discussion has been brewing over at Black Looks about monetizing your blog. It’s an interesting an sensitive subject within the blogosphere that I have seen addressed a couple times within the African blogging community in particular.
I’m guessing here, but I’d say that 90% of bloggers come from developed nations where the writers make a living elsewhere and don’t need to supplement their income through their blog (notice I said need, not want). These bloggers blog because they feel their need to share their thoughts and insights with whoever might stumble across and read their blog. This is the general background to the idealistic viewpoint of a “pure” advertisement-free blog – White African falls into this camp. Read Seth Godin’s piece to get a better understanding of the history of this mindset.
Oluniyi brought up a good point though, especially for “the other 10%”:
You can’t avoid monetizing your blog, if you don’t have any other means of survival. Here in Africa, poverty is still very much rampant and folks would hold on to anything, just to survive. I’m for monetizing blogs. At least, the additional income would help offsetting some of the bills one incurs for being online.
So, is there an argument for trying to monetize your blog when it truly supports the writer being able to blog at all? I think so. If you make 1000/= Kenya shillings a week and it costs you 100/= shillings to get online and blog at an internet cafe/shop, then any small amount of advertising revenue that you can bring in makes sense.
It’s an interesting debate, one that I’d love to hear others chime in on. Thoughts?
Where to start on such a topic? Lady Raptastic is to breakup songs what Milli Vanilli is to lip syncing. Don’t believe me, or don’t get what the heck I’m talking about? Please, visit Da Breakup Song website and test the song player out. It’s just freaking funny, and very well put together. I just sent my brother-in-law one, saying that he was “cheap” and “talked to much”.
Oh, if you can bear to read the stuff, she seems to have a blog and podcast as well.
Found this via Digital Africa’s blog. It looks like Global Voices is hiring a managing editor that will work remotely:
Preference given to candidates from outside the United States and Western Europe.
Global Voices Online is a non-profit global citizens’ media project, sponsored by and launched from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School. So, if you’re looking for a good job, fire out that resume!
Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch pointed me in the direction of 1000tags.com. Similar to the idea behind the MillionDollarHomePage, it allows you to purchase links/tags to your website. By the way, I’m extremely jealous that Alex Tew thought of this and made a million bucks and not me!
Well, I thought this would be the first (and maybe last) place that WhiteAfrican.com would try and do some advertising. Mostly because by starting the tag “AFRICA”, I thought it would be a huge help to all of the other African bloggers out there, especially my chums at the Kenya Blog Webring. It costs $30 to buy into the AFRICA shared tag – and that’s for life too, no future payments – so not a bad deal at all. The more people who join, the bigger the tag grows.
I hope that my other bloggers of African heritage will join and also pass this news on to everyone else!
UPDATE from 1000Tags.com:
1000tags.com goes in Alexa’s TrafficRank position from nowhere to 4,808 in less than 3 days!
Macworld, Steve Jobs private little time to unveil his newest Apple products and prove his peers at Google, Microsoft and Yahoo to be novices in comparison when giving a presentation and releasing new products to the world. He truly is the best at it, and his legions of fans prove it out. (watch the video here)
How popular is it? Let’s take a gander at what’s hot in the blogosphere today by looking at Technorati’s “top searches this hour”.
The first 3, and 4 out of 10 overall, pretty impressive
What did we get from this Macworld?
A new iMac – pretty cool.
A new version of iLife – not bad.
A new version of iWork – VERY cool (more on this later)
A new MacBook laptop – Wow, this is sweet!
What Apple really did right here is the MacBook. People were chomping at the bit for the new Intel Core Duo powered computers – Macs have lacked the pure processing power that their PC counterparts have had for years. Most people didn’t think that Apple would have their top level laptops redone with the new chips in time, thinking that they would have to wait until the summer for them. Underpromising and overdelivering – there’s just a huge wave of excitement over this product. The $2000+ ticket price will not stop this from being a very high selling product.
I actually used to hate Macs. That was up until about a year ago when their software started to become useful. Now, it’s one of the reasons that I really like using them. The thing that got me most excited about this release was iWork’s Keynote 3 (Apple’s version of Powerpoint). I design quite a few presentations and have always thought that Keynote looked much better than Powerpoint. Up until Keynote 2 it wasn’t as powerful – you just couldn’t do as much as you could with Powerpoint. After reviewing what’s available online, I think we’ve finally reached a point where Keynote 3 is just an overall better product in every way than Powerpoint. Very exciting times indeed if you’re a Mac owner.
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