African Digital Diaries is live

This was built for us in Bangladesh by the charming Mamunur Rashid - and is starting to do the business.

African mobile predictions

Rudy de Waele has collected five predictions from a wide range of African mobile entrepreneurs and visionaries. They consensually point to a very exciting african mobile future.

Mobile Trends 2020 Africa

View more presentations from Rudy De Waele

Facebook population psychology research tool

This community (or audience) profliing dataset from Cambridge University Psychometrics unit is in beta. http://likeaudience.com/ and I think it is quite interesting. It is the first research tool using facebook as its population sample which is produced with proper statistical methodology.

I see social media planning applications in benchmarking, indexing, community and prediction work: it mines a very large set of Facebook profiles to create a normative population conformed to a standard psychological classification procedure.

Audio Map immersive sound navigation

Nothing beats this for immersive navigation and information delivery on the web. A music map which allows you to see and hear as you explore modern composition. Click "Music Map"

Editing on YouTube

I thought I'd try out the YouTube free editor as I'm always saying that web 2.0 sharing technology makes it easy for everyone to be a creator of content. For African Digital Diaries, it's potentially the way that someone with access only to an internet cafe could work with pictures.

Well, it's simple to get a simple product together. Whatever's on there, you can stitch into a kind of assembly. But you can't add a soundtrack other than music, so narration falls out the window.

Time to re-shoe

Twenty five years ago in Taos an old Indian trader from the pueblo sold me a pair of elk moccassins. I was twenty-two then. He said they would last me out all of my days.

However, he said that about half way through my life, I should come back to Taos to get them repaired and re-soled. He said I would find someone there who would do it, although it wouldn't be him, and he couldn't tell me who it would be.

Well, I have worn these shoes every day of my life for 25 years, they have walked with me on every continent, they have become almost part of my body, and have done me well. Now it's time to pick up the old guy's invitation to find someone in Taos to help to fix them up for the next 25 years. .

I am now starting to look for the particular leather-worker for whom this work might be waiting. I am sure that in 1986 he imagined that we would get on planes and look for each other. But I think that in the spirit of the age, and to conserve fuel, I will try to fulfill this quest by mail and internet. I've located a few designers of Native American wear, and written to the Taos governor, and we will see what happens.

digital stories in university and in life

University of Houston has a format for students to make digital content as part of their work, and distribute it on Itunes and other channels. See it here.

This implies that the action of narrative and story telling is educationally valid as a part of Higher Ed. Do I agree ? I guess I do. Up to a point. If students qualify for employment by telling stories skillfully, it leads us to a society, and intellctual paradigms, that are becoming less analytical and therefore less applicable, and more based on tales, reports and structures of specific personal experience, so perhaps more immediate.

In a strange way, then, digital technology is taking us away from the rational, enlightened, technocratic connectable world, and back into a distinction world of private stories and myths.

I liked Houston's citation of Daniel Meadows' paeon to what all this means:
"multimedia sonnets from the people" in which "photographs discover the talkies, and the stories told assemble in the ether as pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, a gaggle of invisible histories which, when viewed together, tell the bigger story of our time, the story that defines who we are."

Daniel is a discovery - thanks Houston ! - and is based in Wales; and here's a lovely little digital story he did about editing and meaning. Click here

This is unlocking some new possibilities for African Digital Diaries. So digital, that the next batch of stories are making their way by post from South Africa right now, on a CD, in an envelope.