Kenyan Pundit

I’m still on my blogging drought (or is it blog-menopause? TM Nick 2006).

Cool link of the week: coCooment, tracks all your comments wherever you leave them online andtracks responses to your comments.

Why donor funded projects often suck. Wouldn’t it have been simpler / more sensible to just have the Ministry of Justice allocate funds to train and hire court reporters (job creation, hello?) and buy the requisite machines, rather than keep some (foreign) consultants in business and keep the process mired in procurement shadiness?

Can Kimunya focus on implementing his directive instead of chasing bogeymen?

Mzalendo news: First, if you haven’t done so please read Thinker’s brilliant piece on Mzalendo…sometimes we just get vexed about all the (unhelpful) pontificating. Second, it looks like I’ve managed to find a way to get my hands on the Parliament’s Order Papers…they do make for interesting reading so please check them out, I hope my access will be regular (eternal thanks to my super-duper hookup…50% of my time on mzalendo is spent on finagling information out of a very closed system). Finally, Mzalendo got wiki’d!

Popularity: 6% [?]

- Hash get’s his manifesto published (Yeah!).

- For those people who are thinking about doing projects in Africa and Kenya in particular, please read this report by MIT students who were recently working on several projects. Why? First, it shows that you can have your cake AND eat it (M’s post notwithstanding). Being overseas is not necessarily mutually exclusive with trying to make a difference at home in a non-remittance manner. Second, helping is not that easy…some of the challenges that the students faced are a classic case of us shooting ourselves in the foot as Kenyans et. al., from administrators who act like they are doing you a favor to ten thousand procedures before you can get anything done.

- Zookada an email tool for bloggers just launched, looks really neat and is especially useful for bloggers whose readers don’t have regular net access.

- Why I hate drug companies.

- Who says there’s no money in Kenya? Wonder what it would take to spur similar interest in V-C type funding.

- For the geeks: Share your OPML (share outlines, feeds, taxonomy) and Valleyschwag (just click on the link dammit).

- Now why didn’t this ever occur to me when I was searching for a paper topic in law school?

Popularity: 2% [?]

- My new obsession - food blogs (I love cooking), among my favs The Cooks Cottage (via Global Voices and check out the blogroll as well).

- Nokia introduces local Nigerian languages as an option on their mobile phones. Nice.

- For the Mac geeks, 10 Essential Mac Apps. I’m a particular fan of Netnewswire (definitely worth paying for by the way), Imagewell and Transmit.

- For music loving geeks, Tunefeed, a new music sharing widget.

- For all geeks, 101 Fabulous Technology freebies.

- Great post on Samba Mapangala / Virunga.

Popularity: 6% [?]

- Kenyan courts to FINALLY have stenographic services. About freaking time.

- Chinese as a second language?

- For the geeks, Roofnet, experimental 802.11 mesh network that will be used in conjunction with the One Laptop per child project. The software is open source and they have a great wiki.

- Google Calendar. Still in private beta but looks pretty awesome.

Popularity: 3% [?]

What did we used to do before RSS again???

- So Charles Taylor has been captured and that’s excellent news but I would have liked to see more balanced coverage of the story as far as Nigeria’s role. As Chippla points out, “Without a doubt, the Nigerian government was pissed off by such a move and seemed to say “come get him if you want him.” After all, the Nigerian president allowed Taylor to come live in Calabar as part of a [U.S brokered] deal to end the Liberian civil war. This is a fact that must not be overlooked in any discussion on the current state of Liberia. Had Charles Taylor not left Liberia, the civil war would not have ended at the time it did.”

- Newish and supposedly the biggest job-search database; it searches message boards as well.

- African women reshaping the continent.

- A case of the pot calling the kettle black.

- Wyclef Jean using his celebrity to do good in Haiti.

Popularity: 14% [?]