2.2. Kabissa Blogs

Kabissa will begin blogging in a variety of key ways that have a potential to contribute in a big way to our work and the work of our member organizations:

• Kabissa team members that want to will set up their own blogs, syndicated to the Kabissa website and to technorati, digg.com and other blog bookmarking and aggregation sites including Global Voices
• We will set up a centralized blog on the Kabissa website that enables the team to blog from the Kabissa perspective as well as to promote guest bloggers. The blog will provide feeds relevant to Kabissa from Global Voices and other bookmarking and aggreggation sites. The blog will also feature a Kabissa badge/feed with instructions that others can add to their blogs and websites.

One major goal of Kabissa is to keep our members informed of opportunities and ICT in Africa developments on a timely basis. We do this through the Kabissa website as well as the Kabissa Gong Gong member newsletter. The newsletter is produced on a monthly basis and distributed by e-mail to members as well as posted on the Website. Generally, the website content and newsletter are produced in a relatively formal style appropriate for an organization, and this format is well received by newsletter subscribers.

We do have two regular “columns” that are dynamic and personal. One is the “Member Spotlight”, designed to provide a soapbox for organiations to introduce themselves to the community and describe in their own words how they are using ICT successfully. The other is the “Dear Mimi Internet Advice” column, written generally by Tobias Eigen and occasionally other guest writers. Because of her projected personality and friendly writing style, the Mimi persona could be described as a blogger. These columns are also quite popular and, because they are original and appear first in our newsletter and website, are often blogged by others and drive quite a few readers to our website from all over the globe.

Our method for adding content to the website and producing the newsletter is rather rudimentary. We have an Online Community Coordinator internship position, currently based out of the University of Washington in Seattle, and the coordinator is in charge of monitoring the editors e-mail mailbox for submissions and correspondence, evaluating submissions and posting the relevant ones in the appropriate category on our website. The website is built using a content management system called Joomla, which enables the coordinator to add articles via a web interface with a minimum of training. S/he also produces the newsletter on a monthly basis by copying and pasting content into a wiki page which is then reviewed and edited by other members of the editorial team. When the newsletter is ready to go out, we send it via an email mailing list.

The existing content management system and procedures works very well, however we have realized that the content we are making available can be made even more useful and accessible if we start blogging. On a purely personal level, members of the Kabissa team are eager for more opportunities to share their views using their own voice. We often have very interesting discussions (if not heated debates!) in internal meetings and with partners and collaborators. We share e-mails we receive amongst ourselves with interesting articles, discussions from e-mail mailing lists, upcoming conferences, new books and resources - many make it into our website and newsletter but not all of them do. In particular, when sharing resources we do not usually have the time - or space! - to explain to the online community coordinator why we think an email is particularly interesting or important. It is this piece that is particularly valuable and is currently being lost.

We also have many people involved in Kabissa, especially our members, training partners, advisors and board members, who have very powerful views and insight into the state of ICT in Africa. While we are often amazed by what we learn from them, the benefits of what we learn often stay with us or only emerge later in the form of improvements to our programs. A “guest blog” feature would enable us to spread the benefits of their knowledge while also giving them credit and encouragement through a public “endorsement” on our blog.

On a technical level, the website can be improved with blogging features in a number of important ways. Currently it is possible to search for content via keyword searches, or to browse via the navigation menu or “read more” links from the home page and section main pages. Blogs have new ways of enhancing the navigation and accessibility of website content just like ours, including for example:

• tags/keywords/categories
• linkbacks
• bookmarks (Technorati, delicious, digg etc)
• rss feeds (Feedburner, etc)
• add comments/discuss article
• links to profile page and other articles added by the author

And finally, Kabissa's standing in search engines will be greatly improved by having a set of closely related blog websites sharing tags/keywords/categories and linking to each other frequently. So for example if Kabissa announces an event and Kabissa staff all blog about the announcement, the event will immediately be given high rankings in Google search results and on Technorati, Feedburner and other blog aggregation sites. This will also increase the possibility that other bloggers will find out about the event and add their voices as well.

A number of blogging tools will be experimented with during the course of this experiment, with feedback provided by team members on the tools they work with.

Given our background with Joomla and tools we have had exposure to in the past, we are considering the following tools:

• Joomla CMS and Add-ons
• Wordpress Free/Open Source Software
• Hosted on Wordpress.com
• Hosted on Blogger.com

Helping to decide are these resources:

• Asymptomatic Blog Breakdown - feature comparison of a large selection of blog software (does not include hosted blogs like blogger.com).
  • Same author also described his decision-making process and ultimate choice of WordPress
• Weblogmatrix.org - same creators as wikimatrix.org, feature comparison of a limited number of blog sofware, but including the main ones and blogger.com

As we get into blogging, a number of Web 2.0 services that enhance and support bloggers keep coming up that we will also experiment with. More may emerge as we move along, but at first sight the most relevant appear to be:

• Del.icio.us
• digg.com
• Flickr.com
• Technorati

As part of our experiment, we will create accounts on a range of these services for Kabissa team members and for Kabissa, and use these services for cross linking and sharing between the blogs.

• 3.4: Kabissa Blogs Implementation Plan

We will share our experiences once we have been blogging for a short while.