This Week in Appfrica [Nov 16 - 22, 2008]

^{“This Week in Appfrica” is a weekly digest highlighting articles and stories from the previous week.
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Editorials

African Singularity
Exploring the approaching ’singularity’ and analyzing what it means for Africa and other developing regions of the world.

RSS and the Mobilization of News
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is an easy way to keep people updated with information from news sources, blogs and other publications on the web. Currently there’s no easy way to reach people who aren’t ‘connected’ with the internet, but it doesn’t make that information any less relevent. This post brainstorms on some potential methods for using RSS to serve the mainstream, beyond the areas where computing is abundant.

News

Analyzing Africa’s Internet Traffic
What are the most popular sites on the internet in African countries? Well, I couldn’t do all 50+ countries so I looked at Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, Egypt and Nigeria…the countries most often associated with being the technology leaders of their respective regions.

Journalist Bikes Through Congo
Tim Butcher, author of the book Blood River, is dedicated to his craft. So dedicated that he took nothing but a motorbike through vast stretches of the Congo countryside…

Japanese Blogger versus Rwandan Hotsauce
I’m not sure how Akabanga ended up in Japan but it’s fairly popular in Rwanda. Blogger Emiko Huruya decides to try it.

Tech Awards Honors Social Entrepreneurs
Al Hammond of Next Billion writes about attending the Tech Museum Awards in San Jose last week where hundreds of CEOs, developers and engineers gathered to honor some of their exceptional peers. It just so happens that this year those honorees were mostly Social Entrepreneurs.

While Twitter was Sleeping
While Twitter was sleeping, a number of start-ups have sprung up with huge appetites ready to eat the companies lunch for breakfast.

Events

Facebook Comes to Kampala
Facebook sends staffers to Kampala for the countries first Developers Garage.

Archives

A Web Without Africa
With Africa offline, it comes increasingly easy for investors in the private sector to ignore Africa as an irrelevant population when it comes to the tech sector. This means less jobs, less opportunities and less concern (from the rest of the world business community) for anything that goes on here at all. In other words, Africa is facing a potential shut out from the global marketplace in ways much more absolute than ever before…