[kictanet] Tandaa - An Honest Analysis

Tue Nov 18 08:22:14 EAT 2008

Hi all,

As indicated by Alex, spam & forced mailinglist subscriptions is a
critical "local content" issue now that Alai has pointed fingers.

I have been forced onto lists that do not allow for unsubscribing thus
I have marked Alai's address and his mailinglists as spam addresses.

Robert, please sort that out first so that the "traffic" and
"subscription" numbers on your lists is a true reflection of
subscription by choice rather than forced numbers.

I bet someone else has had the same experience with Kazi africa, bidii
africa and other lists.

Wainaina

On 11/18/08, Gakuru Alex <alexgakuru.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
> Alai,
>
> I am somewhat now tempted to start a local content blog focusing on
> 'opinion influencers' and opinion shapers themselves - informed by the
> fact that, content is king and awaited 'future online content warfare'
> arrived a long time ago.
>
> So despite excluding my skunkworks presentation from your firing
> squad, I shall nonetheless shoot back at you;)
>
> On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 12:37 AM, Robert Alai <alai.robert at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Mirembe
>>
>> I have a very open and honest analysis of our Tandaa conference.
>>
>> The facts which we must change is that Paul Kukubo, my big brother still
>> sees it best to defend foreign companies and say that "eve if we want
>> local
>> content we must stilldo it with foreigners'.
>
> Paul stated, "Let's realise that Internet is one. How can have 'our
> Internet' so shielded away for 'outsiders Internet' to the extent that
> 'our content' is only accessible to us yet somehow  we expected to
> make money from 'outsiders' through 'our Internet'? Maybe we should
> not use downloaded [even-free] 'foreign' software, 'foreign'
> computers, 'foreign' concepts, nothing 'foreign' except only localyy
> made?" That was heavy!
>
>>Let me tell you a thing. We
>> must focus on local mpaka it becomes music. When I saw the slides of Joe
>> Mucheru, which apparently I have seen in every conference I have attended
>> in
>> which he is the speaker. The websites listed there, non were Kenyan. The
>> fact that Mucheru works for a Carlifornian company and he is Kenyan should
>> make Mucheru sell Kenya more.
>
> Its what all (or at least the majority of) the people in that room
> were there *actually doing* Give Mucheru a break. (You stand accused
> of promoting 'foreign content' by using Google mailing lists;)
>
>> If you wanted a subscription website, you
>> should have started with kenyalaw.org. If you wanted affiliates,
>> mamamikes.com has affiliates. Lets focus on local. Lets give it lots of
>> thought. We must give local examples and then mention the foreign ones
>> just
>> as an after-thought.
>
> I wish you had asked ICT Board to make a presentation to the audience
> to articulate you point?
>
>> We want the companies to give the local content much thought and they can
>> only do that when they think locally. When you make people believe that
>> facebook is great, we wont head anywhere. See why Tanzanians are engaging
>> more in bongo5.com and jamiiforums than facebook and others. They are
>> actively loading pics and content and these two websites are really coming
>> up well and considreing the age of the websites, we will see nice things
>> from them. We should not glorify anything western. We must start
>> appreciating our own facebook like Ngari has developed a good site,
>> www.kasarani.com
>
> Kasarani is your website, right? The conference was not a sales pitch
> for *anyone* but a conversation exploring various ways to promote
> local content.
>
>> When I started my start forum and blogging thing, jamiiforums.com, we had
>> lots of problems. But we also had people telling us that the forum which
>> is
>> being run by my great friend Maxence, was going nowhere because Tanzanians
>> don't speak a lot of English. See the site now. I don't think that there
>> is
>> any forum in this region with that kind of killer traffic.
>
> Me, me, me again... Try a bit of our, our, our, country's local content.
>
>> There is no forum
>> in this region which makes the government shakes like hell when issues are
>> being analyzed there. And they are doing it most of the time in Swahili.
>> We
>> must focus on being local if we want local content.
>
> 'Government' is a strange 3-legged animal Executive, Legislature, and
> Judiciacy.
> If one makes this animal 'shake like hell,' that person ought to be in
> very serious trouble...
>
>> NMG bought a script from Germans and installed it on their site without a
>> forum nor blogs for the senior writers. Why? No creativity. NTV, EasyFm
>> and
>> QFM are not online. A very good percentage of articles in Mailbox are
>> plagiarized from blogs and forums without acknowledgement and articles in
>> entertainment and lifestyle mazagines are plagiarized from magazines like
>> cosmopolitan and Elle sometimes word for word.
>
> Why so excessive negative energy? There must be something NMG have done
> right?
>
>> The Tandaa website was .com and not .co.ke. Even if you are not hosting
>> locally, you could still have had a local domain registration.
>
> Had you tried http://www.tandaa.co.ke/ before the conference? BTW, I
> host websites abroad many times and I have no problems with it. It can
> be a business decision why host locally with painfully expensive ISP?
> Host 'politically incorrect' website at a pro-conformist provider
> 'anti-telcos' content with one of them.... etc.. It's a matrix of
> decision making procees..
>
>> The funniest thing I got from the conference, why would 6 or 7 speakers
>> speak for 15 minutes each and then  the forum audience is given 10 minutes
>> to ask questions and suggestions?
>
> The sun waits for no King and time has never been enough.
>
>>Do you know that the slides from Capital,
>> NMG, Google, Homeboyz, Kictanet, ICT board, Strathmore, Rich, Cisco and
>> others are shown to us almost in every conference we attend. They have
>> become so predictable that the best place to get more stories and even
>> slides which you have never seen is from the public.
>
> Would you also be suggesting that new school textbooks be published every
> year?
>
>>Givingg 15 minutes to
>> each speaker which is 105 minutes for the seven speakers then the audience
>> asks and get replies in 10 minutes is really not correct and shows and
>> attitude of escapism where te audience are feared that they might embarass
>> the speakers with questions.
>
> You just created conveniently suitable circumstances to arrive at your
> conclusion?
>
>> The other facts of the conference was ok. The moderator, Al Kags, was ok
>> but
>> I think that we can do alot of improvements by having power cable well
>> spread for bloggers and also the Wi-Fi to be abit superior. I had to rely
>> on
>> my Zain unlimited since the ICT board Wi-fi kept shutting down.
>
> Would it not have been fair to mention some of those 'ok' facts. Its
> called "fair commentating"
>
>> We also think that we can have an active network and the best place to
>> start
>> is now here in KICTANET. I see us turning KICTANET into an open vbulletin
>> run forum with CMS managed frontpage like www.haitiwebs.com and
>> www.mustangevolution.com. Vbulletin is so superior and it wont take us
>> even
>> a day to have this thing up and running.
>
> Dunno..
>
>> Senior members, what do you think?
>
> I just have. But allow me to add that *nix users have this thing about
> multi-thread thought processes which lead me to advice users to format
> their Windows and install *nix. It makes engagement multi-faceted
> critique and criticize when necessesary but also appreciate and praise
> excellent achievement.
>
> Tandaa.08 was an excellent event and I wish the ICT board could
> explain to us who were the brains behind it. They can count on me for
> their next such conference.
>
> Rider:
>
> There is a clip one run NTV of an Edloret pharmacist who literary and
> severally slapped himself on the face upon being visited by Pharmacies
> and Poisons Board drug inspectors.
> Let's not always take the shrtest route to slap every great
> initiative, erroneously.
>
> Also we avoid "local content spam", for example, forced mailing lists
> subscriptions;)
>
> G'day,
>
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