Kenyan bloggers keep world informed

Kenya has one of the most vibrant blogging communities in Africa according to the Internet and Democracy project team at Harvard in the United States in this blog entry on the impact of ‘Blogs, SMS and the Kenyan Election': “Blogs and mobile phones have played critical roles since violence erupted,” according to the blog post which is hosted at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

The blog post goes on to report: “Besides South Africa, Kenya has long had the most vibrant blogging community in sub-Saharan Africa. Since Sunday, when the government instituted a media blackout, blogs have become critical to spreading the latest news. On Tuesday, the blackout was lifted, but in this rapidly changing situation, bloggers have been far swifter and more detailed in their reporting about the latest clashes…”

According to the Internet and Democracy blog, only 3.2% of Kenyans have internet access, so mobile phones are a far more useful tool in disseminating information as we have seen where major news organisations like the BBC started accepting and publishing sms comments from viewers and listeners requesting more information and the fact that the major blog sites reporting on the Kenyan post-election violence started accepting comments via sms.

The blog Global Voices, also funded by the Berkman Center at Harvard, asks the following question: “Has technology, particularly citizen media, played any positive role in covering the crisis in Kenya?” It is tracking links and blog extracts of some of the significant blogs reporting on Kenya to try answer that question.

New media model

As we have seen since the London bombings on July 7, 2005 and the Virginia Tech shootings in the US on 16 April 2007, the rise of the blogger or ‘citizen journalist' has been changing the way major news organisations source their news and the way the news is reported, i.e., with immediacy through the real time witnesses capturing the event with their first hand experience in words or pictures and video through their mobile phones.

The media model is changing radically and this has been brought home to us even more with a tragedy of the magnitude of Kenya happening on our doorstep. If anyone in our industry doubted the power of the mobile phone in Africa (that we on Bizcommunity.com and our expert contributors have been banging on about for over a year to our media, marketing and advertising community of 80 000 weekly subscribers across Africa), the Kenyan example should demonstrate its power even more.

Remember sitting glued to your television during the fall of the Twin Towers in New York on September 11, 2001? Or the Tsunami in Asia on the day after Christmas, 2004? We were reliant on the TV networks to push the news and visuals to us, reliant on the programming of the television stations in our country deciding how long we would be interested in the story… That's has all changed in the last three/four years with the enormous progress in mobile phone technology and the fact that it is the one device that people carry on their person at all times, so that when they are on the scene of a natural or manmade disaster, it has become part of our culture to want to ‘tell our story', it's part of human nature, except this time we can do it with pictures and video, as well – and the internet has given us a global stage for our stories.

The first video footage of the Tsunami actually slamming into the beaches and hotels of Thailand were shot by mobile phone and distributed by the major news services. But it was with the London bombings in 2005 when mobile access to websites and blogs really came into its own as far as highlighting a major news event was concerned by the very witness on the ground – almost instantly after the event. Remember with the Virginia Tech shootings when blow-by-blow accounts were being posted on personal blogs and news blogs by students hiding in their dorms from the gunman, also via internet, mobile phone and sms?

I predict that the rise of social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and YouTube, which have helped the mainstream user of the internet who wouldn't normally blog or have the technical know-how to do much more than get their email and Google, will aid greatly in getting the mainstream consumer more internet-savvy and brave enough to try the new technologies on offer.

Kenya blog links

The posts coming from within Kenya are heartbreaking. Many bloggers using large scale sms-ing have also been threatened by security forces this week – receiving sms's to that effect which they have then proceeded to post as well, such is their need to get information out and tell their stories.

Here some of the blog links on Kenya highlighted by the Internet and Democracy blog and on Global Voices and White African:

Berkman and Harvard Law School alumni Ory Okollo: Kenyan Pundit

Juliana Rotich on Afromusing

Nick Wadhams on the context in view of previous Kenyan elections.

Ndesanjo Macha has been posting excellent Kenya updates on Global Voices

White African has a list of bloggers covering the conflict in Kenya and its aftermath.

And news services: www.africanews.com

And in the interests of spreading the news, all the above sites provide further links to blogs, news sites, pictures and video on the conflict.