Who is this poet who is sweeping everyone in town with his SpokenWord events? Wamathai is his name. An accountant by profession, Wamathai is a gifted poet who started out sometime mid last year posting his poems on a blog. With some clever use of Twitter, he has managed to create a loyal following among poetry enthususasts in town. Did you hear about the #Paragasha event that took place sometime this week? I have read some of his poems on his blog. Simple but powerful is all I can say. Nothing like unfathomable abstractness, incomprehensible stylistic devices or convoluted techniques of language use. It’s simple, plain English. I do sense that their power lies in the rhythm the words create. But all this is subjective. Read them for yourself and make your own judgement. And what about this….

#SwaWed Thing

Actually, it was a day, Wednesday to be precise, that was set aside for #KenyansonTwitta to crack up and start tweeting in fluent Swahili: #SwaWed. Now you get it! Started out some 3 weeks ago but seems to have fizzled out of late. It wasn’t easy tweeting in Swahili. Some tweeps did not get into the flow right away (Hi there @Astar_TheLight and @soulsystah and us too). And there were so many grammatical errors on many of the posts. To give you a little glimpse into the problems we had that day, check out the following update:

@mahasi @rimbui @njesh316 @Ngendo87 Kwani mipango yenu ya jana yalikuwa kukiongea Kiswahili hapa? #mpangowakando 11:30 PM Oct 5th via web [http://twitter.com/KenyaMicroblogs/status/26528714788]

That was us. But in came @rimbui who quickly corrected us:

@KenyaMicroblogs Habari kaka, Kiswahili sanifu ni "Mipango "ilikuwa" sio "yalikuwa" ....LOL #SwaWed11:35 PM Oct 5th via TweetDeck in reply to KenyaMicroblogs  [http://twitter.com/rimbui/status/26528906792]

:-D.

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Intervangelist, a fellow blogger, has written a thought provoking article on why "SEO is dead". I'll not repeat anything here about the advantages of SEO in enhancing a site's accessibility, usability et al. If you have read the article you'll see that it adds something on the impact of social media on web design/web development. Now that's where the battle for people's attention is being fought. I concur with his views that its only a site that knows how to leverage its social media strategy that will out-compete even the best SEO'd website out there. Let me quote some paragraph to show you what I mean:

At this point, the Paper went on the defense, “Mr. Alex, If you want to have a site which performs well in search engines, then you need to stop worrying about search engines and start worrying about creating a really great website. Code your site properly, make it accessible, make it usable, make sure it has fantastic content, make sure you have great marketing that has other people talking about it. All of these things contribute to the factors which search engines use to rank your site. (From Intervangelist's blog)

Good bye!

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For Twitter users ‘subscribers’ may sound a little bit strange instead of ‘followers’ but this site (and this one too ) use that to describe those who listen to another person’s updates. At least it sounds right for microblogging. To get more subscribers/followers on any microblogging site is no means task especially if you want to create an audience that just loves to listen to your updates. So many bloggers ,Twitter users and others recommend following as many people so that they may follow you back. But this can turn out to be not so productive in the long term since much of your stream will be noisy. The truth is that many people only respond to tweets/shouts/notices from those who have a strategic importance to their goals; the rest are listened to rarely. There are so many ways through which one can attract more followers/subscribers on any microblogging service and offering great content is one way. Great content for microblogging can be:

1. NEWS: You just can't beat news updates in creating more followers /subscribers. For example did you know that Microsoft ditched its Live Spaces blogging platform for Wordpress.com? What about " Wikipedia uses P2P Technology to show its video content "? And I hope you heard about LibreOffice? You see news, especially technology news, can boost your visibility on any microblogging site if people come to trust your reputation and tweet/repost your updates. So look around you. Do you have access to news sources? Are you smack right there in an organization that makes things happen? You have an advantage over the rest of the microblogging masses.Note: Retweeting / reposting of the latest news updates can also increase ones follower / subscribers too. This just shows that you are ‘up to date’, too.
2. ITS-ALREADY-BEEN-SAID CONTENT BUT WITH A PERSONAL TOUCH: I will call this adding some spin to information that many already know about. For example everything about creating websites is already known but you can attach some personal touch to that content breathing life into it and setting yourself apart. Maybe it can be through your writing style or your personal experiences or something that makes you unique. Now condense this content into short microblogging posts and you will attract people to your profile. For a fuller display of your uniqueness, you can link to blog posts or information you have written elsewhere. 
3.  WITTY CONVERSATIONS: Display some wit in your @ replies and I will love your conversations. Drop a witty quote and I will not forget about it. Go on like this and who will not be attracted to you?

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The microblogging concept is now much more connected in many ways to Twitter the most popular of the microblogging sites. But there are many more out there each offering some minor add ons to the basic text based messages. Tumblr, Plurk, Jaiku, Foursquare, Nairobi-stique and Twytravels (of course!) come to mind. Pownce was shut down a few years ago. Another microblogging service that is now getting airplay due to the nature of its source code is Identi.ca. Identica runs on the free and open source Statusnet software. The rise of this site due to its open source nature has aroused claims from certain experts that it will be a major competitor to Twitter's dominance. I will mostly focus on the features that Identica has that Twitter does not have. Since I do not want to bore you with much talk, let’s dig in.

Attachments

Have you ever thought of posting a file e.g. music fie or photo together with a tweet but reality struck you that Twitter does not offer such a service? This feature is implemented on its open source competitor, Identica. You can share music files, photos etc by attaching them to your notices. Just click on the ‘attach file’ icon next to the notice form to share your holiday photos with your subscribers. I don’t quite understand this but it seems that particular URL’S carry attachments automatically.

Geolocation capabilities

Starting from sometime last year Twitter included the ability of adding the location to ones tweets. That means that the location from which a tweet is tweeting from will be added to his or her tweets. But, did you know that this feature was in built in Statusnet even before Twitter implemented it. That means that Identica, which was started in 2008, was already using it even before Biz Stone and company picked it up for their creation. The beauty of Identica’s geolocation capabilities is that even a map is displayed on a user's profile page showing from where they are posting from. The sharing of ones location per post on Identica (and on any other Statusnet using site) is implemented via Mozilla’s IdentiFox plugin.

Threaded Comments

Now where can you get this on Twitter? Nowhere, not even on your private stream once you log in into the site. The reply system on Twitter only appends the ‘@ user’ syntax to the tweet. On the other hand, clicking on the "Reply" button on every notice on Identica not only includes the ‘@ user ‘ syntax to the notice but also links it to the commented notice. This reply always has clickable text at the bottom reading ‘in context’. Clicking on this link will send you to the page where all the threaded comments/notices for that particular notice are displayed.

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What is known about Statusnet (through Identi.ca) and Twitter is already out there. Everyone or at least almost everyone, knows something about these two entities. Since we live in a world that is now dominated by social networks and that microblogging is just but an aspect of social networking, the Identica and Twitter microblogging services are now well known. Identica runs on the open source Twitter clone Statusnet script. Both services are similar in what they offer to their users with both providing s platform on which users can send short text messages of up to 140 characters. Each offers SMS integration too. But both are quite different in terms of the software that they run on; and the major difference is that you can download the source code of one so as to set up your own microblogging site while you can't do that with the other.

Take the case of Twitter. Twitter runs on  open source software too but the code is  not distributed a la Statusnet. *I have just come to learn that Twitter is built on open-source software too from someone on Mann Connect. Read this on http://twitter.com/about/opensource.*  StatusNet, a downloadable Twitter-clone script,  is absolutely free and open source (FSF/FOSS) software. Yup you read it right; it is absolutely FREE. Actually you can download the latest release from the author’s site and set up your own microblogging service. The source code can be modified but this has to comply with the software's licence conditions. With the open source concept any user of the script can report bugs to the developers by adding it to the bug database.

The Statusnet software also complies with the Open Microblogging Standard. That means you can subscribe to another person’s notices on a different Statusnet site; their posts are simply pushed to your stream. Try it out on this site by simply using the “Remote Subscription” form and then subscribe to another user on this site. It’s like following another tweep on a different Twitter site (if ever there was) and getting their tweeps streaming on your profile page.

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Mann Connect

!mannconnect M-PESA is such a sticky product that it will make even online payment solutions in #Kenya to have a hard time flourishing. !mannconnectfans

!mannconnectfans Have you seen that #huutr's new domain name is qwangu.com? And the site has gone private; you cannot read other members' posts without logging in. !mannconnect

Nairobi-stique

!nairobistique This one is for the ardent users of Twitter: KMS sites are far much better than Twitter. #Geolocation services here are much more advanced, you can attach files to your #notices, follow your notices real-time without a page refresh......

Some #tweeple consider linking to another social network from the site as a #fail but with the recent #Twitter bridge from Facebook all long updates are truncated on Twitter with a link appended at the end of the tweet.

!nairobistique Walking along Tom Mboya street in the evening requires good negotiation skills against obstructions. HMMMMM....

Twytravels

Does not have any popular notices for the month. Visit Twytravels to see why.

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