It's Friday Evening, and so it's music time. Tonight with Tiken Jah Fakoly's Ça va faire mal (It's going to hurt), which it's not my most favorite song by him, but it has a very nice music video shot in 2005 during the African Reggae Festival in Mali.

In case you don't know, Tiken Jah Fakoly is a very popular reggae singer from Côte d'Ivoire (but who's living in exile in Mali since 2003 due to death threats). His big popularity is due to the political character of most of his songs. For example, in 1993 after Houphouët-Boigny's passing away, he wrote about the electoral situation and one of his albums is titled Françafrique which includes songs such as Le pays va mal (The country is not doing well) or Y'en a marre (We're fed up).

Car Rapide, Dakar.

Today in the news we learnt that the car rapides will "soon" be replaced, and I'm torn between sadness and relief. Sadness, because they are such an integral part of the life of the city, and so much of my learning process in Dakar happened inside of them. And relief, because they are dangerous: toubabs working for foreing organizations are usually forbidden by their employers to use them, and seriously, it's not surprising -- it's almost a miracle that some of them are still running.

The car rapide is one of several kinds of public transport in Senegal, to my knowledge. In Dakar, there are several ways to get around this busy, large, and not-always friendly city:

The first option is to take the taxi -- that is, if you feel strong enough to argue with a driver and manage to agree on a price. Taking a taxi is almost without exception an adventure: you pay per ride, so more time on the road is a waste. Also, the same car will be driven by an undetermined number of people with several degrees of separation from the vehicle, to which they may not feel very attached. And I haven't seen a single one with working security belts. You guessed it: taxi is not my favourite kind of transportation in Dakar.

The sept-places are collective taxis that travel between cities and towns. They are taxis, but usually the price is already fix and the possibility of friction with the driver minimal.

Within Dakar, you may also take a city bus. The big, blue ones with the yellow stripe are beautiful and comfortable, and would make Dakar worthy of an award if they only passed on time and more often. So far, that is not the case.

Then you have the ndiaga ndiaye, which is much like the car rapide, but white and with more seats. You find them all over Senegal, and I have taken them from downtown Dakar to the suburbs as much as from one town to the next in other regions. They are efficient, but boy, some owners just don't care. Most of the times they're ok, but once, on the way from Bambey to Diourbel, I wanted to cry when a ndiaga ndiaye started loosing (many) screws. I learned that screws are a severly overestimated part of a vehicle structure.

In this one I crossed Gambia:

The clandos (clandestine taxis, usually in very, very bad shape) are NOT a good option, in fact this is only an option when there is no other one. I had to take them in Guédiawaye to go from my friends' place to the house where I was staying. Bad, bad, bad idea.

Then, in some parts of the cities I have seen carts pulled by big four-legged animals of different kind. I've never taken one of them, although they seemed particularly popular in Kaolack (where, by the way, you could also get around by moto-taxi).

And of course, you can take the car rapide. And if we are to listen to evidence, it must be very rare that (young? female?) toubabs get in most of them, because more than once and more than twice I caught the apprentice taking pictures of me with their cellphones, and let me tell you, I'm on the not-so-cute side of things. This guy, for example: he took a picture of me. In punishment, he had to let me take a picture of him and his friends. I think the rest of the passengers had their share of fun with the exchange.

In general, I found Dakar (and more generally, Senegal) offered many options to get around -- some safer, cheaper, and more agreable than others, but many nonetheless. Although they were not always toubab-friendly (and I don't mean this as an offense) this would be a very different place if no cheap, easily available, and relatively quick transportation was not in place. To put it simply: I don't think metro Dakar would function without it: most workers couldn't go to work, most students couldn't go to school, and there would be a growing demand for private transport that would collapse the already fragile communication network in the city. So it's great.

Now, honest to truth, the fleet needs to be renovated. As I understand it, car rapides are the most common bus in Dakar, and if I am not mistaken most of the buses are private (I may be wrong, though). So I wonder what could it mean when they say that Chinese-owned Eximbank is financing a plan to replace this colourfoul buses. How will they paint the new ones?

In addition to the multilingual abilities of Maneno, one of the big things we talk about is the low bandwidth aspects to the site and the fact you can set varying levels of bandwidth throttling. To date, this function required that you join the site in order to use it as it is part of a member's profile. While we still recommend that people join to take advantage of various site features, we've now opened up bandwidth selection to anyone who visits the site to try out or use while reading the site. From the home page or any other top level page, you will now see on the right, a Connection Speed selector. Feel free to play around with it and see what we've done with the site to make it as light as possible depending on your needs.

If you try out each setting and analyze it with something like the Page Speed analyzer from Google, you will get results similar to these:

As you can see, the number of elements on a page (the left column) decreases with the actual size of the page (the right column). The last two settings of 'Slow' and 'Very Slow' might not seem all that different, but these settings make a very big difference when you are a member and access other areas of the site. But note that at the lowest setting our home page is a mere 9.4kb to download!

In the center column of this chart you will see that we are big fans of compressing the site to make it even smaller before you view it. This helps us to make the site anywhere from 50% to 70% smaller to download.

A dusting off

You will also notice that we've changed the home page a little bit. We've worked to make elements of more importance have a greater visual impact. We also worked to get more data on the page, while giving it a visual appearance that is lighter overall.

In addition to this, all language selectors have been moved up to the top of the screen for all top level, blog, and hosted blog pages. It clears up a bit of space, gives you the full name of each language in an easier format to select from, and most importantly, it gives us more space to add more language as we get them available.

We hope you like all the changes!

A jewelry workshop in Abengourou, where you can get things like custom-made cross pendants or wedding bands with huge initials carved on them.

I'm currently based in Spain. There is good connectivity here. In fact calling it "broadband" is a fair term. But for some reason, I am constantly getting errors like the one you see above on Facebook. I don't know what's causing it, but contrary to the message in the window, I am indeed very much connected to the internet.

AJAX is a cool system as it offers one the ability to grab a snippet of a site and in theory, incur much less bandwidth in making that request, thus speeding up website interactions for those on slower connections. There's just the problem of latency as well as a great many other issues when it comes to how you actually implement AJAX. Personally, I know how easy it is to think, "Sure, that request is fine. No problems. I never have to worry about it failing." But in reality you do. Modern web design is sloppy this way and if you don't chain AJAX events to be dependent on one another, you get results like this. We talked about this a good deal at the AfricaCodeCamp as it isn't just a good design strategy for African websites, but also a good one for any website.

In Facebook's defense, at least there actually are error messages, but still, they could do more. I have to hand it to Twitter, as I have far fewer problems with their site from where I am and they know how to make the site degrade properly. For instance, if you try to click on the Sign In link on the main page before all the JavaScript and widgets are loaded, you'll go to the more basic, non-fancy login page. It's a small detail, but it improves the user experience. With how much Facebook is copying what Twitter is doing, you'd think they would copy some of these things as well.

What comes into your mind when you hear the term "bridging the digital divide"? I bet its the idea of connecting rural schools with computers, government policy , mobile phones for the poor, huge donor funding and that kind of stuff.

Well, the same term appeared in the ICANN strategic plan and was quickly shot down. Why? After all, there is no argument that there exists a gap within ICANN, between the developed and developing countries, especially in Africa.

The term bridging the digital divide has political connotation within the ICANN community and evokes memories of the World Summit on Information Society (WSIS) where the International Telecommunications Union discussed ways of taking over management of the internet from ICANN as a way of giving power to the governments.

So, you will understand the ICANN faithful when they say that the term should belong to other circles and not the mainly technical and business oriented group.

After all, most of the people who attend ICANN meetings have all the internet infrastructure needs and the idea of an unconnected business in Giathi village in Gatundu, where I come from, does not resonate with them.

Maybe the idea of a country not having an internet exchange point or a non performing country code Top Level Domain e.g ,ke. .ug, .za seems remote, but these are realities in Africa.

I think the gap within ICANN for instance within the ccTLDs can be bridged through sharing resources and ideas. I recall Michuki Mwangi explained to me that Kenya got copies of root zone files because of his contacts within ICANN.

Michuki met root operators and was able to get the root zone files, which is probably why internet in Kenya is faster than in Uganda, even though we both have the fiber optic connectivity.

Michuki also benefitted from training offered by the Brazilian tech team, the guys who operate the .br registry. The Kenic infrastructure, which is open source, has heavy contribution from Brazil.

So, can the actions of Hartmut Glaser in Brazil, who invited Michuki be termed as bridging the digital divide? I think so.

In my opinion, ICANN community needs to do something, and am sure so many people here would help if they knew about the challenges and ways their technology share can help.

The problem is in the political correctness of the term "bridging the digital divide". Maybe they can come up with another term but the experiences can yield greater benefits if taken seriously.

Of course, for the global community to help, African internet infrastructure must rise from the chaos. The ccTLDs must resemble a sense of normalcy. They must sort out the issues of who operates the domains and have operational registries. Then we can start talking about ways of improving the services.

Perhaps that is the reason why we do not have many Africans contributing in the public forums; because of the apparent gaps.

Political terms or no political terms, something needs to be done. I will not stop saying that Africa needs to act but so is the global community.

Ends