Anti-social bookmarking

I call them bookmarks, others prefer the name favourites, and a minute number of people use the term hotlists. According to wikipedia, "Bookmarks are pointers - primarily to URLs - built into the various internet web browsers".

Bookmarking is a way for an internet user to find his/her way back to a web-page on the world wide web. Without them many-a-page would fall through the cracks in our memory, never to be found again.

Traditionally, whenever an internet user discovered a web-page worthy of keeping, they used their browser to store the URL locally on their computer. Whenever they needed to go back to the page, they went to their browsers and with minimum fuss found their way back. This methodology works great for users in "developed countries" but it is not necessarily a good fit for sub-saharan africa.

Millenium Indicator 48 for Ghana: 38% of the population have computers and 78% of the population use the internet(Source: UN Statistics Division).
Lets ruminate on that for a minute.

Okay, time's up.

I don't know about you, but for me the fact that 40% of internet users in Ghana use public computers means that the traditional method of bookmarking is not tropically tolerant (tt). So, what are we going to do about it ?

Nothing, its already been done for us.

The solution: storing the bookmarks server-side, can currently be found in social bookmarking websites. These services exist mostly for social-networking and folksonomy purposes. However, looking at them from a tropical mindset, social-networking and folksonomy are secondary features. Social bookmarking sites are simply, free, online storage for bookmarks. What this means is that an internet user in Ghana can have his own "private" list of bookmarks that is available whenever he is online without having to own a computer.

Fellow tropical netizens, what we have here is tropically tolerant bookmarking.

Resources:

• del.icio.us


• reddit


• Simpy


• Furl


• Ma.gnolia

technorati tags: bookmarking, social-bookmarking, folksonomy,ghana, africa

Tropically Tolerant

This blog is my humble attempt to look at technology both old and new through the "tropically tolerant" microscope. I will focus on technology that has great potential for use in the tropics. There will be excursions into technology policies that are not tropically friendly like net neutrallity. In summary anything that can be tagged technology and tropically tolerant is a possible topic for this weblog.

Tropically tolerant is a term coined by Hermann Chinery-Hesse of Soft Tribe. Chinery-Hesse used the term to describe the software that is designed and coded with the realities of modern day Ghana. The realities include but are not limited to power issues, connectivity and piracy. Soft Tribe's software writes to disk often to counter the issue of inconsistent power. The connectivity problem is handled by caching data locally and syncing to a central server when a connection is available. Piracy is tackled by having engineers travel to customer sites to install
products.

I believe that the concept of tropical tolerance can be applied to all attempts by the modern african to acculturate western culture. Reggie Rockstone stumbled upon this truth when he localized hip-hop. The appeal of hip-life to all generations of Ghanaians in contrast to hip-hop bears witness to the validity of my belief.

In technology, we need to only look at the success of Soft Tribe's point of sale software. This POS software was designed with the tenets of tropical tolerance in mind making it a more viable option than imported software. This is not to say all imported technology is bad. Rather, foreign technology should be given the "Reggie Rockstone" treatment. It should be remoulded to fit the tropics.

Welcome to tropically tolerant.