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July 22, 2005
Ghanaian Blog-O-Rama
Leaving the Kofi Annan Centre, David and I drove across Accra past the sprawling campus of the University of Ghana until we reached the site of my workshop on blogs, podcasts and video blogs. When we arrived, I discovered the cards were stacked against me; the facility had no projector (nor an empty wall on which to project, even if we had found one), and its Internet access was having problems. What those problems were, no one could really explain, but the end result was that my connection was no more than 10k per second.
Frustrating as this was, it was actually useful in a way, given the fact I'd be talking about publishing tools that usually require fast bandwidth. Would it be possible for me to demonstrate video blogging or podcasting on a connection slower than what I had at home in the 1980s? We'd have to find out.
Eventually, a group of two dozen Ghanaians settled into the room. Most of them were professional journalists, some quite well known in Ghana, while the others were technologists or academics. Since we didn't have a projector, I ditched my plan to show lots of websites and instead led a 90-minute discussion on the digital divide, blogging tools and their potential impact in education, politics and community life.
Amos Anyimadu, organizer of the event, then suggested we break up for refreshments on the verandah, then return to the conference room in small groups so people could huddle around me and watch me demonstrate various blogging techniques. We enjoyed the outside breeze while chatting over Star beer and Fanta, then worked our way back inside the facility.
Just for kicks, I offered to demonstrate podcasting and video blogging using fairly small files, neither of which was larger than 750k. I recorded a quick mp3 file while uploading a compressed two-minute video clip of a taxi ride through Accra. In both cases, it took just over 15 minutes to publish each file, plus another five minutes to way for the Web pages of my blog to download while I updated them. The slowness of the process gave us time to talk about what I was doing in great detail - again, an unexpected bonus caused by limited bandwidth.
The participants were very eager to learn more, but some wanted to step back and learn the basics of setting up a blog from scratch. For that, we simply visited Blogger.com and created a blog in about 10 minutes, again slowed down mostly because of bandwidth. They all took copious notes, asking lots of good questions; by the time we were done it was nearly 6pm.
Before heading out, though, one of the journalists pulled out his minidisc recorder and a large microphone; he wanted to do an interview for Radio Ghana. We chatted for about 10 minutes, recapping the topics we discussed over the course of the afternoon. Now if I could only get him to publish the recording as a podcast rather than just a national radio broadcast, then he'd do me real proud. :-) -andy
Posted by acarvin at July 22, 2005 6:20 AM
Listen to a computer-generated podcast of this article
