Visualisations Many-Eyes Wordle Network analysis NodeXL – this free add-on works with Microsoft Excel. Discourse analysis Lawrence Anthony’s free concordancer. Notepad++ – the Swiss army knife of text editors file:///C:/Program%20Files/Notepad++/user.manual/index.html

IkamvaYouth office in Makhaza was petrol-bombed, on South Africa’s Freedom Day, 27 April.  Read about the details of the petrol-bombing. The Makhaza branch has lost everything , including cameras, computers and some of the phones that were donated for our Nokia mobile video project. Ikamva Youth is a wonderful volunteer-driven youth project that runs on a [...]

I attended ISEA2008 in Singapore, and it was a fascinating and mind-exanding experience of digital art and scholarship.  It saddened me that, as far as I could tell, I was the only delegate from the whole of Africa. Thanks to the efforts of Andreas Broeckmann and generous sponsorship from the Goethe-Institut, the picture at ISEA2010 [...]

A A rough history of the web industry in South Africa by Jarred CinmanThis article made me remember: Sitting in a dark office as a grad student late at night, staring at green text on a black screen, amazed at the generosity of the anonymous guides who helped lead the way through the labyrinths of [...]

Afrigator is an African social media aggregator. The site also gives an idea of the current distribution of bloggers in the continent: * South Africa 1055 blogs * Kenya 124 blogs * Africa General 108 blogs * Nigeria 93 blogs

The beep could be a callback request, a relational “stroke” to tell a loved one you’re thinking about them, or an instrumental nudge – “it’s time to fetch me”. Just remember that the poorer one “beeps” the richer one and the hopeful suitor never “beeps” the beloved. This is a great academic paper about the [...]

Cultural borrowing in World of Warcraft Everything they say in this article about the fake Jamaican accents of the WoW trolls is true.I spent some time playing a troll and have usually joined troll guilds on a role-playing server. It is interesting that most players with troll characters mimic the Jamaican accents of the non-player [...]

Great story by Steffen Fjaervik about the huge readership gained by Norwegian site Bergens Tidendes (known as Bt no) when they reported the winner of Scandinavian Big Brother in a two-sentence article. This coverage is so minimal that it almost amounts to a snub. The third sentence of the report drives their point home by [...]

Interesting article on Gamespy about an anti-war in-game protest targetting the U.S. federally funded game “America’s Army”, which is used as a military recruitment tool. Joseph DeLappe logs into the game as dead-in-iraq. Instead of playing, he types the names of the U.S. soldiers who have died since the start of the war (official U.S. [...]

Anti-DRM (Digital Rights Management) activits take on Microsoft’s version of copyright protection in full Hazmat gear at the 2006 Windows Hardware Engineering Conference in Seattle.