Everyone from the presidential to the parliamentary level is getting involved. According to Tungaraza’s blog, current President Jakaya Mrisho Kikwete has an official site and Facebook page. Kikwete’s running mate, Gharib Bilal, also has a Twitter account. Not to be outdone, one of the opposition candidates, Wilbrod Slaa, has a Facebook page, although he has fewer fans that Mr. Kikwete.

According to another blogger, Ndesanjo Macha, one parliamentary candidate has stood out as especially social media savvy. Zitto Kabwe, the parliamentary candidate for Kigoma North has utilized YouTube and Flickr in addition to Twitter. Kabwe tweets in both English and Swahili and also shares links to videos of campaign activities on other sites. He also used Twitter to dispel rumors about his death and express concern about armed police presence at political rallies. Kabwe is one of the youngest members of parliament so it’s not surprising that he has been eager to use social media as part of his strategy to engage with younger voters.

It’s yet to be seen whether social media campaigning will have a major impact on the elections since such a small proportion of the population has access to the internet via computer or smart phone. However, Tanzanian bloggers seem hopeful and internet access in the region will only expand in the future.

Photo source: Global Voices Online

My mother always chases me asking for pictures of my life. She would like to see them in big size and quality, and also to print the nicest ones of her beloved daughter. Having a not-so-good camera (not even an old fancy Lomo one), I always count on the pictures taken by my friends. But in the end, I am never able to gather all the pictures of a trip, a party or any kind of group event. Sometimes I see me tagged in a Facebook picture, which is ok, but not so exciting quality to be downloaded and kept in my mother’s family album. Flickr is also an option for photo sharing, but it doesn’t allow uploading pictures from different users in the same page, neither downloading the selected ones, or all, at the same time. I don’t like going click by click! Picasa does it, but requires every user to install a software to do these kind of magic things… too boring!

My roommate has the solution! Olapic easily “collects, controls, shares and prints” my pictures… Yuhuu!

(please, click here to understand me)

Here comes the bad news, Olapic focuses just on WEDDING photo grabbing, for the moment. Dear roommate, when will you expand your business model to let my friends and me (and my mother) to share our pictures?

Over the past decade groups around the world have utilized Internet communication technologies during crisis to broadcast their message to local and global communities. Tubes, Code & Content looks at three case studies to see how this has been done. In the process we see that over the years, the ability to harness Internet communications is moving from formal organizations to anyone with actual Internet access.

Case studies include:

• B92, an oppositional radio station in Milosevic’s Yugoslavia;
• Sokwanele, an oppositional group under Mugabe’s Zimbabwe;
• Iran Elections, a mass protest against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s 2009 reelection.

Before we review them though, we explore the the significance of the shear amount of digital content being produced on a global scale. In doing so we learn that 20 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube per minute and the digital equivalent of a US Library of Congress is created every 15 minutes. What challenges does this present? What does such mass creation signify?

Run time is approximately one hour. Our review of digital creation takes place up to approximately minute thirty. Discussion of B92, Zimbabwe and Iran occur from there until the end.

Both the video and the presentation can be downloaded by selecting the links below.

• The “Media. Communication. Protests.” Screencast. iTouch/iPhone compatible. (160 MB .m4v file)
• The “Media. Communication. Protests.” PDF. Includes active links to sites and sources referenced in the presentation.

UPDATE: Creative Cloud has a post from the other day called If You Printed the Internet. Fun stuff. Includes factoids such as, if the Internet was a book, it would weigh 1.2 billion pounds and measure 10,000 feet tall.