If you logged in to your Facebook account this morning, you would no doubt have noticed the glaring “Terms of Use Update” which read;

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Over the past few days, we have received a lot of feedback about the new
terms we posted two weeks ago. Because of this response, we have
decided to return to our previous Terms of Use while we resolve the
issues that people have raised..... 

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Facebook creator, Mark Zuckerberg, in a post on the Facebook blog, said;

This move comes 2 days after (not implying any connection whatsoever) Independent filmmaker Luis Moro and his wife, producer and actress Bobbi Miller-Moro accused Facebook of Censorship. The couple initially accused the 175 million strong Social Network of deleting Luis’s account for “political reasons”, a claim which Facebook said was absurd.

According to the couple;

“All he was doing was posting about ‘The Freedom to Travel to Cuba Act’ in Cuba-related groups, and to friends with the same interest,”.

“When I posted on my status ‘My husband’s account was deleted by Facebook’ it was erased 3 times from the main wall! I could not believe it.” Mrs Moro added. She went on to say that her husband’s account was deleted Monday evening after Luis sent out word about the proposed Cuban travel bill.

In Facebook’s defence, Barry Schnitt, Senior Manager, Corporate Communications and Public Policy at Facebook categorically stated;

“That system is designed to keep spammers and potential harassers from abusing Facebook.  It is triggered by a user sending too many messages or friending too many people who ignore their requests.  In this case, the user ignored at least one of the warnings when he was spamming people with messages and friend requests to promote his cause and was automatically disabled.  The suggestion that our automated system has been programmed with a certain political agenda is absurd.”

“In the press release the user acknowledges receiving warnings from our automated system,” he further added.

Though Luis’s account was restored and an E-mail apology issued, Mrs Moro wasn’t “so sure her husband wasn’t targeted”, citing Facebook’s alleged history of censorship involving words and phrases like “anti-war,” “Gaza,” and “Palestine,” as well as the much publicized row with breastfeeding mothers.

Anyway, returning to the changes, Facebook says “we’ve changed the terms back to what existed before the February 4th change, which was what most people asked us for and was the recommendation of the outside experts we consulted.”

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When Craig Newmark started his “email list for friends and co-workers about events going on in the San Francisco Bay Area“ in 1995, he probably never thought that his hobby would grow to become one of the “busiest sites on the internet, helping people with basic day-to-day needs such as finding a job, an apartment and a date, all within a culture of trust.“

The Craiglist Network- a centralized network of online communities featuring free online classified advertisements and forums on various topics, has local classifieds and forums for more than 550 cities in over 50 countries worldwide – community moderated, and largely free.

Of the 50 countries featured on Craiglist however, only 2 are from the continent of Africa- none from West-Africa !!

For a continent the size of Africa- the 2nd largest in the world, having an estimated population of 975,330,899 and 54,171,500 Internet Users, you can’t help but ask why?

Nigeria, for instance, has an estimated population of 140 million- 10 million of whom are Internet users according to Internet World Stats;

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Nigeria’s Very Own Craiglist

Oluwaseun Osewa, the founder of Nairaland.com (arguably Nigeria’s most used Forum), recently stepped in to fill the vacuum (if you will) and provide a service which caters for “a need that Craigslist hasn’t seen”, with the introduction of Nairalist.com

Nairalist.com is a free local classified advertising service that supports the listing of personals, vacancies, cars, flats, products for sale & services in any of the 37 states of Nigeria. The site was built from the scratch using Python by Seun Osewa (the Nairaland Boss) and was launched on the 7th of January and has been featured once on Hacker News.

The site features categories which include Jobs, Dating, Housing, Vehicles, For Sale, and Services, and had 1660 non-spam adverts and about 290,000  page views as at February 7 2009.

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One of the first things you notice about the site is the speed at which pages load. The minimal graphics no doubt had to a lot to do with this- a definitely well thought-out move, seeing as majority of Nigerians rely on Dial-Up connections for Internet access. Nairalist now only needs to gather as much momentum as possible, and the sky would be the limit.

With regards to increasing traffic to the site, Mr. Osewa’s Nairalist would surely rely heavily on his Nairaland Forum which currently has a membership of 292, 262, and a purported average traffic of 10,000 unique visitors monthly- a feat he would no doubt be hoping to replicate with Nairalist.

The site has already seen an influx of listings ranging from personals to job openings, and the future definitely looks bright for Nairalist, especially as it targets a country where majority of the populace  love “new toys”.

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Whenever Search Engine Marketing is mentioned, terms which readily come to mind (apart from Google that is) include;  meta tags/page content optimization, Link Building, and Site Submission.

Most people tend to focus more on Link Building. Of course you can’t blame them- as it is a well known fact that Google’s ranking algorithm (Page Rank or PR as it is now widely known as) places a lot of value on the number of inbound links to a site.

The down side to this however is that in the pursuit of PR glory, SEO’s often neglect some other vital and equally important aspects of Search Marketing.

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What am I talking about?

Content, Content, Content!!!

This just CANNOT be overemphasized, and has been debated over and over again by many pundits, some playing down the significance of content vis-à-vis links and PR, but the truth remains that “Content Is Still King”.

“Some webmasters are strong proponents of non-content SEO strategies. These technical experts rely very heavily on meta-title and other HTML or code-based SEO strategies for sites that are less content oriented.”

“Purists on both sides of the argument will say their approach is far superior to the other.”

I don’t belong to either. I am an advocate for both, as I have even
seen a PR 3 site outrank a PR 6 site for relative keywords.

Don’t worry, this isn’t just another “Content Is King” article (so you can wipe that smirk off your face now). Urr Umm!! Where was I? Ah yes! Content;

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So what is it that makes content so special?

What most people often seem to forget is that “Search Engines” as their name implies, were originally designed to help people find what they are searching for on a world wide web containing large volumes of information.

Naturally, any, and indeed all kinds of services are actually meant to solve a problem

Google, Yahoo, AOL, Ask, and the rest exist for the sole purpose of solving the problem of narrowing what would have otherwise been a daunting task of searching through the millions, billions, and possibly trillions of pages which exist on the web.

To effectively do this, these Search Engines maintain huge, categorized databases of World Wide Websites, classified according to the information contained in the pages which make up each of these sites. The job of the site owner, then becomes the (not so) simple and straightfoward task of;

providing as much information as possible about their sites to the Search Engines

This normally begins with optimizing the meta (title, keyword, and description) tags of each web page, all the way through to submitting the site’s pages to the Search Engines for indexing. Then comes the undending process of searching for quality inbound links to build the highly coveted PR, which most webmasters embark on- completey forgetting about their site’s content.

Needless to say this is a completely bad move, as Search Engines, like humans, are highly attracted to “Fresh Content”

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So How do you keep you site content “Fresh”?

The general idea is to keep the Search Engines updated with changes made to your website as much as possible. Most Search Engines allow you submit your site’s content for free, though it sometimes takes forever to have them indexed.

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Your Secret Weapon

Your Site Map, like a physical map, provides information about your website’s content. According to Wikipedia;

“A site map (or sitemap) is a representation of the architecture of a web site. It can be either a document in any form used as a planning tool for web design, or a web page that lists the pages on a web site, typically organized in hierarchical fashion. This helps visitors and search engine bots find pages on the site”.

There are mainly two kinds of SiteMaps, an XHTML Site Map meant for human visitors, and an XML Site Map for Search Engine robots. Most Search Engines, like Google for instance allow you submit an XML Site Map for your website.

Your Site Map, however, isn’t just a tool for providing information about your site, but is also a “Secret Weapon” for keeping your site’s content fresh.

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How So?

A standard XML Site Map has the following format;

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
   <url>
      <loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
      <lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
      <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
      <priority>0.8</priority>
   </url>
</urlset>

The <urlset> tag encapsulates the file and references the current protocol standard.

The <url>is the parent tag for each URL entry. The remaining tags are children of this tag.

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The other tags basically provide additional information about each individual <url> entry.

The <loc> tag represents the URL of the page. This URL must begin with the protocol (such as http) and end with a trailing slash, if your web server requires it. This value must be less than 2,048 characters.

The <lastmod> represents the date of last modification of the file. This date should be in W3C Datetime format. This format allows you to omit the time portion, if desired, and use YYYY-MM-DD.

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Using a SiteMap, updating the information Google (for instance) has about your website is completely seamless. You simply change the value of the <lastmod> tag whenever a particular page has been modified, and resubmit your SiteMap with Google’s Webmaster Tools. This tells Googlebot that the page was modified on
<lastmod>this date</lastmod>

You would notice that content submitted in this manner are re-indexed
much faster than the regular manual submissions.

This techinque is particularly useful for Site’s such as blogs whose content are updated regularly, as well as sites which broadcast RSS feeds. Google’s Webmaster Tools provides additional options, such as submitting an RSS SiteMap for your Website.

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I made an astounding discovery today. I never knew it was possible to send Postal letters through the Internet.

What! Postal letters? Yeah postal letters. You know;

• write your letter,
• insert it into an envelope,
• rush to the nearest post office,
• buy some postage stamps and drop the letter in a post box.

That kind.

I was glancing through this blog I recently fell in love with, when I came across a post titled;

“Send Postal Letters Anywhere in the World Through Internet – Email to Snail Mail”

A title like that would no doubt spark up interest so naturally, I read through the post and what I found left me astonished. Though (technically speaking)  it obviously isn’t possible to send Postal Letter through the Internet, there are a couple of online services which allow you do just that.

The postal service may not be as important as it used to with the advent of Email, but there are still a couple of reasons why you may want to use the service. This is particularly true with regards to our beloved “Mama Africa”. Let’s recount a couple shall we:

1. Some of your relatives live in remote villages where they don’t have computers let alone access to Internet.
2. Your grandparents know computers (or not) but they’ll probably feel more happy if you could send them emails and photographs in paper form that they can read in the lawn outside.
3. You are trying to reach someone who already gets a few hundred email messages per day. Your email may get lost in the clutter but if you take the snail mail approach, chances are high that he or she will at least read your message if not respond to it.

Whatever the case may be, should you need to send a Postal Letter, and would like to avoid the hassle, there are web based letter printing and dispatching services that “work more or less the same way”.

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You send then an email or upload the document as Word or PDF on to their servers, make the payment online and they’ll send the letter via regular postal mail to the specified physical address.

I have taken the liberty of compiling a list of some web based letter printing and dispatching service companies, according to the nature of their service;

Country-Specific

These companies provide their services to clients within a specific country;

• Via Post (for the UK)
• Pixel Letter (for the European Union)
• Snail Mail Me (for Canada), and
• India Post (for residents of India)

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Non Country-Specific

• Postal Methods
• Mail a Letter
• Postful
• EZGram
• L-Mail
• Click 2 Mail
• Email 2 Postal
• PC 2 Paper

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The long debated issue of the “digital divide” between the rich and the poor was brought to the fore once again with news coming in from different sections of the global media of plans to release “a low cost” Laptop computer, which would be the centerpiece of India’s National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technologies.

Early reports of this incredibly cheap laptop- fondly referred to as India’s “answer to American One Laptop per Child project” which set out to produce a computer for $100 (£68)- indicated that the laptop had initially been pegged at an amazing 500 rupees (just around $10), but according to the BBC;

“… this could be a mistranslation, because transcripts of the speech, in which it was unveiled, mentioned it costing $10 (£7) but this was later corrected to $100 (£70)”

Fine! Let’s assume it may have been a mistranslation, and that the actual price really is going to be just around a 100 USD, the question still remains;

Just how feasible is this, Really?

Though not much is know about the rudimentary laptop (which has been in the making for almost 3 years), it is believed that it would have on board memory of up to 2GB, as well as wireless capabilities.

The price of computer components makes it is even more difficult to envisage developing such a low cost laptop. It is a known fact that previous attempts at developing cheaper laptops intended for the developing world ended up exceeding the estimate budgets. Even the One Laptop Per Child’s XO machine, went well over the $100 mark, soaking up a surplus of around $88-

“… That high-profile venture led by the scientist Nicholas Negroponte ran into problems after several companies, including the chip manufacturer Intel, refused to cooperate”

Most experts have even referred to India’s plans for an even cheaper machine as “Unrealistic”. The Times Online reports that Analysts at the financial management company Merrill Lynch, estimated that “the Negroponte laptop screen alone cost about £20″, which leaves one wondering if the so-called $10 laptop will ever become a reality.

It is worth noting also, that Intel’s Convertible Classmate netbook which was released on the 12th of January 2009, hit the shelves for $549. Specs on the second-generation Classmate (aka the convertible) are as follows:

• Atom N270 (1.6GHz)
• Intel 945GSE chipset
• 8.9″ at 1024×600
• Up to 16GB of flash storage
• Water-resistant keyboard
• VGA port output

In the end, and just as the analysts at Merrill Lynch put it, maybe;

“India’s $10 price hopes appear to be nothing more than pure fantasy”.

This may well be the case; however, let’s not be too hasty in judging, we just cannot forget the “100,000-rupee (£1,450) Tata Nano car and a no-frills mobile telephone that costs less than 800 rupees”.

Regarding the feasibility or otherwise of India’s $10 laptop, we would just have to wait and see. Reports have it that “Plans to cut the price to the bone appear to hinge on domestic technology that uses low levels of power.”

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