Science & Technology

From rural Mali to the world

Yaya Coulabaly is part of a group called Fasokan Segou which uses the Internet to connect with the world outside Mali. Here he tells us more about the project, and life in rural Mali.

Hello Yaya, thank you for taking the time of answering our questions. Can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers?

Hello and first of all a big thank you to Eddie Avila from Rising Voices and Lucy Chatburn from PocketCultures for giving me the opportunity to talk of rural Mali and our blog.

Yaya Coulibaly

My name is Yaya Coulibaly, I’m 27 and am agronomist (agricultural technician and engineer). I play football and love soft music as it allows me to work on my data without losing focus.

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Google+ creates a buzz in Pakistan

Pakistan has one of the fastest growing social media scenes in the world at the moment. Recently, it held its first international social media summit, with bloggers from Egypt, Malaysia and Indonesia attending alongside local bloggers.

So the release of Google+, the new social network from Google, has been greeted with quite some buzz among Pakistan’s tech bloggers. Faisal Kapadia, writing for Global Voices, compiled the following roundup of Pakistani blogger reactions to Google+:

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Picture Postcards: Funny photo from Spain

Happy April! I hope you didn’t get fooled by anyone on April Fool’s Day. This month we’ve decided to lighten things up and show you photos of funny things from around the world. This first one comes from Marta, who is our contributor from Spain.

More by Marta:
Futbolin: The origins of foosball
Burning Art in Valencia
The rain in Spain stays mainly in…

Should we talk about the weather?

One of the peculiarities of living in a country as big as the USA that touches two oceans, two major gulfs, straddles the continental divide, and has climates ranging from sub-tropical forests, to snow-covered mountain ranges, all the way to sub-arctic (if Alaska counts)… is the differences in the weather, and to a lesser extent, natural disasters. The East Coast gets hurricanes, and the Northern seaboard can also get hammered with snow and “Nor’Easters” (storms blowing from the Northeast). The Midwest has abysmal snowy winters, thunderstorms, and tornadoes and in the Spring and Summer. The West coast has earthquakes, torrential rains, wildfires and sometimes mudslides. In the Pacific Northwest, it rains, then it rains, and sometimes it rains some more. The South sees severe Thunderstorms, tornadoes, hurricanes, and ice storms in the winter.

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Oranje fever in The Netherlands

Image Courtesy : Travel Webshots

6th of July, 2010.

Tuesday evening, around 10.20pm Netherlands time.

The whistle blew signalling the end of a thrilling, high adrenaline semi-final encounter between The Netherlands and Uruguay.

And the Oranje fever gripped the nation!!

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Living inside the Great Firewall

As an online geek, one of the most inconvenient aspects of living in China is being trapped inside the infamous Great Firewall. Stuck inside the wall, technically I am unable to access YouTube, Facebook, all blogging platforms (WordPress, Blogspot, Tumblr, etc. including my own blog), Twitter, FourSquare, Google Documents & Google Calendar at times, and the list continues. You can imagine sheer frustration of those unfortunate ones, confined to an unnatural limited cyber space. World Wide Web in China doesn’t read exactly World Wide Web, but more like Webs Within the Wall.

From my experience, Internet users in China split into three camps – the Rebels, the Don’t Cares, and the Completely Unawares.

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