I want to apologize ahead of time.  VoA is curently onlne, but it may be experiencing some technical difficulties from time to time as we work to perfect our website backend to better enable us to serve the people of Africa and the world information about technology empowerment.

What if we continue with the web portal idea for web design (referenced in an earlier post of mine), and make it bigger, expand it.  The web design portal serves a very specific purpose: it connects people who need to get their information out (the CBOs and NGOs) to the people who can do that (the local web designers and developers), which subsequently gets the CBOs and NGOs connected to the people with the ability to provide funding or volunteers or whatnot.  The web portal will provide a mass hub to enable an e-commerce explosion in the development-support world.

First off, let me apologize if you have already read an article about Botnets in Kenya, and their potential growth do to the new fibre optic data cables that are landing and coming live (however so slowly).  I want to put a spin on it, though not a large one.  As this website's mission is to empower the people of Kenya, and Africa, to be heard on the internet, a direct result of this is teaching people basic internet skills.  Teaching internet skills means empowering people with internet connections, which are set to become inexpensive and abundant in Kenya if all of the political and corporate wrangling over the data cables eventually dies down.

Good day blog readers.  It's Wednesday morning and my class of teachers that was supposed to show up has not (which actually is a suprise, usually they are early!  Wait, I have been informed there are some national exams going on...), so I have decided to introduce the layman to a very specific technical issue that plagues Information Technology in the developing world: that of open data formats and other forms of open standards.  Don't worry, I know it sounds boring, but hopefully you will be interested enough at the end, and maybe you will have even learned something!  I can only hope.