We all know journalists live dangerously in parts of Africa (as elsewhere). It ain’t anything to chuckle about, but I just had to smile when I saw the pay-off line (slogan) of this Ugandan newspaper.

I get the impression South Africa is finally waking up to the internet. It took so long, I wrote the country off as “essentially non-digital” in 2009 (here and here). But, I might have been wrong – there may still be (digital) life down there after all.  [Read on]

Always something funny out of Africa…

Jersey-based Petra Diamonds announced a 5-fold increase in its carat production, largely thanks to their mines in Tanzania.

I followed a link to look what got Petra Diamonds so lucky in Tanzania and landed on a Tanzanian e-newspaper site called This Day. It’s slogan: “The voice of Transparency”.

I read the article, found it very interesting and then looked to see who the people behind the e-paper were. Click here to see what I saw – the no-name editorial office. Not even the name of the managing editor is revealed!

…very transparent, very transparent indeed.

One of the leading German business daily papers Handelsblatt, in the stable of Naspers “gatgabba” Georg von Holtzbrinck, has now also decided to “cooperate” with the world of blogs, rather than “ignore” or “compete” with them. 

From today, every article on Handelsblatt.com will be “strengthened” with a list of posts pulled from German blogs on the same topic. In other words, commenting on a Handelsblatt article and then linking to the article (as I often do), might now give my blog some “air” on Handelsblatt.com in return.

That will, no doubt, be good for my traffic.  

I wrote “might”, because it depends on whether they judge my blog to be good enough. In a press statement Handelsblatt explained all blogs will be checked for their quality and only those German blogs pulled in which “adds value to the theme” and “upholds the editorial standards of Handelsblatt”. (If I pass the quality hurdle, the language barrier might still get me…) 

Also in the press statement: Handelsblatt follows the lead of The Sunday Times of South Africa on this. Apparently, The Sunday Times has been working with the same Swedish blog search engine Twingly.com (providing the blog links for Handelsblatt) for a while.

Late last year (yes, sometimes I’m not as awake as I should be) Springer Science+Business Media (SBM), a subsidiary of Germany’s biggest media group Axel Springer, signed an agreement with the University of the Free State in South Africa to provide all of its libraries with the Springer eBook Collection 2005 – 2008.

That meant that 10,781 Springer eBooks were immediately available to more than 30,000 students and faculties at the university. The Springer eBook Collection includes textbooks, monographs, reference works, handbooks, book series and encyclopedias.

Now, all students and researchers at the university have electronic access and full archival rights to the Springer eBooks available on Springer’s online platform, SpringerLink. This platform also includes millions of articles from Springer’s peer-reviewed journals and reference works. A powerful search engine gives researchers, librarians and students quickaccess to the information they need.

So, let’s not think the digital age hasn’t arrived in the deep platteland!

For the complete press statement look here. 

SBM publishes over 1,700 journals and more than 5,500 new books a year, and has the largest science, technology and medicine eBook collection worldwide. SBM has operations in about 20 countries in Europe, the USA, and Asia, and some 5,000 employees. In 2007 it generated annual sales of around €906 million.

The International Herald Tribune published a report on Africa’s and South Africa’s broadband infrastructure, saying the price of broadband to households may drop to a fifth of its current level in the next two to three years. Also look at this contribution.

The nice thing about capitalism and free markets, is that it has a “built-in rectifier”. When the system tips over, the “rectifier” automatically kicks in and works in the background to bring the whole system back on an even keel, or back in balance**. [Read on]

The regulators have taken a hit, politicians have been blamed and now the financial media are urged to “come clean” on their role in the financial debacle of the century (or at least the last 80 years). Only the banking community is proceeding as if nothing’s happened. [Read on]