I think its about time the web industry in Kenya takes shape. We have no proper loyalty to our own, maybe because there is not that much the industry is offering but we are busy supporting international sites. How can we make Kenyans get into our sites and participate properly?
David, your thirst for local content is time-bound. There has been a lot of concentration on the foreign based sites at the expense of the local ones. This is because the polarization of the foreign content is developed with the realization of addressing issues affecting the local(read foreign) communities. Our Kenyan participation to, say, Haiya.co.ke etc is not fully utilized due to the insignificant attached. For instance most of the local content sites (SNS-type) are inclined towards politics of the day, celebrity gossips and dating issues. While real-time information is missing a great deal, the target audience is not making any good use of the local developed sites, which is a borrowed idea from, say FaceBook and MySpace. To make the local content visible, in my opinion, the language should be made local, in this case Kiswahili instead of English. But how many of us are willing to embrace Kiswahili as a medium of communication? Let me see by the show of votes!
I have a great Question and Answer website that I think people would use as a forum of assisting each other and sharing knowledge and experience.
Check it out at http://qanda360.com
Join and let me know whats your opinion of the site and suggest ways to reach more people.
As long as I see .com anywhere, I tend to believe that it is not locally developed in terms of the content and presentation. Had it been a .ke, then a smile with pride. qanda360.com, unfortunately, is more of a copy-cat from some Foreign sites and localized to fit our context. Good work, though! I'm not dismising it's relevance because a journey of a thusand miles, starts with a single step (sorry for using that cliche). KENIC <http://www.kenic.or.ke> facilitates the registration of .ke domains! Mburu -- Man is a gregarious animal and enjoys agreement as cows will graze all the same way to the side of a hill!