Geeky stuff for the weekend

Social media

I can think of a couple of organisations which have embraced social media exactly like this:

New aidinfo website

In work-related geek news, my team has a brilliant new website: http://www.aidinfo.org. (I can call it brilliant without immodesty because I had almost no part in it.)

The internet in Ethiopia

If you live in Ethiopia, you’ll have noticed that the internet got a lot faster from the second week of July this year.  I wondered at first if this was for the same reason that the Addis roads are relatively clear of white 4x4s at this time of year: all the ferenjis go on an extended holiday to avoid the rainy season.  But I now know that there is a better, and more long-lasting reason: there is now a fibre-optic cable to Djibouti, connecting Ethiopia to the Seacom submarine fibre optic cable for the internet. This has completely transformed internet speeds in Ethiopia (I can now stream BBC Radio 4 on our home broadband connection).

Shared items

If you read things on the internet via an RSS feed reader (if you don’t, see here for an explanation of what you are missing) then you may be interested to know about shared items feeds.   These are RSS feeds containing items that someone has tagged as interesting (that is, not articles that the person has written, but articles that they are recommending).

My shared items feed is here.  Chris Blattman’s shared items feed is here.

Guardian Development Pages

Let me be the thousand and first person to point you towards the new development section of the Guardian online.  I admire the Guardian for putting so much effort into this, and giving it so much prominence.  But so far it feels a lot like white middle class people, mainly men, talking about development. I’d like to hear more from the citizens of developing countries.