Our two months self-drive safari in Botswana and Namibia is now over. We drove nearly 11′000 kms without any major incident and I shot about 6000 photos. After a first selection, 1700 remain and about 150 are now available online on a dedicated gallery.

Our trip went quite smoothly without any major incident. Indeed we got some visitors at night in our camps (Elephants, Hyena, Baboons and Lions) and we got some minor technical damages (the auto-focus of the Sigma lens 50-500mm gave up, a tyre exploded in Southern Namibia and our 350W power inverter did not go further than Maun).

As I’m leaving Thailand for Côte d’Ivoire, the traditional content of this blog will certainly change a bit and get an African perspective on new technologies. Nothing clearly defined yet, but for sure, moving from South-East Asia to Western Africa will have an impact.

In the meantime, enjoy the photos and feel free to drop questions and comments about our trip

Found two interesting posts about how Twitter becomes a real-time news media and how it contributes to spread news all over the World despite telecommunication networks breakdown and/or government censorship.

Smart Mobs author Mark A.M Kramer asks if Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) could make humanity morally accountable ? Today, even with a very limited presence of the International community (politics, journalists as well as Aid workers) we continue to receive near real-time information from Myanmar through various multi-plateforms communication media such Twitter, SMS, RSS etc.

Ten days later, in China, an powerful earthquake shook the Sichuan province, information that Technology blogger Robert Scoble claimed that Twitter had the breaking news even before the United States Geological Survey, which provides early warnings of seismic events.

Is Twitter's slogan "What are you doing" should be now replaced by "What's going on" ?

Sources: SmartMobs, BBC

I found very interesting post on Tom Barrett's "ICT in my Classroom" blog about how Twitter is used as an educational tool.

Tom's post also describes where Twitter is positioned among other communications tools. Twitter is not a synchronous or an asynchronous communication system. It is rather both at once depending how channel's followers use it.

He makes a nice metaphoric comparison between Twitter and a flowing torrent where people can just stand by it and observes the flow. Some prefers to jump into while others simply do not pay much attention to the  stream.

Personally I am amazed to see how many different ways Twitter is used today. There are, indeed, lots of individuals (you and me) but also some politicians (Clinton, Obama, UK Prime Minister), Public Services (LA fire department, AmCross), Airlines, News agencies, etc.. which are increasingly using it, but not necessarily to interact with others but to broadcast content or information.

Is any company using Twitter for internal use only ?