The Role of Blogs in the Kenyan Elections

In Istanbul we had a presentation from some of my favorite Kenyan digital activists. Their presentation was fun for me, especially as a follow-up to the piece I wrote on the role of the internet in the immediate aftermath of the Kenyan election. This is a story I will be following for quite some time.

cross-posted from the I&D blog. Thanks to Victoria for this roundup.

The next presentation highlighted the role of blogs and twitter in last December’s Kenyan presidential elections, especially with respect to monitoring the violence and strife in the aftermath. Several blogs, such as KenyanPundit.com and Ushahidi.com, are nearly exclusively covering the elections protests. Many of the blogging sites are organized into the Kenyan blog webring kenyaunlimited.com. One blog site, Mashada.com, became ethnically divisive enough to be unmoderatable and the forums were closed. In its place, the organizers set up ihavenotribe.com, where Kenyans and others are successfully submitting their thoughts.

Another site that was discussed was MamaMikes.com, which allows people to log on and deposit money to have it delivered to people in Kenya in the form of various different commodities, such as gasoline, beer, mobile phone credit (note that through the m-pesa system money can be transferred from one mobile phone to another).