Mlogik
Mlogik is an African start-up that designs and sells value-added mobile services using open source technologies. With headquarters in Mauritius, Mlogik’s objective is to extend its network throughout Africa by the end of 2006.

Ndiyo!
Ndiyo! is a project set up to foster an approach to networked computing that is simple, affordable, open, less environmentally damaging and less dependent on intensive technical support than current networking technology. They have a very interesting video, that explains what they are doing very well.

Mobile for Good
Mobile for Good (M4G) is a social franchise project designed to use mobile phone technology to help alleviate poverty and improve the lives of people in the developing world. It delivers vital health, employment and community content via SMS on mobile phones in order to inform and empower disadvantaged individuals.

Manobi
More than 3400 producers, middlemen, traders and hotel keepers receive by phone on a daily basis, a free SMS indicating the prices the product they want in any selected market.

The good news is that these are just a few of the projects being developed. They only represent the great amount of work being put in by individuals, that are in NGO's as well as private enterprise, to bring the everyday African into the digital age. You'll notice that many of the companies are leveraging the widespread use of mobile phones as the platform for connectivity - a trend sure to increase in the coming years.

I was thinking about that one day and realized that most people don't know how to tag their blog in order for it to be indexed by the top blog search engine: Technorati. Technorati is a valuable tool that can greatly increase your readership, and if you register and create a profile it will help you build your personal “brand” on the web.

Tag your blog if you want more readers
Technorati reports that there are 75,000 new blogs being created every day, what are you doing to make yours stand out? What are you doing to make it visible?

One of the easiest tools is to begin tagging your posts with the code necessary for Technorati to index it in the 27.7 million blogs that they track. All tagging is, is a way to help people find your article in the myriad of others. If you write a blog post highlighting African technology bloggers, you might tag it “Africa”, “African”, “blog”, “technology”, “tech”, etc… It's very simple and it makes sense to do over time.

It can sound daunting at first, because now you're dealing with that scary thing called “code.” But it's really very easy. Take the below template, which I've tagged for “africa”, and replace the word “africa” with the tag of your choice:

<!– technorati tags begin –><p style=”font-size:10px;text-align:right;”>technorati tags: <a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/africa” rel=”tag”>africa</a></p><!– technorati tags end –>

That's how easy it is. Rinse and repeat with different tags. If you have 4 tags, it might look like this:

<!– technorati tags begin –><p style=”font-size:10px;text-align:right;”>technorati tags: <a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/africa” rel=”tag”>africa</a>, <a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/technology” rel=”tag”>technology</a>, <a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/african” rel=”tag”>african</a>, <a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/blog” rel=”tag”>blog</a></p><!– technorati tags end –>


For those who are interested in knowing how I put code onto a blog as an example, you can do that easily using Tamba2's tool.

NOTE: WordPress user's categories are automatically indexed as the tag, but sometimes you still want to use this code to add other tags than are in the categories.

technorati tags: technology, technorati, tagging, how to