I'm pleased to see that Ushahidi and nearly all of the projects I supported made it to the finalists stage! There were few African projects in the running but there were some really good ones and I think in fact that most of the winning projects show terrific potential to be very beneficial for Africa. Congratulations everyone!

Many people ask us all the time about Drupal, the platform used to develop Kabissa 2.0.

Our friends at Lullabot have announced The Lullabot Learning Series available on DVD. I have not yet seen the DVD but the short trailer video on their website is very useful in explaining quickly some of the most important benefits of Drupal.

Visitors to the Kabissa 2.0 site may have noticed small changes happening here and there. We are indeed continuing to improve and "tweak" the site features in response to feedback from visitors and members - keep it coming! I thought it might be particularly useful to point out the nifty interactive features.

African blogger White African raises the issue of the middleman on African Remittances which is a $billion market. Before I continue I think it is important to also note speak about the "African Brain Drain" which in one sense is the other side of the remittance issue being that those who leave Africa to work in the West are the ones largely responsible for remittances.

I remember once writing a post called Turning on the social networking on my personal blog - that was last year when I was learning about blogging and was very excited to learn about the power of social bookmarking tools like del.icio.us, digg.com and their very popular African equivalent muti.co.za. These tools can be extremely useful to learn about important events in Africa and around the world, and to help spread the word about initiatives, campaigns and organizations that you believe in and support.

Now, almost exactly a year later, we are bringing social networking to the Kabissa community! At the bottom of this and every blog post on kabissa.org you will see bookmarking links, enabling you to share blog posts you see here with others. We all have our preferences (I like muti and delicious personally) so if you don't see your favorite social bookmarking site here let us know and we will add it.

I have once again been asked to nominate projects for the Ars Electronica PRIX in the Digital Communities category, which is described on the Ars Electronica site as follows:

The "Digital Communities" category will honor important achievements by digital communities well as innovative artistic approaches towards web-based communities.