I just ran across this great article about a ranger in Kenya’s Masai Mara park who is disseminating the park’s conservation message (and the economic impact of the tourism collapse) using web 2.0 tools including the Flickr.com photo sharing site (which we are also using to feed the images in the left sidebar), Twitter.com (which we will be using for text message posts to this blog), etc.

It’s a fascinating read about how “wildlife ranger Joseph Kimojino … a ranger in Kenya’s acclaimed Mara Triangle wildlife park … first learned how to click a computer mouse in November. Now he blogs about the Mara Triangle and posts wild animal photos on Flickr nearly every day.” And even more compelling is his blog itself, with first person stories of shootouts with poachers, crocodiles gorging themselves on zebras, and boy shepherds chasing off leopards that prey on their goats.

The penetration of web and mobile phone tools into Africa has happened incredibly rapidly and led to some great innovations. Of course there are a few bumps in the road, like that fact that here in Ethiopia the telecom industry is a government monopoly, voice over IP (Skype) is illegal, and there is no text messaging.

Still, it’s interesting to think about how radically things will be transformed in just a few short years when the fibre arrives and there’s bandwidth galore.  Live webcam on the Mara river during migration?

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