Readaloo

Musician Kanye West performs onstage during the 2010 BET Awards held at the Shrine Auditorium on June 27, 2010 in Los Angeles, California.

Kanye West doesn't like his new rug. The rapper appears to be redecorating his house — buying gold-encrusted goblets, coveting 19th century artwork, and turning his home "real Kingish," as he puts it. But the rugs are all wrong. "I specifically ordered Persian rugs with cherub imagery!!!" He wrote on Twitter on July 28. "What do I have to do to get a simple Persian rug with cherub imagery uuuuugh."

Oh, Kanye. We've missed you.

Hip-hop's most ridiculous rapper has been relatively quiet in recent months — ever since that 2009 MTV Music Video Awards outburst about Beyonce's "Single Ladies" video being better than Taylor Swift's (which, by the way, it was) and someone on his PR team told him to shut it until the backlash died down. Well, time's up. Kanye has a new album out in September — formerly called Good Ass Job, it's currently without a name — and the promotional firestorm is kicking into gear. Kanye has already performed at the BET Awards and appeared at the khaki-clad offices of Facebook and Twitter. Then, on July 28, he opened a Twitter account. And here's what we discovered: Kanye is funny.

His blog, Kanyeuniversecity.com, has made us laugh for years, but it was sometimes hard to tell if we were laughing with Kanye or at him. The all-caps rants — such as the January 2009 post that began with the phrase, YOOOO WHY WON'T YOU LET ME BE GREAT!!! and ended with the request that we all "LOOK HOW FRESH MY SUIT IS" — seemed to be accidentally hilarious. And when fans complained that he showed up two hours late for a 2008 Bonaroo performance, Kanye didn't apologize, he blogged an obscenity-laced rant and called everyone at Bonaroo "squid brains." Basically, Kanye seemed like a diva. But on Twitter, he's different. He's more sarcastic, even tongue-in-cheek. Maybe we've had Kanye all wrong.

According to Twitter, here are some things Kanye West has done in the past two days:

• Flown on a private jet

• Complained that the private jet he flew on was too small.

• Called himself king and then posted a photo of one of Napoleon's thrones

• Drank wine out of a gold goblet

• Bemoaned the lack of cherubs

• Listened to the "William Tell Overture" ("Classical music is tight, yo")

• Listened to Leonard Bernstein. ("[His] flute player is snapping write now!!! Are those Christmas bells?")

• Put fresh flowers in his house

• Explained what it was like to date a model: "I had to learn to like small dogs and cigarettes"

• Asked for decorating advice: "Is the Versace sofa too hood? Might need to cover it in plastic!!!"

• Ordered his salmon cooked medium instead of medium well ("I didn't want to ruin the magic")

• Posted photos of Louis XIV's credenza

• Asked someone to give him this horse

Close to 300,000 people are now following his Twitter account and looking at his pictures of furniture. The number of people Kanye is following? Zero.

It seems that Kanye West is doing a tour of the Silicon Valley’s nerd hubs. After freestyling over at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, California, the other day — and subsequently joining Twitter  yesterday — he jammed on over to Twitter Central and treated Biz Stone and Co. to a performance as well.

As pointed out yesterday, Kanye West has an almost embattled relationship with the micoblogging service. Last year, he busted out with the following rant on his blog — which now only yields an “Error 404″ when you try to locate it. Regardless, here it is:

“I DON’T HAVE A F*CKING TWITTER… WHY WOULD I USE TWITTER??? I ONLY BLOG 5 PERCENT OF WHAT I’M UP TO IN THE FIRST PLACE. I’M ACTUALLY SLOW DELIVERING CONTENT BECAUSE I’M TOO BUSY ACTUALLY BUSY BEING CREATIVE MOST OF THE TIME AND IF I’M NOT AND I’M JUST LAYING ON A BEACH I WOULDN’T TELL THE WORLD. EVERYTHING THAT TWITTER OFFERS I NEED LESS OF. THE PEOPLE AT TWITTER KNOW I DON’T HAVE A F*CKING TWITTER SO FOR THEM TO ALLOW SOMEONE TO POSE AS ME AND ACCUMULATE OVER A MILLION NAMES IS IRRESPONSIBLE AND DECEITFUL TO THERE FAITHFUL USERS. REPEAT… THE HEADS OF TWITTER KNEW I DIDN’T HAVE A TWITTER AND THEY HAVE TO KNOW WHICH ACCOUNTS HAVE HIGH ACTIVITY ON THEM. IT’S A F*CKING FARCE AND IT MAKES ME QUESTION WHAT OTHER SO CALLED CELEBRITY TWITTERS ARE ACTUALLY REAL OR FAKE. HEY TWITTER, TAKE THE SO CALLED KANYE WEST TWITTER DOWN NOW …. WHY? … BECAUSE MY CAPS LOCK KEY IS LOUD!!!!!!!!!”

Now it seems that West has full-on embraced the service, even noting once — in the midst of a torrent of tweets — “awwwww man this is addictive I might get in trouble on here!!!!” So much for only blogging “5%” of what he’s up to.

When it was written about his entrance on to Twitter yesterday, West had around 20,000 followers — now he has 228,862.

What do you think of the rapper’s reversal of his previous opinion? Do you think his embracing social media can save his tarnished image? Let us know.

Source: Woopra

How it Works

"Explore the web like never before," declares the StumbleUpon sign up page. And indeed the beauty of StumbleUpon is how easy it makes browsing the Web. It's often called a 'serendipity engine' for its ability to turn up strange and new content.

Here's how StumbleUpon works as a user. You firstly download and install a browser add-on, then select categories that interest you. Now you're ready to explore. Simply click the Stumble button in your browser to be magically transported to an unknown web page. Where you're taken is driven by StumbleUpon's sophisticated recommendation engine, which is fueled by data from its users - who vote on whether they 'like' or 'dislike' web pages across the Web.

What's Popular on StumbleUpon?

It's simple for the users, yet surprisingly difficult for the media industry to get its collective head around. Its randomness and lack of an easily identifiable core audience are two things that make StumbleUpon hard to understand. So what kind of content is popular there?

Much like Digg, another crowd-sourced recommendation engine, the most popular content on StumbleUpon tends to be easily digestable and entertaining. Lists, bizarre things, scientific discoveries, animals, humor, images, and so on. Among the most stumbled content of 2009 were these articles: '99 Things You Should Have Seen On The Internet' (471K Stumbles), 'Life Summarized in 4 Bottles' (439K Stumbles), '14 Rare Color Photos From the FSA-OWI' (341K Stumbles),... you get the idea.

We queried our community via Twitter to find out their main use cases. Here's a representative sample of the replies (you can see them all via Twitoaster):

@brettmorrison: "I use it to share things I find interesting and I use it to find randomly interesting things when I have a few free moments."

@EssenteeWeb: "So's I can share what I think is cool and find content I otherwise wouldn't have."

@andinarvaez: "I do, on occasion. Whenever I'm online, want to stay online, but just feel like browsing. [...] Even though they're [within] my interests, stumble upon helps me burst my usual browsing patterns & online bubble."

@rjanyk: "boredom... killing time a couple minutes at a time... entertainment. Sadly, almost thrilling not knowing what's coming next"

@MicaR: "Been a Stumbler for yrs. Great to get new ideas flowing when stuck, and, of course, great time waster. I've learned a lot, randomly."

@ezy80: "I find its a good source of 'random relevant' that nothing else provides in quite the same way..."

@lauratellsjokes: "i stumble when i am bored and to learn new things. i love stumbling through photos, art and philosophy."

@estateofflux: "I do, great for entertainment and uncovering hidden gems of content when you've exhausted all your usual sources!"

These and other replies often used words like "random" or "new." Also it seems that people tend to use StumbleUpon when they have a bit of spare time, or are bored.

Let us know in the comments whether you currently use StumbleUpon; and if so, how and why?

This week Facebook hit a landmark number: 500 million registered users. Put into geographical context, Facebook has enough members to be the third most populous country in the world. At the head of this virtual country sits 26-year-old Mark Zuckerberg.

Zuckerberg is the founder and CEO of Facebook, which he started while attending Harvard just six years ago. And while he may have never finished Harvard, no one can call him a quitter.

The founder of the most influential social media network online admits he doesn't even know how much he is worth. He does know, however, that as the CEO of the company that holds the largest database of personal information — aside from the government — he has a responsibility to his subscribers. And he tells host Guy Raz that he has no intentions of selling or giving that database away.

"I just think it would be the stupidest thing we could possibly do," he says during a forum held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.

Zuckerberg tells Raz it's not the data that makes Facebook valuable.

"I think it's really easy to say that there is all this information that Facebook has," Zuckerberg says. "What Facebook is today isn't a set of information, it's a community of people who are using Facebook to stay connected and share information. They are only going to do that as long as they trust us."

In the past, Zuckerberg has described his company as a utility for its subscribers. "When I say utility, I mean we are trying to provide people with utility," he tells Raz. "Our goal was never to build something cool. It was to build something useful."

Useful indeed. With 500 million registered users and counting, Facebook is undoubtedly the success story of the 21st century so far. It's a story many people want to tell. Zuckerberg and his company have been the focus of at least two books and now the subject of a film, The Social Network directed by David Fincher (Se7en, Fight Club) and written by Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing, A Few Good Men). But Zuckerberg tells Raz he doubts he will see the film.

"I wish that when people try to do journalism or write stuff about Facebook that they at least try to get it right," he says. He admits that he declined interviews with the writers.

"The reason why we didn't participate is because it was very clear that it was fiction from the beginning," he says. "I really believe that all that we can do is focus on building the best thing, and over time people will remember us for what we build."

As Facebook grows in the United States and overseas, Zuckerberg finds himself more involved with foreign affairs than he would like.

"Actually I think someone is trying to get me sentenced to death in Pakistan now," he tells Raz and an audience, which responds with laughter. "That's not a joke. It might be funny but it's not a joke. I mean, we think that what we are doing is a really valuable thing in the world and," he pauses. "And, I hope I don't get killed."

“140-character status updates to a network of followers.” That makes Twitter sound simple. But in fact, the social information platform has grown to be much more complex than its 140 character-limit suggests. The site not only connects people, but has also become an intricate information resource for everything from news to shopping deals.

Yet in many ways, the site’s actual functionality hasn’t exactly kept up with user interactions. Twitter’s interface has remained simple, which is why a lot of tweets take place through third-party sites and applications that make the experience more useful.

We’ve compiled a list of the top 20 third-party websites for making your Twitter experience more useful and easier to manage. Although this does not include the many desktop or mobile applications that are available for Twitter, we hope that it will make your browsing experience more enjoyable as you dive into the Twittersphere. Also, as a one-stop shop for Twitter apps, check out OneForty. We’d love to hear what’s missing from this list, including sites that you find useful in the comments.

Web Applications: HootSuite and Brizzly

With its recent update and HTML5 support, social media dashboard HootSuite has become one of the most useful Twitter web applications not only for individual users, but teams managing several accounts. In some ways, HootSuite has the look and feel of TweetDeck with the big differentiator of it being a web-based application, not requiring any downloads.

HootSuite enables you to update to multiple accounts at once, and supports Twitter, Facebook profiles and pages, LinkedIn, Ping.fm, WordPress, MySpace and Foursquare. Similar to TweetDeck, these features make the application useful for maintaining your overall social presence. Moreover, you can allow other users to jointly update an account, integrate Google Analytics for your stats and schedule tweets and updates ahead of time.

The HTML5 interface enables you to easily include an image or file with your update by simply dragging it from the desktop into the message box, which will automatically upload the file with an “Ow.ly” shortener for sharing. The fast loading of the dashboard is perhaps one of the most notable improvements, making the site more usable for users who manage dozens of accounts. If you don’t like Hootsuite, you should also check out Seesmic, which has a lot of similar features, but a different interface.

Brizzly has a different functionality from Hootsuite, but may be more appealing because of its simple interface. Brizzly is specifically focused on Twitter and no other networks, which makes the experience somewhat less distracting. It also includes subtle, but worthy features like automatically expanded URLs, which shows you exactly where you are going if you click, and displays replies and direct messages in a threaded form, making it easier to follow the conversation.

Filtering Through the Noise: TwitterTimes and Paper.li

After you log in with your Twitter username, The Twitter Tim.es creates a page that displays stories by filtering through what the people you follow have tweeted the most in a more presentable stream that is updated regularly. Though the design of the interface isn’t the best, The Twitter Times is effective in showing you who has tweeted the story along with the story headline and blurb to give you an idea of what it’s about. In some cases, the site shows you the full text of the post. It also gives you options to view popular stories on Twitter from media sources and Twitter Lists.

The site helps you filter through the noise and keep up with what is trending among the people you follow. If you’ve been off the grid for a couple hours, you can get a sense of what people are sharing and the news that is important among your Twitter community at any given moment.

Paper.li has similar functions but a different presentation. Users can create their own “newspaper” based on who they follow. Users can also create newspapers based on a Twitter hash tag or a Twitter list. Instead of a stream, Paper.li presents content by creating a custom homepage that separates content based on popularity and topics. The site does a great job of making the content visually appealing by including thumbnails, YouTube videos and blurbs.

Trends: TweetMeme and Trendistic

TweetMeme is best recognized for its bright green buttons on websites (like this one), enabling users to easily tweet the article they’re reading. All of the information is collected at TweetMeme from across the web, giving a good sense as to what is trending on Twitter. The site enables you to filter by categories and topics (entertainment, gaming, etc.) and to showcase the most retweeted links. You also get a brief blurb from the link being shared and are able to filter by news articles, images and videos.

Trendistic also works well, but specifically for bigger Twitter trends and how they have performed over time. The site gives you an idea of current trends and presents them in a graphic format, showing you the percentage that the trends account for at any give time. For example, on July 8, “heat” accounted for 1.8% of all tweets at 9 p.m. during LeBron James’ big announcement that he would be joining the Miami Heat. You can also sort the trend based on timeframe, and get a code to embed the chart on your site.

Twitter Lists: Tlists and PubliTweet

Tlists is a Twitter Lists directory where you can search by list topic, view popular lists, and create your own lists. Users can also apply to join a list, and the creator is then notified and can approve them to join the list depending on whether they are a good fit. Lists are a great curating tool in rounding up like-minded tweeters in one place. It functions not only as a directory, but also as a stream of useful information around a specific subject. But after you have that list, how can you make it more presentable?

PubliTweet takes your Twitter Lists and makes them a lot more useful. It does this by providing a nice embed code that presents the lists in a handy stream that includes the text of the tweet, headline, thumbnail and blurb of the article they are sharing. You can take the code and plant the list anywhere on your site. Not only does PubliTweet make your Twitter Lists more useful visually, the tweets are also more shareable through convenient Twitter, Facebook and e-mail share buttons.

Hashtag Stats: TwapperKeeper

TwapperKeeper and Trendistic are great tools for getting some basic stats on how much a specific hashtag on Twitter is performing. Though there are several other sites that give you more options (often for a price), these two sites are simple to use in getting a general overview. TwapperKeeper lets you create an archive for tracking a specific hashtag, keyword, or username and collects the data and the number of mentions. If you’re interested in getting a sense for how many times a specific hashtag was tweeted, it gives you a total number, along with the ability to search precisely through the archive that you created, listing the recent tweets that have been tracked. The beautiful part is that you can also export the data and analyze it to your liking.

Embedding Tweets: QuoteURL

Though Twitter released a script that allows interactive tweet embedding, the code has had some issues and isn’t always ideal. QuoteURL seems to be the best option for creating embedable tweets. The app enables you to add multiple tweet URLs and embed them into a post. You can also embed an individual one, but if you want to get a stream of tweets to embed, this is the tool to use.

The application gives you a nice, clean embed such that users can see the text of the tweet, but it also preserves the interactivity of being able to reply, click on the username, or any links within the tweet. Essentially, it mirrors the experience a user has engaging with individual tweets on Twitter. This makes your tweets a bit more useful than just a screenshot, however, many sites and blogs have yet to adopt it because the embed doesn’t show up in blogger’s RSS feeds.

Location: MapMash.in and Monitter

Though Twitter has launched its own location feature with Twitter Places, which will likely be expanded in the future, there are several other sites that showcase location-based tweets. Local Twitter Trends displays trends in major cities and allows you to click on the keywords to see what people are talking about. It’s very simple and to the point, giving you an easy way to track the conversation in a specific place.

However, if you want to track news on specific topics, monitter might be the better choice. This site allows you to not only search for a specific location, it also lets you track three specific searches within that area — in real time — and displays the results in an easy-to-view, three-column format. You can also adjust the radius of the area that you’re searching.

Discovery: WeFollow and Twellow

WeFollow is a Twitter directory from Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg, that emphasizes topics that users associate themselves with. Anyone can easily add themselves to the directory by simply tweeting out the hashtags that will make their usernames searchable in the directory. The site is great for discovering new users that you might share common interests with. It also enables you to view the top users in each category.

Twellow’s tagline is the “Twitter Yellow Pages,” and aims to be the directory to search for Twitter users based on industries and topics like biotechnology, food, home and garden, etc. In a lot of ways it is the ultimate directory for Twitter, also enabling you to search for users based on area. It also offers a very useful search engine.

Influence: Klout and TwitterCounter

Type a username into Klout and you can get a sense for how influential that user is on Twitter and their behavior. Klout gives you a score out of 100 based on reach, amplification and network after being compiled from numbers like the total retweets, message reach, unique mentions, retweeters, and more. The cool feature is the influence matrix, which defines the user and gives you a brief description of their behavior on Twitter. Klout also tells you who the user influences and is influenced by, as well as a topic summary of their tweets.

TwitterCounter tracks the top accounts and lists on Twitter based on how many followers they have and gives you some more basic numbers of influence based on growth and rank of the user’s account. The site provides some basic graphs tracking the number of the follower, following, and tweet growth over time, even setting a predicting number for where you will be in the future based on your average growth. It also enables you to easily compare several accounts at once, and build a handy widget for your site that tracks and displays recent Twitter visitors to your site.

Photos and Videos: TwitPic and yfrog

Among the first sites to make sharing photos on Twitter easy and popular, Twitpic is still one of the best. It’s also useful to browse through the public timeline of photos uploaded, and now you can even tie location to the photos you upload. It also lets you group photos into events, which is great for organization.

Yfrog lets you not only upload photos, but videos as well. The site is also extremely useful and easy to navigate. One simple Yfrog feature that Twitpic fails to include is a site search. Yfrog allows you to sort videos and pictures based on popularity, and showcases top search trends on the site. You can also easily share the photos across platforms and get an embed code for the image. Here’s an example of Glee star Mark Salling’s Yfrog post about a recent big catch:

Polls: PollDaddy and TwtPoll

PollDaddy has an easy integration for creating a quick poll that can be easily distributed on Twitter. The setup is easy. You create a poll question, select the answers (multiple choice, etc.) and the order you want them to appear, enter your username and post it to Twitter. The site sends a nice clean tweet with a link to the poll where users can vote. After setting the poll up, it is also quite easy to embed the poll into a post. It’s also worth mentioning PollDaddy has a great WordPress plugin that enables you to easily create polls within the content management system.

TwtPoll is similar to PollDaddy but has a different interface and allows users to answer questions through different formats, such as text, images or videos, Twitter handles or addresses.

New Facebook mobile boss Eric Tseng is re-organzing the company's mobile efforts around what he calls a "platform strategy."

By that he means Facebook will soon allow mobile app makers to hook into Facebook's APIs the same way Web developers currently can.

Eric, who came to Facebook from Google just two months ago, thinks mobile developers will take to Facebook's APIs because "Facebook is nice analogy for what you would do on the phone."

Your friends list is like your phone's address book. Your calender is like Facebook Events. The photos you took with your cameraphone make up something like a Facebook photo gallery.

"If you're a developer you're not building for all those features yourself." Facebook, he says, can help fill in the gaps. So for example, Foursquare might some day be able to let users take photos in-app and upload them into Facebook photo albums. We've also heard Apple might integrage Facebook features in iOS.

"We're far far away from having a truly socially-informed mobile experienced," says Eric. "Look for that in 12 to 16 months."

This is a smart sneaky strategy for Facebook.

While Google, Apple, Microsoft, Nokia, and HP spend billions fighting a bitter platform war, Facebook can sit back knowing it owns data

Larry Freed, CEO of ForeSee Results, says in the release that the reasons for users dissatisfaction with Facebook are varied, but lie along some expected lines of tension.

"Facebook is a phenomenal success, so we were not expecting to see it score so poorly with consumers," said Freed. "At the same time, our research shows that privacy concerns, frequent changes to the website, and commercialization and advertising adversely affect the consumer experience. Compare that to Wikipedia, which is a non-profit that has had the same user interface for years, and it's clear that while innovation is critical, sometimes consumers prefer evolution to revolution."

The Internet Social Media category - new to the index this year - had only five entries, with MySpace and Facebook bringing up the tail end. Wikipedia and YouTube led the pack, with scores of 77 and 73 respectively. We have to say, it's odd that the "Internet Social Media" category - a categorization that could contain hundreds of sites - has this few entries, but even in the other categories released this month, none scored as low as Facebook and MySpace.

The site has run into continual trouble over the past year, from backlash after repeatedly changing its privacy settings to simply redesigning the user interface, and it looks like the numbers reflect this. But will these numbers reflect whether or not consumers actually use the site?

As usual, we expect consumer dissatisfaction to mean little, if anything, until a better alternative comes along.

Even though Facebook’s users are dissatisfied, they haven’t demonstrated the will to leave. Perhaps it’s because there is no strong competitor, or because their social lives would suffer tremendously if they opted out of this now-essential tool for communication and event planning.

After the Instant Personalization opt-out controversy, thousands of users committed to quit on May 31. The movement failed when many of them simply didn’t. Instead of suffering perceptible negative consequences for its choices, the social network has continued to grow. It will celebrate 500 million users later this week.

Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg will be giving a rare TV interview with Diane Sawyer today, presumably to talk about the milestone and repair some of the PR damage in the wake of these privacy scandals and in anticipation of the release of the film The Social Network. What do you think he’ll say? What does he need to say?

Texting isn’t just for late night convos and killing boredom. Short bursts of instant communication are connecting some isolated African communities to vital information.

Because of widespread poverty in Africa, the technology culture there has followed a different path than the West. Because computers are so expensive, affordable mobile phones have become the ubiquitous form of communication. Between 2003 and 2008, Africa had the fastest growing mobile phone market in the world. On average, more than one-third of the African population has a mobile plan, with some areas reaching almost two-thirds market penetration.

Non-profit organizations have seized on this unexpected opportunity to bring lifesaving health care information, quality K-12 educational curricula, and advanced farming techniques to millions. Here’s a look at some of these mobile awareness efforts.

Health

It’s impossible to overstate the health care crisis in Africa. Over 5.6 million people are stricken with HIV/AIDS in South Africa alone; upwards of 30% of the population in some age groups. Many are unaware that medical care is even available. Perhaps even more heartbreaking, the multi-million dollar efforts to provide antiretroviral drugs are in vain for those without proper instructions and monitoring.

Cell-Life Aftercare, a joint project between the University of Cape Town and Peninsula University of Technology, can remotely monitor 15 to 20 patients per heath care worker, provide supplemental medical information and relay information back to a central database all via mobile technology.

“The single greatest risk [to effective patient monitoring] is the lack of resources to roll out [antiretroviral therapy] effectively,” said Ulrike Rivett, founder of Cell-Life. “The areas with the highest prevalence of HIV have a shortage of skilled medical personnel, lack of good nursing and management staff and have limited financial resources.”

Instant communication combined with an eagle-eye view of disease demographics has already prevented at least one outbreak of typhoid in Uganda. The U.S.-based non-profit Academcy of Educational Development – Satellife developed a program to relay information through networks via personal digital assistants (PDAs). “The outbreak was contained because we could see that something was amiss,” said Holly Ladd, Director of AED-Satellite. “This would not have been possible with paper and pencil reporting, which is much more time-consuming.”

While we are far from stopping the serious health care issues that plague African communities, these early projects seem like an important and promising technological step.

Instant Education

With so many young eyeballs fixated on mobile devices, educators saw a great opportunity to reach kids who have traditionally struggled with formal education. MXIt, a mobile messaging and social networking client, reaches 40% of South Africa’s population according to a company spokesperson, and has teamed up with scores of organizations to provide educational information on everything from mathematics to driving instructions.

For mathematics, MXIt partners with cities and school districts to provide personal tutoring and curricula for use inside and outside of the classroom. For schools, teachers are given established curricula and student performance results to help them tailor future lessons. Outside the classroom, students can get answers to burning math quandaries through direct access to a real-life tutor. They can also refer a struggling friend.

MXit seems pleased enough with the initial results to extend the program. According to materials provided by MXit, a new project partnership with Nokia that began with 260 learners has been expanded to over 3,000 and will soon cover two more South African provinces.

Other educational projects include the aptly-titled “m-novels,” which aims to provide mobile-formatted novels to fiction-hungry teens (as of this writing, only one such book, Kontax, seems to be in circulation).

Finally, for young people striving for a driver’s license, MXit beams instructional videos and driver-knowledge questions to help them ace their test. According to material provided to Mashable  by MXit, over 85,000 people utilized the program in the first month.

Agricultural Education and Equality

For many in the industrialized world, so-called “price dispersion” is a mere inconvenience — we might splurge for a $9 bagel on New York’s 5th Avenue even if we could buy one for 99 cents further downtown. For people in low-income countries, however, price variance across markets can mean one less meal for a entire family.

Fortunately, research finds that cell phone permeation can help smooth out price variation across markets. One study shows that for the fishing industry in sub-Saharan Africa, mobile phone penetration reduces waste, increased profits by 8%, and decreased consumer prices by 4%. “[With a cell phone], I know the price for US$2, rather than traveling [to the market], which costs US$20,” said one grain trader in Zinder, Nigeria to researcher Jenny Aker.

Mobile phones also provide access to global markets and crop-saving weather forecasts in developing areas around the world. Ross Biddiscombe reporting for the Guardian found that:

“…using the Reuters Mobile Light (RML) mobile phone service, one grape grower in Maharashtra state, India, began sending his product to Russia for a higher price after subscribing, while a maize grower received an SMS message about bird flu in West Bengal which would cut his sale price, so he decided to store his produce, selling it for an increased profit when the market improved a few weeks later.”

Pocket-sized technologies are making the age-old uncertainties of agriculture somewhat more manageable for many in Africa and other developing regions. And for those with meager savings to buffer a crisis, it’s little wonder farmers are taking advantage of every opportunity to avoid them.

Conclusion

Cheap and efficient mobile technologies are significantly changing the lives of people in developing areas who are burdened by unequal access to resources and information. Health, education and agriculture are all benefiting from the collective I.Q. of a mobile nation, and cell phones are bridging the gap between isolated African communities and a global market eager for knowledge and talent.

Ian Wilkes, left, and Ginsu Yoon are the founders of Bynamite, which is testing software that monitors what ad networks and Web sites collect and assume to know about a user.

LIFE, as they say, imitates art. And the way things work commercially today across much of the Web recalls that chapter in “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” where Tom cajoles his guileless friends into whitewashing Aunt Polly’s fence. They supply the labor, but he gets the reward.

On the Internet, users supply the raw material that helps generate billions of dollars a year in online advertising revenue. Search requests, individual profiles on social networks, Web browsing habits, posted pictures and many Internet messages are all mined to serve up targeted online ads.

All of this personal information turns out to be extremely valuable, collectively. So why should Google, Yahoo, Facebook and other ad businesses get all the rewards?

That is the question that animates Bynamite, a start-up company based in San Francisco. “There should be an economic opportunity on the consumer side,” said Ginsu Yoon, a co-founder of the company. “Nearly all the investment and technology is on the advertising side.”

Bynamite, to be sure, is another entry in the emerging market for online privacy products. The business interest in such products, of course, is being fed by worries about how much personal information marketers collect. Also playing a part are recent outcries after Facebook changed its privacy practices and Google introduced a social networking tool, Buzz, that initially shared information widely without users’ permission. Venture capital has been pouring into Web-based monitoring and privacy protection products like ReputationDefender and Abine, as well as services that help parents protect children’s privacy online, like SafetyWeb and SocialShield.

Bynamite brings a somewhat different perspective to the privacy market. “Our view is that it’s not about privacy protection but about giving users control over this valuable resource — their information,” Mr. Yoon said.

Both the protection and the value approaches to the privacy market could well pay off, says Randy Komisar, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the venture capital firm. “What’s intriguing about Bynamite,” he said, “is its emphasis on privacy as revolving around choice and ownership of data, and ultimately a notion of an exchange of value.” (Kleiner Perkins is an investor in ReputationDefender but not in Bynamite.)

Although Bynamite is a tiny start-up, it points toward larger issues about privacy transactions and pricing of personal data. “In reality, we constantly make transactions involving our personal information,” said Alessandro Acquisti, an associate professor of information technology and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University.

Every search on Google, Mr. Acquisti notes, is implicitly such a transaction, involving a person “selling” personal information and “buying” search results. But people do not think about, or are unaware of, the notion that typed search requests help determine the ads that Google displays and what its ad network knows about them.

Bynamite, Mr. Acquisti said, is “simply trying to make these kinds of transactions explicit, more transparent to the user.”

Last week, Bynamite introduced an early, or beta, version of its software, a downloadable plug-in for browsers. That software and its Web service monitor what ad networks and e-commerce sites collect and assume to know about a user. A user’s interests are then assembled on a Web page, grouped by categories like “news and current events,” “general health,” “travel,” “technology” and “shopping.” The categories are weighted by how often you visit different categories of sites or make purchases at some online merchants.

The information tracked by Bynamite is steadily updated, and, at least for me last week, a small pop-up alert at the bottom of my computer screen appeared every day, informing me of new information about me from ad networks. Mr. Yoon calls the product’s early version mainly a “mirror,” showing users how the commercial Internet sees them.

Users can change that mirror to represent their interests more accurately. For example, I don’t own a car, but my “automotive” folder soon had several entries, saying I was interested in Mercedes-Benz and other brands, presumably because middle-age men who visit the Web sites I do are typically attractive targets for car ads. I deleted the auto interests, suggesting to advertisers that I’m not necessarily a good prospect. Still, I saw a few car ads on sites I later visited.

Bynamite is by no means anti-advertising. It does not block ads. Its Web site recommends free tools, like AdBlock and NoScript, for people who want ads blocked.

In essence, the company has a libertarian, free-market ethos. If consumers have more power and control, it says, personal information should flow more efficiently to the benefit of both consumers and advertisers, who will be able to more accurately aim their ads.

Like most start-ups, Bynamite faces long odds. To succeed, it must be easy to use, and users must trust it as a reliable middleman handling their data. It has no business model yet, though it could offer product recommendations, based on interests, and collect fees on resulting sales from merchants. It hasn’t ruled out accepting ads itself. To start, its free plug-in software works only on Mozilla and Chrome browsers.

IF Bynamite gains momentum, Mr. Yoon predicts that individuals will be able to use their portfolios of interests as virtual currency. He calls the idea a “consumer’s preference wallet.”

Mr. Yoon and his co-founder, Ian Wilkes, are former business and engineering managers at Second Life, the online community where trading virtual currency for digital goods is common.

In a few years, Mr. Yoon says, a person’s profile of interests could be the basis for micropayments or discounts. A media company, for example, might charge a monthly subscription fee of $10 for news or entertainment programming, but offer it for $8 to those who exchanged their preference wallets.

The discount, in theory, would be justified because advertisers would pay more to market to people whose interests they knew precisely and thus were more likely to buy.

“I may be wrong about the product and our company,” Mr. Yoon said. “But I’m absolutely convinced that the direction is right, giving people a way to identify and use this store of value that is their personal information.”