Xeni on the Road in West Africa: Liberia's Blackboard Blogger

Boing Boing reader Hugo van Tilborg, who I caught up with here on the road in Benin, points us to a fascinating story by Eric Hersman on Afrigadget blog about a fellow in nearby Liberia who "blogs" on a chalkboard. The guy even sells ad space there! I wonder what his CPMs are, and how the business is doing these days. Snip:

Alfred Sirleaf is an analog blogger. He take runs the “Daily News”, a news hut by the side of a major road in the middle of Monrovia. He started it a number of years ago, stating that he wanted to get news into the hands of those who couldn’t afford newspapers, in the language that they could understand.

Alfred serves as a reminder to the rest of us, that simple is often better, just because it works. The lack of electricity never throws him off. The lack of funding means he’s creative in ways that he recruits people from around the city and country to report news to him. He uses his cell phone as the major point of connection between him and the 10,000 (he says) that read his blackboard daily.

Above, WhiteAfrican's video. See lots of photos of Mr. Sirleaf's "analog blog," and read the full post at Afrigadget (or WhiteAfrican). Also: here's a New York Times story about him from a few years ago.

• [Jack]

  Very cool. Early newspapers started as being just lists of basic facts/info placed on a board outside of a newspaper office.

• [Mark Frauenfelder]

  I love his penmanship and how white the chalk looks on the blackboard. I wish he would talk about the kind of chalk he is using!

• [Barnabas]

  This reminds me of a scene from the episode “Black Jack” of the post-apocalyptic TV series Jericho, where news was posted on a giant board in the middle of the trading post. Is this method of mass communication only in our past, or our future as well?

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Jack_(Jericho_episode)

• [FutureNerd]

  ALFREDO INTO MONROVIA < --> INFORMATION OVERLOAD

• [Moriarty]

  Cool. But if “blog” is a shortened “web log,” then shouldn’t be “dlog” for “blackboard log?”

  • [Xeni Jardin]

    Oh, good one. But I’d vote instead for “ANABLOG.”

• [atomburke]

  “Anablogger” : the revisionist term for all paper written and blackboard scribes

• [Manko]

  Atomburke & Xeni, I think Ana Voog may already have that trademark nailed.

  So but yeah, I’m reminded of living in a remote village for Peace Corps training, then being assigned to live in a town, where utilities were considerably more precarious. Electricity in my lil’ mud hut was entirely my own responsibility, and if I’d charged my batteries I’d have it, whereas in town I was dependent on Lesotho’s version of a grid. In the village I got all my water from a well; in town, when the power went out, we had no water either because the pumps were on the grid, and I had no idea where the nearest well was. In the village I’d send messages quickly via running children as opposed to counting on a weak phone infrastructure. Etc.

  The Moral: A weak infrastructure is often less reliable than none at all.