Monday, September 13, 2004
Highway Africa
Hi there, hello and welcome to Cybersurf, your weekly window on web matters. I am Steven Lang coming to you from a somewhat chilly Grahamstown.
What am I doing in the Eastern Cape? Well this week, from Thursday till Saturday, Rhodes University and the SABC are co-hosting the eighth annual Highway Africa conference.
This is the biggest single gathering of African journalists anywhere. The focus of Highway Africa is to discuss new ways of using new technology more effectively in journalism.
A wide range of IT issues on the program includes an assessment of the outcomes of the World Summit on the Information Society, an address by the deputy minister of communications; Nepad and ICTs in Africa as well as a preview of the Internet Corporation on Assigned Names and Numbers meeting to be held in Cape Town this December.
No-one expects you to remember all these interesting issues on a very tightly packed program – and that is why the Rhodes University students are putting up a very creative web site at the following address: www.highwayafrica.org.za
Not only will you be able to read the program, but you will also find links to two valuable news sources on the conference. The first will take you to a multi-media version of our conference newspaper. It will carry news, photographs, and inter-active features explaining the issues heating up the plenary sessions.
The second link will take you to HANA – an acronym for the Highway Africa News Agency. As HANA is a news agency it is not really designed for the general public – although it is freely accessible – but the news agency stories are written for the benefit of other African news organisations that have not been able to send their own reporters to the conference.
HANA will also be celebrating its first year of existence this week. Conceived last year ahead of the World Summit on the Information Society, it was born from the understanding that most African news organisations would not be able to directly cover the summit in Geneva because it is just too expensive.
HANA covered the summit and two other international gatherings on ICTs earlier this year. The agency then distributed news material about the meetings free of charge to a number of news web sites and papers. HANA articles were widely distributed and widely read – and so African readers were able to understand the African perspective on a number of controversial IT debates.
So to keep up with the latest on Highway Africa – click along to highwayafrica.org.za – one more time - highwayafrica.org.za or if you would like to read the script for this program check out the Cybersurf blog at www.cybersurf.blogspot.com
That’s it for this special Highway Africa edition of Cybersurf from Rhodes University – thanks for listening and remember - to keep on surfing.
What am I doing in the Eastern Cape? Well this week, from Thursday till Saturday, Rhodes University and the SABC are co-hosting the eighth annual Highway Africa conference.
This is the biggest single gathering of African journalists anywhere. The focus of Highway Africa is to discuss new ways of using new technology more effectively in journalism.
A wide range of IT issues on the program includes an assessment of the outcomes of the World Summit on the Information Society, an address by the deputy minister of communications; Nepad and ICTs in Africa as well as a preview of the Internet Corporation on Assigned Names and Numbers meeting to be held in Cape Town this December.
No-one expects you to remember all these interesting issues on a very tightly packed program – and that is why the Rhodes University students are putting up a very creative web site at the following address: www.highwayafrica.org.za
Not only will you be able to read the program, but you will also find links to two valuable news sources on the conference. The first will take you to a multi-media version of our conference newspaper. It will carry news, photographs, and inter-active features explaining the issues heating up the plenary sessions.
The second link will take you to HANA – an acronym for the Highway Africa News Agency. As HANA is a news agency it is not really designed for the general public – although it is freely accessible – but the news agency stories are written for the benefit of other African news organisations that have not been able to send their own reporters to the conference.
HANA will also be celebrating its first year of existence this week. Conceived last year ahead of the World Summit on the Information Society, it was born from the understanding that most African news organisations would not be able to directly cover the summit in Geneva because it is just too expensive.
HANA covered the summit and two other international gatherings on ICTs earlier this year. The agency then distributed news material about the meetings free of charge to a number of news web sites and papers. HANA articles were widely distributed and widely read – and so African readers were able to understand the African perspective on a number of controversial IT debates.
So to keep up with the latest on Highway Africa – click along to highwayafrica.org.za – one more time - highwayafrica.org.za or if you would like to read the script for this program check out the Cybersurf blog at www.cybersurf.blogspot.com
That’s it for this special Highway Africa edition of Cybersurf from Rhodes University – thanks for listening and remember - to keep on surfing.
