One of the enduring features of an Old Economy is the large amount of physical stuff that gets shipped around in order to get things done (printed documents, people). Yes, in the end some physical objects do have to be loaded up and delivered. After all, factories and homes are built with physical bricks, and people eat physical food. Still, looking around southern Africa, it is amazing the amount of stuff that gets shipped physically from one place to another. This includes people — shipping themselves to meetings, training courses and the like. In our business it is not unusual to have several people fly all the way from Kasane to Gaborone for a 2 hour training session, or drive 4-6 hours one way to Gaborone for a meeting. In an earlier post we introduced YouSendIt, a free file upload service that eliminates the insane physical delivery of electronic documents. Today we offer Yugma, a free solution that can help your organization eliminate unnecessary physical shipments of people all over the place.

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We often get the questions - “What is RSS?”, “How can I read RSS?” and “How can we use RSS on our website“. Truth be told, many explanations of Web terminology are too self-important and too loaded with technical jargon to be useful to many people. Today we bring you a short video explanation of this technology in a fun and completely accessible way. This video from Common Craft is about 3.5 minutes long and is entertaining enough that you’ll forget you are learning something.

The video controls include sub-titles in many languages other than English. Sadly no African language is included other than Afrikaans. Volunteers are invited to help translate the film. When you’ve finished viewing it, let us know what you think as we’re always on the lookout for useful resources to share with you.