A gifted Zimbabwean, now American based pro photographer, Michael
Bowles (michaeljnbowles.com), is undertaking a small appeal to all
those he knows to ask for any form of a donation to help keep alive a
little African elephant – “Zamma” (as he as been named).

Zamma was found orphaned in the African lower Zambezi valley. Efforts
were made to reintroduce him back into a herd with no luck, as a
result Conservation Lower Zambezi was burdened with looking after him
at a cost of more than US$100 per day for food and a wage for Monday -
a dedicated and devoted young man (shown in the picture below) who
looks after Zamma’s needs and keeps a daily eye on him. The David
Shepard foundation helped setup an elephant orphanage in the Kafue
National Park of Zambia late last year where Zamma is now looked
after, with 3 other orphans. The orphanage is in desparate need of
funds as the entire operation had to be relocated recently due to
heavy rains and floods which destroyed the orginal camp.

Michael is offering a signed 16×20 print of “Zamma with Monday” to
anyone who makes a donation of $100 or more. Image offered attached.
It’s a small but worthwhile effort Michael is making in exchange for a
terrific image he really loves.

If you are able to help, please contact Michael via michaeljnbowles.com.

David Pogue, from the NYTimes, wrote:

With 525 million photos posted so far, Flickr may be the largest photo site. But its strengths are social interaction and personal expression, like a visual blog. For example, 75 percent of Flickr photos have been made available for public browsing, commenting, downloading and subscribing.

People are weird. Simply put. In the past twenty-four hours, we’ve come across a handful of Flickr users who’ve marked some of our (and some of our friend’s) photos as favorites. Now, let it be known these aren’t photographs capturing beautiful sunsets or the views from a 14,000’ peak or us sitting on a bench in our garden laughing. Conversely, nor are they “Miss New Jersey� style shots or anything otherwise compromising to our integrity – they’re frozen moments in time in which the focus happens to be on a female. And that’s where it gets creepy.

Entire Flickr accounts are dedicated to saving photographs of women – old, young, tall, short, skinny, overweight, blonde, brunette, clothed, nude, sitting, standing – as their favorites. Their profile thumbnails are commonly flaming pitchforks or skulls and crossbones.

I chased down some help topics on Flickr looking for an answer. This made all of us generally uncomfortable. Ironically enough, we’re not alone. Unfortunately, Flickr doesn’t offer much in terms of shelter. You can block the person, but does that really protect someone?

We ultimately decided to immediately lock down our entire Flickr account and limit it to friends and family only. To see what photographs we’ve taken, we have to invite you to be one of our contacts. And how sad this is. Especially when 1) it’s fun to share, 2) it’s fun to be part of such a large community of talented photographers, and 3) there’s a ton of people out there making a lot of money by doing nothing on Flickr.

Proceed with caution.

I have to admit, I’ve never been much of a social networking guy. I spend way too much time in front of a computer normally — I don’t need to stick around and see who’s doing what. Believe me, I’m not being nasty; it’s just not my thing. But, it’s my nature as a web designer to want to know what is the draw. Is the site really cool? Is it some über-app linking people across the globe? Is it easy to use?

At first I laughed at them. My wife — and so many of my family and friends — were spending their time searching Facebook profiles. The laughter got louder and more frequent, until a few days ago. Jude hurried me into our home office to see her latest Facebook contact: the mother of one of her childhood friends from Zimbabwe. Let me repeat that in some other terms. An older woman entering the prime of her life having lived her entire existence in the rural farming nation in the breadbasket of Africa has a Facebook account. A country where inflation is now 10,000% and Internet access is as common as seeing a Jackass penguin riding the subway in New York. The real kicker is she’s not the only one. There are hundreds from Zimbabwe alone, not to mention South Africa (where things are only a little better).

Yesterday, ComScore released statistics on Facebook’s success in the past year.

In the months prior to allowing open registration, Facebook.com’s traffic hovered at approximately 14 million visitors per month. However, after Facebook opened its doors to the general public, visitation accelerated to reach a level of 26.6 million visitors in May 2007, up 89 percent versus the same month last year and 100 percent versus September 2006.

…

The most dramatic growth occurred among 25-34 year olds (up 181 percent), while 12-17 year olds grew 149 percent and those age 35 and older grew 98 percent.

181 percent in 25-34 year olds. Absolutely remarkable. Now, before we all jump up and down, CNET.com reminds us:

It should be noted that any Internet statistics still ought to be taken with a (small) grain of salt. The industry hasn’t yet come to a concrete conclusion on which methodologies work best, and so many Web stats firms, ComScore included, have taken some criticism in recent months.

Here are some more statistics from ComScore’s website.

Part of the mystery behind their success is Facebook originally only allowed Harvard students and a few other elitist schools to register. They then expanded to allow corporations and colleges from around the world. It wasn’t until last year when they opened registration for everyone. And this is when the deluge of traffic began.

I’ll be watching closely to see how Facebook handles the pressure of nearly 16 billion page views — and growing– per month.

Amidst all these statistics, the one that truly stands out for me is Average Minutes Per Visitor. In February 2007, that number reached 200. Two hundred average minutes per visitor. Do Facebook users have jobs?

My wife and I just returned — on the 20th of May — from 17 of the most glorious days one could hope to experience. Our travels brought us once again to the heart — and desperately slow heartbeat — of southern Africa: Zimbabwe. Those of you who know us well are familiar with our travel habits; this trip to Zim is nearly an annual occurrence and one we look quite forward to each and every time. Tales of misadventure aside — which include a destructive elephant and disgruntled hippo in separate attacks — Zimbabwe was different this time.

We kicked off our journey back on the 4th of May taking off from Charleston for London (via Washington). We’d planned a few nights in the U.K. to see some friends and to break up the long-haul flights on both the outbound and inbound trips — and this turned out to be the perfect plan. It’s just over 18,000 miles en route¹ when flying from the southeast United States north through Europe and then down the length of the African continent. Just over 20 hours in the air.

When we arrived in Harare around 9am local time, Judes and I queued for our Zim visas (one of the cash-strapped government’s legal ways of collecting foreign currency), grabbed our over-stuffed bags, paid Z$10,000² for parking, and headed off into the Blue.

On the airport road into Harare, passing under the Independence Arch erected in 1980, Judes and I remarked there was a different feeling in the country this time. As the country’s Tourism Authority says:

“Zimbabwe calls upon you for a moment, to reflect on the wonders of human creativity and civilisation.”

We couldn’t agree more. And no one knows it better than my wife, Jude. (She was born and raised in the country.) The landscapes and offerings of Zimbabwe are no doubt some of the best in the world.

It’s coming into winter in the southern hemisphere — a beautiful time of the year to be in Africa. But there were less cars on the road. There were fewer people around. It seemed less chaotic. Less desperate. It was almost calm. We’re unsure why though. The city of Harare — in fact, the entire country of Zimbabwe — is starving. Food is short. Cash is even shorter. Fuel is nearly impossible to obtain. There’s a dire need for foreign exchange to purchase essentials. Robert Mugabe’s failure as president and recent bad press³ has spawned new resolve in the people of Zimbabwe. They love their country and they want it back.

This was our holiday after all, and we intended it to be just that. There’s much happening in our lives at the moment — which I’ll write more about later — so Jude and I were much in need of a few days disconnected from it all. For myself especially, a trip to a land so distant is a welcome respite. Here in America, everyone is ever-connected to their computers, televisions, mobile phones, text messages, flashing billboards. Zimbabwe certainly has these — natch, some of these — facilities, but we push ourselves to steer clear of any temptation to check email, voice mail or even the news. Zimbabwe’s vast countryside is one of the last remaining places on this planet where one can truly escape — not a single soul possessing the ability to find you — unless you want to be found, of course.

We spent our first few nights northwest of Harare with family before lightly re-packing our bags, hitching up the boat, and grabbing our Tilleys heading off to Lake Kariba. Kariba is purely majestic in nearly every regard. It is a man-made lake covering an area 2,150 square miles (5,580 sq km). It is 140 miles long and over 20 miles wide, and supports 200 billion tons of water behind the hydroelectric plant built into the Kariba Dam wall.⁴ Both Zimbabwe and Zambia share the lake’s borders –Zim on the south and Zambia to the north. It’s clear, however, most of the fervent wildlife around Kariba is on the Zimbabwean side. One can find almost every type of bird — some 300 species — or animal imaginable there; from the cormorant to the Nile crocodile and from the fish eagle to the African bush elephant or buffalo. In our few trips to Kariba, including this most recent one, we’ve been lucky enough to see it all.

Throughout the rest of our time in Zim, we enjoyed our days and nights close with family. Indeed, those were the best of days. Jude’s brother, Myles — notably one of Zimbabwe’s best hunters and safari guides — and his wife have a new baby girl. She’s just a few months old now, but she’s certainly filling her shoes!

Pictures speak 1,000 words

While I could write countless pages detailing our many stories from this trip, I’ll let the photography speak for itself. Visit JudeAndMark.com for the slideshow.

1. According to TerraPass.com’s cool carbon emissions flight calculator. 18,500 miles each way. ↩
2. When we arrived in Zimbabwe, the unofficial exchange rate was US$1 to Z$32,000. Parking was US$0.33.↩
3. Mugabe’s cronies have arrested, assaulted and otherwise abused members of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), the only opposition party in Zimbabwe. Also, Australia’s PM, John Howard, banned his country’s cricket team from traveling to Zimbabwe in September 2007 because of the downward spiral caused by President Mugabe. Howard also called the 83-year-old a “grubby dictator.” Yeah, there’s more, too.↩
4. Source: Wikipedia ↩

The Marine Corp Times has the story.

Shortly after I finished writing this post, I heard through the grapevine this friend of mine received “the exception,” and is not being reactivated. Phew.

Update 15 Dec @ 2pm: Sold to some guy who didn’t click through this blog.