Soweto uprisings . com wins Highway Africa new media award

That's right, the cool cowboys behind Soweto uprisings . com, Ismail Farouk and Babak Fakhamzadeh were presented with the very (dare we say) prestigious Highway Africa new media award in the individual category in Grahamstown last week.

Ismail was invited over to receive the prize. Here's a cute little video of the ceremony.



Besides ever lasting fame, we won a carved fishbowl with the odd inscription "Journalist of the year 2007" and a Blackberry 8700g. Wanna trade for a Nokia N95?

At the event, Soweto uprisings . com was called "...the most innovative site in Africa." This was definitely the case a year ago, when we started the site, but the technology we use has slowly entered the mainstream.

That said, we do believe that due to the social relevance of this site, it does deserve to be called at least one of the most innovative sites in the world.

Here's a picture of the award:

Credits

Thanks to all involved:

Antonnete Sithole, by re-living the day's events, helped with identifying her route, from Tshesele High School to Phefeni senior secondary school.

Mphafi Mphafi, for identifying the Morris Isaacson High School Route. Mphafi now works with the June 16th Foundation and at the time chairman of the South African students movement (from 1974 to 1975). He is currently involved with the Johannesburg Road Agency (JRA) in formalising the Soweto township sidewalks and roads.

Oupa Maloto, from the June 16th Foundation, was instrumental in identifying meeting places in central western Jabavu.

Ali Hlongwane, for identifying the Madibane High route and Junior secondary school routes in Diepkloof. As well as the Avalon Memorial Route in Chiawelo.

ASM architects and urban designers, for managing the Hector Pieterson Research Project and for facilitating architectural scale drawings of the routes of the uprisings. In particular, S'phelele Nxumalo, Lorenzo Nassimbeni and Liale Francis.

Ismail Farouk - The primary researcher who talked to all the individual contributors and collected all the content on Soweto uprisings . com.

Babak Fakhamzadeh created the online environment. In doing so, he used the Flickr API, the Google Maps API, the Geo-names webservice, the GeoURL webfeed, the tabber script from Barelyfitz designs, the Lightbox JS v2.0 script by Lokesh Dhakar, the Rich HTML Balloon Tooltip code listed on Dynamic Drive, some additional javascript by Shawn Olson and even some of his own code.
The cloud tags is done by ZoomClouds, the backend of soweto uprisings . com uses the excellent tableeditor by 2enetworx.