Scanning Kenya's Daily Nation news site for the latest on the troubles, I came across a story about information that made my heart sink. The people of Eldoret in western Kenya who survived the horrific violence of this past week are now finding that they can't restart their lives simply because they lost so much of their personal data in the chaos: ID cards, school papers, ATM cards. Reading that story reminded me of the fight that some of my former colleagues on Capitol Hill have long engaged in to win restitution for Holocaust victims whose insurance records were destroyed in the war -- some 60 years after the fact! Ugh. Couple what's happening in Eldoret with the fact that the Kibaki government has issued a ban on live TV and radio broadcasts, and information does seem to be one of the first victims of this sort of upheaval.

But information does seem to have some good things in its corner in Kenya, namely some strong bloggers and other noteworthy attempts to use the Internet, cell phones, and mashups between the two. Blogs like Mental Acrobatics and Kenyan Pundit are sharing gripping first and second-hand reports on what's going on in their country; a blogger named Kui writing on KP had what I thought was a breathtaking quote: "I feel naked in all this, stripped of many things that made me Kenyan." The African blog aggregator and chat room hub Mashada has been quite active. (There's even been a fascinating discussion -- or, really, name-calling bout -- going on in various threads over what effect what's happening in Kenya will have on Barack Obama's presidential chances. Obama's even getting called a "kihii" a lot -- a derogatory term used against Luos that that references a man's circumcision status.) Of course, Global Voices is a great resource full of Kenyan blogs.

But the big-pipe Internet access is by no means universal in Kenya. Access is spotty and expensive where it does exist. (Research bleg: please send hard numbers on Internet penetration in Kenya if you've got 'em.) People seem to have turned to more accessible technologies like SMS in recent days. White African and other bloggers have been reporting that text messaging has been widely used to informally communicate, and there have been reports that mass texting is being blocked. A blogging aide worker name Rob Rooker shares texts from either the government or his cell phone service "advising me not to send hate messages inciting violence which are subject to prosecution and not to take part in any unlawful assembly that may result in violence." And some of the most interesting new projects, in my mind, are happening where the web meets more accessible technologies like SMS. Kenya IndyMedia is soliciting contributions of cell phone air time minutes to free more people to SMS, and Mashada is taking in posts via SMS. A particular neat new project is Ushahidi -- Kiswahili for "witness" -- a Google Maps mashup which plots lootings, killings, and other acts of violence sent in by either email or SMS (+447624802635).