Maneno is a blogging application initially released to Beta in October, 2008, focusing on creating a multi-theme, multi-author, multi-lingual system that works in a hosted setting. The name Maneno means 'words' in Swahili and focuses on having low latency/filesize options to make it fast to load on low bandwidth connections. The system is being developed in order to increase participation in citizen journalism in Africa as well as work to preserve local African languages digitally, and increase overall media transparency.