Weblog on the Internet and public policy, journalism, virtual community, and more from David Brake, a Canadian academic, consultant and journalist

Archive for the 'Digital divide (developed countries)' Category | back to home

17 September 2003

A good idea to encourage Internet use from the UK Government – a downloadable “information pack”:http://getting.ukonline.gov.uk/oee/getstarted.nsf/sections/angels/$file/angels.htm that helps people help their friends and colleagues to get online for the first time.

I have to say I was rather hoping it would turn out to be something even more ambitious – a scheme to recruit volunteers to donate their time to be online and answer new users’ inquiries there. Perhaps that could be phase two? I have a suspicion that something like that is already out there if only one knew where to look but government publicity would be needed to make sure enough people knew about it to make it a success.

Of course people are more likely to turn to their friends and relations than to absolute strangers for aid getting online, and if you’re able to use a chat tool while surfing you are already a fair way along the road to Internet mastery so perhaps a programme like that would have limited effectiveness.

Thanks to Matt Jones for the link.

16 September 2003

Carrying the Internet over the electricity grid is a solution to problems of broadband availability in rural areas that has been long-discussed but ran into persistent problems with radio and radar interference in earlier trials. Now, apparently, trials in Crieff, Campbeltown and Stonehaven in Scotland “have been successful”:http://www.vnunet.com/News/1143183 and Scottish Hydro-Electric is expanding its coverage to Winchester in England. It is charging £29 per month which is competitive with “conventional” ADSL but offers 1Mb of bandwidth in both directions instead of the 512Kbps download/256Kbps upload speed offered by BT and others. Another benefit is that you can plug into broadband anywhere in your house instead of relying on a single access point.

27 August 2003

I just finished reading Technology and Social Inclusion: Rethinking the Digital Divide by Mark Warschauer and I was bowled over. This is to my mind the academic text on this subject – I agree with him almost throughout. He wrote a Scientific American piece which summarised some of his thinking available in PDF form. You may also want to see this First Monday article for a more academic take.movies lesbian homemovies pussy lesbians lickingclit lick mybest list scene sex moviesmovies porn list micheals sean ofmovie little darlingslittle movie mermaidtheaters loews moviemovie documentary making amovie making a

20 August 2003

Take a look at this BusinessWeek article about The Digital Divide That Wasn’t.

1) It concentrates on the digital divide within the US – outside the west there’s still a huge digital divide.

2) Internet access at a public school terminal or in a community centre is not comparable to Internet access at your convenience at home.

3) Digital divide isn’t mainly a race question – it’s an income and education issue – “When he controlled for education and income, he found that broadband had been deployed more rapidly in minority areas than in white neighborhoods over the past two years.” Sure – but if minorities are predominantly poorer and less educated the effect is the same.

4) It correctly identifies that 42% of Americans don’t go online but states (without showing any statistical evidence) that “the divide that does exist between the Web and non-Web proficient is no longer defined simply by income, gender, race, or education.” Well, not simply by those factors – but they are still important factors. The key factor they miss is that choosing not to be interested in the Internet is probably itself a choice linked to lower education.

Take a look at this table:
chart of the digital divide in the US

and you can see clearly that all kinds of divides still exist even in the US.henati moviesholes movie soundtrack thehollywood rentals movieporno homemade moviesfigures horror movie actionwavs horror moviehsu jade moviesjameson jenna lesbian galleries movies andmovie jennifer nude connellynude jill movies schoelen

13 August 2003

Salon’s Farhad Manjoo recently produced an interesting piece on the battle between cable companies and big tech companies over equal access to content over broadband cable.

As I commented on Eszter Hargittai‘s blog entry this issue appears at first to be a straightforward one – cable industry bad, free access good. But there are sound business and technical reasons why some forms of discrimination between different forms of content may be useful. For example, for good video quality cable companies want to put stuff in servers directly connected to their networks. But they can’t afford to put all streaming video content there so they may want to cut deals with certain providers. Is that unfair to the other providers? Internet users would still be able to see their stuff – just not as well.

Cable companies might also want to charge users who want to stream stuff from their “non-preferred” suppliers but keep “preferred supplier” content free (or lower cost). But while discriminatory the practice would also be fair, since the cable cos would be incurring different costs depending on where the content they were streaming came from.

Perhaps all legislation should do is demand open bidding for content deals and that per-Gb charges should have some proven relationship to the cost of providing bandwidth.calculator loan table amortizationestate ag real loansloans amortization bankmortgage get amc loan outhome loans guardian americanok loan sacramento cash payday advance$88 car loansbaltimore loans 100 investoradversary proceeding student loansexpert loaned servant alabama issues doctrinealpena alcona unions creditcredit rating advantis union financialcredit abc warehouse appliance storeaenima creditscredit card blogspot com accept e2for accreditation center detention youthon abet accredited lineabc card credit appliance warehouse Map

29 July 2003

After producing an excellent study on what people on low incomes want from the Internet (easy-to-read, relevant content) and what they get, the Children’s Partnership has produced a follow-up paper for the Community Technology Review called Closing the Content Gap: A Content Evaluation and Creation Starter Kit which brings together some useful resources and gives a brief overview of projects like Firstfind which are being trialled at NY public libraries – a virtual library that provides information to low-level readers and adults with limited English skills. (Also see starthere.org a UK charity trying to do a similar job but using kiosks).

25 June 2003

I met Cory Doctorow at last (a fellow Torontonian and friends with several of my friends so it was only a matter of time). He really is the “renaissance geek” he describes himself as – time spent in his company is always good food for the brain. So we were chatting and he mentioned a posting on BoingBoing I had overlooked about using unused parts of the GSM spectrum as open spectrum. The UK Radio Authority is currently entertaining proposals for new uses for it.

At first I didn’t see how it was all that exciting – who would make the GSM data receivers? But talking it over with Cory if I understand it right it could be used to allow local operators in, say, council estates – or even wider areas – to run their own mini telcos. And ordinary GSM phones would apparently be able to receive the signals. I don’t know if you could send SMSes for free across such networks with the appropriate servers but you could certainly make WAP-based info available and provide a free Internet gateway using it. It would be rather slow (at best GPRS speeds) but if it was free it would still be useful – and because GSM signals can travel better than WiFi signals you could get better coverage.

Sounds pretty good to me – Julian Priest co-founder of consume.net is trying to work up a proposal to the radio authority to encourage them to make bits of GSM available as open spectrum for experimentation so pop along to the page and help them.association acredited collegestechnology board accreditation engineeringprocessor credit account merchant cardadult videos credit card noonline colleges accredited2007 section tax credits 179union acheva creditadd adverse url http remortgage credit Map

31 May 2003

As the BBC reports, The Countryside Agency’s latest survey indicates while 95% of urban households have access to affordable broadband internet services, only 7% of rural villages are connected. In remote rural areas, this figure is just 1%.

I would be surprised however if this included some of the newest potential approaches to cracking this problem, like wireless broadband mesh networks or broadband via balloon.

24 March 2003

Some time ago Guy Kewney @ Newswireless.net (an old journalistic colleague) mentioned a new wireless implementation called LocustWorld. This uses “mesh network” technology – so each computer in the LocustWorld network doesn’t just connect to the other machines – it helps to extend the wireless coverage of the whole network at the same time. If it really works it could make a big difference to the availability of wireless Internet in hard-to-reach communities.

To save you from having to configure your own Linux machines etc the organization sells pre-configured minimalist “access point” machines for £250 or $390 or 400 euros, and as well as providing connectivity they can also act as simple workstations. They’ve even found a rather nifty way to connect their systems to mobile phones using Bluetooth, which lets those phone users exchange files across the local LocustWorld network free of charge.

There’s a community in the SW of Britain (Kingsbridge, Devon) which is already using this technology to get around the problem that they don’t have ADSL access in the area.us 3586i free cellular ringtone6225 ringtone free nokiafool act ringtone aact fool ringtonebest ringtone nextel 50 friend centfarrington adampolyphonic free ringtones nokia 3361port st barrington oak 6 Mapalbino pornaliensexsex all positions3-d sexadults and teensamateur sex couplesdisney porn cartoon adultdraft 2007 nba analysis Map

7 March 2003

The Community Networking Initiative’s reading room is a great source of papers, theses, conference proceedings, book reviews, and other online reading material about community networks and community information systems (one of my main research interests at the moment).

Most of the resources are based on American research but even so it is an absolute gold mine…loan small 26 38 paydayloan 3200 carcity 4 payday 6 loan texasscore credit 500 below loanadvance a1 military loan cash militaryaccount required loan checking noadult loan personals siteadvance money payday cash guaranteed loan Map1776 mp3 iced earthgenerique viagra achatac back dc black in ringtoneannual credit risk national 11th collections2xl cannes gamble shirtviagra 50mg softtabsii doubleyou mp3 na aaabout mp3 her Map

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