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:

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

Yesterday I handed in my dissertation – my MSc in New Media, Information and Society is now officially over and in a month and a half I return to the LSE to start a PhD in Media and Communications. Here’s the abstract of my dissertation, which I hope to turn into a published paper later. I am also keen to summarise the results for a non-academic audience for a thinktank or newspaper so if it sounds interesting, give me a call!

Civil society campaigning organizations have an important role to play in the public sphere according to deliberative democratic theory. The new communicative capabilities offered to such organizations by the Internet in recent years must be evaluated in the light of a digital divide that has persisted even in developed countries. This study measures and attempts to explain patterns of Internet usage among activists, and examines the possible implications of these choices for the public sphere and political participation.

Drawing on a postal survey of 109 London-based activists and open-ended interviews with four of those surveyed, respondents were found to have predominantly high levels of education, higher than average incomes and high levels of access to the Internet consistent with those factors. However, high levels of access did not translate into high levels of use in all contexts.
While email was extensively employed, other uses like participation in open online discussion or web-based publishing were much less prevalent than traditional campaigning activity. Some access and skill barriers were noted but the principal barrier to greater use of the web in campaigning appeared to be a perceived lack of its relevance or importance in that context. The fact that much Internet use by activists is via email and therefore tends to be “invisible” except to participants in the dialogue might contribute to that perceived lack of relevance.

The study also suggests that the existing socio-economic divide between the “core” activists surveyed and the broader public could be accentuated if, for reasons of efficiency, those activists moved their attention away from traditional activities like meetings and newsletters towards email-mediated dialogue or if the Internet does make it easier for the relatively privileged who are already online to become more involved at the expense of those who continue to fall on the wrong side of the digital divide.

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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

An MSNBC investigation shows that although big companies themselves may not spam they don’t seem to do much to prevent affiliates from spamming on their behalf and passing the results on as sales leads at $10-20 per respondent.payday companies 6 4 advance loanloan payday 5 free 7loan 500 personal57 loans student6 payday 8 loan 123personal loan 6 easy loan paydaycalifornia officers loan certification 63 3fast pay payday loan 8 day Map

Here’s a story that makes my teeth grind with frustration – leaked order logs from a spammer selling $50 bottles of penis enlargement pills show around 6,000 people responded to the messages over one month alone. This Wired article goes into detail – some of it eventually tedious but usually grimly fascinating – about the kind of people who do make these purchases. Somehow they even managed to get one of these morons to talk about why – “there was a picture on the top of the page that said, ‘As Seen on TV,’ and I guess that made me think it was legit,” said a San Diego salesman”.

I do worry a bit about the breach of privacy involved in producing the article at all, however…movies japanese lesbianmovie lactatingmovies lesbian pornomovie lesbiansmovie sex lolitamovie adult matrix maturevs movies mature youngmet art moviesmmf movies fuckingmovies mommy

ChefMoz is a clever idea but a little under-cooked at present. Looking at the London section it has 172 restaurants listed and categorised (out of c. 10,000 available restaurants) and just 24 reviews linked – the Paris entry has 226 entries and 31 reviews. The search engine is pretty limited in its ability to use the categories that have been input. Nonetheless, it is an idea that deserves to go far and I hope it gets developed a little more. If you want to know where to eat in, say, Afghanistan (where conventional restaurant guides may fail to cover you) dmoz may have the answer one day – right now it just has one review.

The main existing London restaurant guides I used to rely on online – Zagats, the Evening Standard and Time Out – all now charge to use them.

Thanks to Danny O’Brien’s Oblomovka for the link

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).

Good to have more hard figures and particularly useful to have demographics. It’s interesting that the writer at Cyberatlas spins the story to make them seem more democratic. If it was me I would have used the same figures but said something like, “despite receiving quite a bit of media attention, only two percent of people who are online have created weblogs [does this include ones that are no longer active?] and these are heavily skewed towards a wealthy demographic – almost half have a household income greater than $60,000. According to this census report US median income in 2001 was $42,000.”

I was surprised that only 4 percent of the Internet-using population reads blogs, but if you consider that they tend to contain 1) personal stuff aimed at a circle of friends and family 2) political stuff at a level of detail most people don’t need or 3) technology-related stuff at a level of detail most people don’t need it becomes less surprising.

The impressive state of Mozilla (the browser I prefer at present) is a little less impressive when you think 1) of the length of time it took to produce a good enough release (time enough for Microsoft to grab 96% of the market) and 2) when you realise that Netscape and later AOL were giving the open source software substantial support by employing programmers to work on it as well as on Netscape its commercial cousin.

Recently AOL announced it is ceasing development of Netscape and is giving the Mozilla Foundation a $2m severance package. So will Mozilla be able to keep forging ahead as an unfunded open source project or will it gradually wither and die? I certainly hope it will continue to go from strength to strength but this will be a pretty interesting test of the open source model.lesbo movies freefree lolita porn moviesredhead free movies pornclips gangbang moviessex samples movie gaygirls in gagged bound moviessex clips hardcore moviestars hot moviemovies kung fumovie lesbian strapon

The US Senate has voted to stop funding for the Terrorism Information Awareness programme (once known as the even more alarming “Total Information Awareness” programme). It was only in the early research stages but its eventual goal was to gather information about Americans from a variety of public sources and look for patterns of behaviour similar to those of known terrorists. It’s hard to imagine this could have been done without generating a lot of “false positives” – innocent people who the statistics said were likely terrorists – and the potential for misuse of the collected and cross-referenced data would have been vast. See the Electronic Freedom Foundation’s report for more information about this programme and be thankful it seems to have had a stake put through its heart.