A digital divide

@RANDOM

Of all the riffs about the online world I've read this year, Seth Godin's post on The New Digital Divide (on http://sethgodin.typepad.com) was the most interesting.

Godin, a maverick thinker, author and marketing analyst, took a look at the new digital divide, one based "far more on choice than on circumstance". Here's his list of what differentiates the Haves of the Internet from the Left-Behinds:

Uses Firefox/Uses Internet Explorer:

For Windows users, Microsoft's Internet Explorer had a virtual monopoly of the browser market until Mozilla released Firefox. Why did so many of the digerati switch to Firefox? It's free, but so were several other browsers "" and none of them caught on in the way that Firefox did across India and the rest of the world.

The thing is, Firefox is a fast, easy download and unlike Explorer, it doesn't track user surfing habits; it deals with some spam as well as annoying popups.

You can open multiple windows without fear that the browser will "hang" and crash. Explorer is still the default choice; but Firefox is the thinking person's browser.

Knows who Doc Searls is/Already has a doctor, thank you very much:

Doc Searls is one of the mavens of the wired world (http://doc.weblogs.com) "" if you spend any time online at all, you'd go to Doc or one of about 15 other bright sparks for a running conversation on how the Net is changing.

Godin's point is simple. You need to know what's happening online, whether it's blogs, debates over software patenting or wi-fi and smart phones.

The best way to do this is to go straight to the experts; if you don't even know who they are, you're being left behind.

Uses RSS reader/RSS?: Short for Really Simple Syndication, RSS readers allow you to keep track of several websites/news sites/ blogs easily. Instead of visiting each site separately, you list the sites you visit regularly at an RSS reader, which will log updates on the site.

What you get is like a universal newspaper with information from different sources: you only click and go to the posts you really want to read, but you stay updated through the summaries on the rest.

Has a blog/reads blogs (sometimes):

Are you watching the revolution or are you part of it? Some bloggers argue that they are virtually rewriting the news instead of just reading it; even bloggers who'd disagree with that would agree that there's a big difference between being a producer and a consumer.

Reads BoingBoing (http://boingboing.net)/ watches the Today show:

Two other comparisons hammer the point home. Where do you get your news from? The mainstream? Or from new, freshly updated, interactive but filtered sources?

In Godin's scenario, the digerati get their news from the new media (Google, blogs); the rest are stuck with old-world, spin-doctored news sources (television, newspapers).

Bored with Flickr/ Flickr?:

One of the most interesting aspects of Godin's analysis is that almost everything he's named in the way of new technology is inexpensive and widely available. Flickr (http://blog.flickr.com), for example, is a free online photo management service that allows users to post and share their pictures.

The old way of measuring whether you were part of the digerati or not had to do with gadget coolth: did you have the latest Mac, the largest processor, the cutest gizmos?

Gizmadoration will probably never go out of style; but the question about new changes in technology is not what you have, but how well you use it.