Mozzeenet

A new European Union (EU) report has been released on a similar topic as my previous post. An article on the EU website titled ‘Women and the elderly are crossing the digital divide, but the poor still lag behind, says new EU report‘ summarises the findings of the report showing that there has been increased access to information technology by women and over-55s but two of the main contributors to the digital divide continue to be lack of education and low income.

The paradox is that access to information eg on the Internet can assist people to escape poverty and improve the quality of their lives but it is education which enables people to reap the benefits of what the Internet can offer. As the article points out, using the Internet mostly requires high literacy (and often specifically English literacy). I discussed this concept previously in Local Languages: Webbed World Wide?

Andy Carvin’s article The Tsunami as a Wake-Up Call to Bridging the Digital Divide on the Digital Divide Network is inspiring for people like me who are interested in the role of IT in improving people’s lives especially for people who are disadvantaged. It’s really interesting to read his example of how technology played a part in saving lives in the horrific tsunami disaster affecting hundreds of thousands of people across Asia and Africa. He describes a telecentre in India where the staff were notified of the impending tidal wave and were able to immediately utilise the strong community and public address system which had been developed to alert local villagers. Read more »

OK, this post leans towards the technical side but it talks about technology which is becoming very significant for all web users and I thought worth an entry. It is revolutionising the way we get web content.

It’s RSS. You might have noticed links on websites to ‘RSS’ or ‘XML’. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. What’s syndication? According to dictionary.com, the definition for ‘Syndication’ is:

n 1: organizing into or administering as a syndicate 2: selling (an article or cartoon) for publication in many magazines or newspapers at the same time; “he received a comfortable income from the syndication of his work”

We’re interested in the second concept here - distribution of content through dispersed channels simultaneously. On the web it is not necessarily about buying and selling. There are specialised tools available now called readers or aggregators (some free and others licensed) which can interpret content published in the appropriate machine-readable xml code and serve it to the web user in a format which is easy to consume. This eliminates the need to trawl through your bookmarks to go to a website and see if it has been updated. You can simply click through the RSS feeds you have saved into your reader to get updated content.
Read more »