Richard MacManus had a sobering post on Monday about global internet penetration levels and just how big the “digital divide” is between North and South (one of the many political science phrases used to distinguish the developed and developing worlds). He quotes statistics from the Miniwatts Marketing Group’s Internet Usage and World Population Statistics which state that internet penetration in Africa is just 2.6%, Asia 9.9% and the Middle East 9.6% (North America, on the other hand, has 68.6% penetration).

One of the commenters on Read/WriteWeb pointed out that only 50% of the world has ever made a phone call, much less gone online — a statistic that I remember from my graduate program in Global Media Studies at Goldsmiths College.

Services such as Harvard Berkman Center’s Global Voices project, which aims to bring the voice of the blogger and journalist in under-represented areas of the world to a global online audience, are a wonderful use of the web as an awareness generation tool. But I’m also interested in knowing about organizations that are working to overcome the digital divide in terms of basic web infrastructure and equipment by helping create libraries with internet access and providing computer services to classrooms. If anyone is aware of any such services, please let me know in the comments below.

Technorati tags: readwriteweb, digitaldivide, globalvoices, berkman

Matt McAlister has a recent post about how his editorial intake has narrowed over time.

I can relate.

When I worked at nytimes.com, the nytimes homepage was my homepage at work.  Every time I opened a browser, I would see the latest world-impacting news and would often dive into an interesting article.  There was something about seeing an image of a recent event that enticed me to dive in and read about it.  I also usually made it a point to read the op-ed section every day (this was pre-TimesSelect, mind you)…and I would often grab a copy of the paper (which was always laying around the office) and read it at lunch in Bryant Park.

Now, however, I use My Yahoo! as my homepage and there is nary a newspaper in the Yahoo! office.  NYTimes headlines are still the top listing on my My Yahoo! page, but I find that I spend more time looking at the headline modules from TechCrunch, PaidContent, GigaOm and other  narrow web industry blogs as well as links to saved Technorati searches and delicious tags which I pull in via RSS.  I’ve gone back to My Yahoo! after using other various feedreeders (I’ve spent hours getting my consumption organized in both FeedDemon and Bloglines) because I actually like that it keeps my consumption more focused with fewer subscriptions!

As i’ve increasingly become my own editor, I’ve managed to narrow my own worldview too.

But, hey, at least My Yahoo! still requires me to link off to the publisher’s site to read the article so that I can see all of the pretty pictures!

Technorati tags: rss, nytimes, mattmcalister, yahoo, feeds, aggregation