Originally written for my Digitial Divide Network blog.

The Webby Connect conference has a lot of smart people attending it, and that’s putting it mildly.

Today’s lineup of events started with looking at commercially generated content to increase brand exposure and ended with Ariannia Hufifington expressing her views on the sad state of American journalism. Don’t worry she has hope for the future - and rightly so!

As far as the digital divide and today went, there was some interesting things said. When discussing online brand strategies there was a lot of talk of using online video. The popularity of YouTube and other video sites has clearly shown that people want to watch streaming videos (particularly user-generated videos). After the talk, I went up to ask a few of the panelists if they ever thought about broadband constraints.

“I haven’t heard anyone bring up broadband concerns in like two years” was one reply. Indeed, it marked the attitudes for the rest of the day - to those in the industry broadband access is not a concern anymore. I suppose those with enough money have broadband access to make it worthwhile.

That being said, it is without a doubt easier for people to connected to the internet than even a few years ago. Beth Higbee from Scripps Network Emerging Ventures sees that this new technology allows for great disruptions in current business strategies (which translates down to cheaper and easer products). Her approach to creating disruptive innovations I think can be applied to ICT projects. In fact I’m sure that telecentres already do this.
She summarized disruptive innnovations using “the WRENCH”:

Who: unsatisfied consumers
Reasionable: good enough solutions
Easy: simple, convient, accessible or arrofortable
Nons: ignored customers, overlooked situations (untapped markets)
Cheap: low cost with iterations (find partners until something succeeds)
Holes: competitive weaknesses, blind spots

Huffington didn’t speak to broadband issues, but she did tell me after her talk that at least having access to the internet is a concern. Sure enough, broadband is not such a concern for The Huffington Post as their content is text. Huffington is a fan of the OLPC and told me that we shouldn’t be thinking it has a device only for the 3rd world as it can be equally as useful in the USA.

This, in a roundabout way, brings us back to why we should have faith in American journalism because it is actually related to the digital divide. Huffington believes that the future of journalism lies in blogging. She cited cases that bloggers have ousted mistakes in the more acclaimed old media. Bloggers allow for a more diverse group of people speaking “the truth” that they gather from “evidence”. First though, Huffington admits, there is a need to increase media literacy so more people can be included with the conversation. Her faith in blogging as a panacea seems idealistic (and that’s not a bad thing) which means that she inherently supports more access and increased media literacy on the internet.

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