Seth Godin sees a new digital divide opening up.
Not the one between the haves and the have nots but between the clued in and the helpless. Those who use Firefox and those who have PCs infected with spyware. Those who get their news from news.google and those who get theirs from TV.
Here’s the money shot:
(T)he digerati are using the learning tools built into the Net to get smarter, faster. A new Net tool can propogate to millions in just a week or two. Unlike the old digital divide, this means that the divide between the digerati and the rest of the world is accelerating.
And Robert Scoble chimes in with an example of how blogging has amplified the Team 99 story in ways the MSM could never replicate.
I’m not one to say that blogs and the new tools of Web 2.0 are the be all and end all of it all but I do see them as enabling the users (me?) to amplify an idea far quicker, far easier and far cheaper than ever before (English Cut anyone?).
Someone at last week’s Blogging Business Summit made a comment that blogs were no better, worse or different then the pamphlets of the American and French Revolutionary periods.
Well… yes and no.
The are and they aren’t – they are a soapbox but a cheaper and quicker soapbox that allows us to ramp up globally in no time at all. And those who figure out how to use these new tools can spread ideas farther and quicker than the pamphleteers of the 18th Century could ever imagine.
