The digital divide is a term describing people with and without access to digital information technology, and is often a factor of the rich and the poor; the young and the old.

People in some countries simply don't have access to digital information technology, and therefore become automatically alienated in many ways. Some people believe that basic telecommunication services such as the internet are a fundamental right, and nobody should be deprived of it. I agree, but the internet is not important in the same ways as drinking water, food and shelter.

"People lack many things: jobs, shelter, food, health care and drinkable water. Today, being cut off from basic telecommunications services is a hardship almost as acute as these other deprivations, and may indeed reduce the chances of finding remedies to them."
Kofi Anan (UN Secretary General)

Gordon Brown recently announced that the digital divide can be prevented by the installation of superfast broadband. He claimed that high speed internet will save the government billions and revolutionise how people access public services. I think they need to develop easy to use public websites, rather than increase data speeds, to make the online procedures less tedious.

I, personally, don't agree with the UK government trying to digitise every daily task. It's the elderly that suffer the most, with computers often baffling them, and quite frankly it's not fair. Yes, the government should digitise the majority of essential services, to make the computer literate users life easier. However, they should not phase out traditional methods, such as paper forms for instance. The digital divide will disappear once the generation that has grown up with computers since childhood enter their retirement years. This is my personal view, and probably applies to the majority of governments around the world.

The digital divide will not be eliminated for at least 40 years, in the UK at least. With the continual decline in computer hardware costs, poorer countries may soon be able to develop wired towns and cities, but this is at least a few decades away yet.

Why are online retailers one step ahead of traditional retail stores? Simple, because they have virtually unlimited shelf space. Other advantages include the extensive lists of similar items or recommendations that a normal shop worker would find impossible to remember. One company that puts these aspects into practice extremely well is Amazon.

The Long Tail graph was developed by Wired Magazine Editor Chris Anderson, later releasing a book titled: 'The Long Tail - Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More.' The whole principle is about fewer products selling in large quantities verses more products selling in lower quantities. Chris Anderson is therefore suggesting that the future of business is to stock as many products as humanly possible in large warehouses.

Chris Anderson suggests that companies such as Google and Apple can mine both the head and the tail. They have the assets and resources to operate monopoly businesses. Take Apple's iTunes Store for instance, with a catalogue of more than 11 million songs. Put that into perspective, a regular HMV shop would have to be monumentally huge to store that amount of records. However, the cost of storing and distributing digital files is extremely minimal, and the chance to profit from back catalogues becomes a distinct possibility.

"We sold more books today that didn't sell at all yesterday than we sold today of all the books that did sell yesterday"
Amazon Employee (Describing the Long Tail)

It seems to me that The Long Tail applies more to the digital age of the internet than the traditional high street. If The Long Tail approach is widely accepted by the majority of businesses in the future, could high street stores start collapsing? After all, wasn't Woolworth's killed off by the internet and supermarkets? It leaves me wondering if the high street will soon become a row of warehouses? With the recent rumours of Amazon planning to open high street collection stores, it could soon become a reality.

The primary objective of the Net Neutrality movement is to keep the internet open and accessible to all users, application providers and network carriers. Basically, the internet should not be interfered with by Internet Service Providers (ISPs); with specific websites or applications not being favoured over others.

Internet Service Providers can easily detect what customers use their connections for. They can discover if you regularly participate in online gaming, or use peer-to-peer programs such as BitTorrent. Subsequently, they can traffic shape your connection, directing different speeds or bandwidth to various applications. For instance, online gaming might be permitted, while peer-to-peer connections such as BitTorrent may be deliberately slowed down.

The whole point of shaping traffic is to stop users clogging up the internet, therefore preventing other users connections from becoming slow. Some people believe ISPs limit certain applications that threaten their own businesses. Take Skype as a prime example, which allows free VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) phone calls. Companies such as Sky and TalkTalk are threatened by these sorts of applications, and therefore may wish to alter their traffic allowance. This type of activity is also known as throttling, when the advertised network speed is not met. If new Net Neutrality laws were implemented this activity would be deemed illegal.

Barack Obama (November 14, 2007 - Mountain View, California)

Net neutrality is an essential aspect in my opinion, and benefits the internet in the same way open source benefits software. With Google and Barack Obama on board, it can't be long before new laws are implemented. The only aspect consumers will be concerned about is whether the cost of Net Neutrality will be passed onto them.

Humans often use the internet to carry out everyday activites, such as purchasing numerous items or researching various topics. However, a computer is not able to complete the same tasks, due to the fact the language of web pages can only be understood by people, and not a computer. The whole principle of a Semantic Web is to make computers understand web pages the same as humans. This therefore allows boring and tedious tasks to be completed by the computer and not the human, obviously allowing more time for the user to be more productive with applications they enjoy. Sir Tim Burners-Lee defines a Semantic Web as a Web 3.0 aspect that will make the World Wide Web better.

Now, lets put all of this information into a practical example. Say you've got you're bank statements online, along with some photographs and appointments in a calendar. Wouldn't it be great to have your photos embedded into a calendar so you could recognise when they were captured, along with important bank statements attached also? Well, at the moment, that isn't possible. It's simply because each element is stored within it's own stand alone application or server, where it's kept to itself. This collaboration of data would be made possible by a web of data from a Semantic Web.

"I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize." Sir Tim Burners-Lee (1999)

Metadata is an important element that makes web pages more relevant, and therefore helps benefit the proposals of a Semantic Web. Accurate metadata is all well and good, and beneficial to internet users, but Metacrap is a problematic issue.

Metacrap is when metadata is not used with care, and was defined by Cory Doctorow in 2001 as the seven insurmountable obstacles to reliable metadata:

• People lie (obstacle #1)
• People are lazy (obstacle #2)
• People are stupid (obstacle #3)
• Mission Impossible: know thyself (obstacle #4)
• Schemas aren't neutral (obstacle #5)
• Metrics influence results (obstacle #6)
• There's more than one way to describe something (obstacle #7)

Therefore, a semantic web requires a massive collaboration between a vast array of internet users, organisations and companies. Web 2.0 was a drastic step up from Web 1.0, and Web 3.0 looks set to be another massive leap forward.

Click here to view the University of Bedfordshire Wiki article about the Semantic Web.