Category Archive: South Africa
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TomorrowConnecting
Keep an eye out for my writings on http://www.tomorrowconnecting.biz/, I will be posting there regularly now to help out the local cause.
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Do you understand the Collective Unconscious?
While reading up on the little spat going on around barcamp, I stumbled on this amazing piece by Tara explaining a phenomenon she calls the “Collective Unconscious”.
Its a beautiful thing, its that thing that just makes certain things happen, click. Its that thing that makes myspace huge, its that thing that made the iPod explode into the giant it is. It is also more than that, its that thought that sits at the back of your head that you battle to get out and when you stumble on that blog post by someone else, or you are having that conversation a while later and you realise that you are on the same figurative page and you go .. “Yea, yea that’s it!” or as Tara puts it “a-ha!”.
That is part of what I love about blogging and participating in the blogosphere, you get to grow so much, you get to finally get those things to bubble up out of your collective unconscious. Sure, I haven’t been doing this for very long, but already my thought patterns are so vastly different from when it was just me isolated, at my desk. Who would have thought six months ago that I would have this incredible burning need to kick of a BarCamp here in Cape Town?
I am sad that this amazing social tool, the internet, is still not a reality for so many people in South Africa, here the barrier to entry is so high. The hardware issue we can solve, the bandwidth issue, man its difficult. In a country where only the cream can afford to experience what I am in this new online world, the interactive live web. Only an estimated 200 000 people have access to broadband to their homes, 200 000 in a sea of 40 million. How do we tap into those minds? How do we add them to our collective unconscious?
Technorati Tags: Collective Unconscious, South Africa
Not so broadband ..
The plight of South African internet users has been much lamented and as much as I get excited about people calling our laws ridiculous there really is not all that much that is going to change until our laws relax.
Here is another one of those exciting articles, Canadian hi-tech guru Leonard Brody reckons we can blanket vast distances with WiMax in a space of two weeks, and he is right, but who really has the guts to fly in the face of the government?
Sure towns like Knysna are going ahead with a WiFi implementation because someone over there got it, but in the whole their is a massive lack of excitement around broadband, people do not fathom the life changing opportunities, you would think that in a country where we have vast numbers of dialup users, that people would get a clue, but honestly cost is scaring them away.
While having an easy means to connect people to a network, even vastly more important is the need to have cheaper data costs, at the moment we are somewhere around 1000 – 2000% more expensive than some other parts of the world, seriously I am not kidding.
Thats why this other new company I found just pissed me off even more, its called goggaconnect and it works on the existing 3G network, and it is SUPER expensive. Its really not their fault its a good idea, but it won’t make any significant impact on the way we live.
Hey, I have a 3G phone and I never use it, metered systems just don’t work as they don’t provide freedom to experiment (who can when you have to glance at the meter all the time?!), nor help to do business in the space. Telkom is killing us with their monopoly on the local loop, read more on Hellkom.co.za.
Here’s hoping the SNO (Second Network Operator) will start making waves soon.
Technorati Tags: South Africa, Broadband, Telkom