Just a mash of stuff - Google and the Divide

I found a few interesting things this morning - the first an individual playing chicken with a train, the second, a report about the Digital Divide that still exists in the US between "races" (nee melatoninly differentiated populations maintained by social and economic inequity) and the last is that Writely is now accepting new registrations (completing the network based Google Office, no Safari love yet however). So in the way that my brain tends to connect things, there is a link here somewhere. The USA Today story says that things are not all bad. US Public schools have almost got the gender gap eliminated and there is good use of the Internet in classrooms. The issue that they see is the color based gap. This does not lead into the Darwin Award candidate that we see in the video that has been loaded on Google, but rather, it got me thinking that with more students using the Internet in schools, videos like this are much more likely to spread through the halls than they had in the past - nothing really new here, but Google, unlike dirty pictures on email is housing video and is able to send it out very quickly. While I hope more people don't try to repeat what that individual did, it does bode well for kids thinking about doing videos of their own and using Google as a distribution channel - or even the social site that shall not be named (which btw is starting to allow people to sell their own music from now). Hopefully while producing the videos they will take notice of some tips from Wes's post here. So where does Writely fit? Well it doesn't really, other than offering a way for people to get their homework done anywhere and everywhere there is a network connection. Technorati Tags: Writely, Digital Divide