I have an old obsession regarding progress at village level. Those who know me, smile at my thoughts about the rural medium and the village-users. Because these users are not in advertising targets , they are not valued by multinationals, they are not YUPPIE (and especially they are not URBAN), they have low incomes, in a word .. they don’t matter . But I make this stand again in 2008 : Will be a boom at village “internet level” and a lot from the future market in terms of users are not in big cities. So … who will bet on these NEW users will be a winner. Imagine yourself, you who read blogs, 6 years ago and try to remember how was Internet and your joy to discover things. Now imagine at least 4 mil users in 3 years waiting for this.
Case Study : I made a website for my village (Sinca Veche) and now i am trying to gather information to put in the website. I found a project of the local school where children (7-10 years) were drawing. Half of the drawings represents Internet & Technology (and are nice in their naivety). I had yesterday a conversation with a normal peasant who went home to wait the “guys with the Internet” to set up for her niece a broadband connexion. Over 50 people from here i found on MySpace, Hi5 and they just love to play there. Everybody has a Messenger ID (they don’t know who is MSN or Google Services). So … in 2 weeks the website was visited by over 200 uniques , from 10 countries (you can see Italy, Spain and Germany where are people at work). The conclusion: it is worthy to consider Rural Medium because it’s easier to win a market share here.
I will make a test with the new social network project in May. We will try to test 5 villages and see how their online communities are evolving. The results will be monitored for 2 years. I think Internet@Village will have a great future, especially now when the government supports the program (almost 80K Euro for every village)
