You're So Vain

Actually, what this is referring to is the map on the right margin of the blog which places a dot for the location of anyone who looks at this blog. This is a fun widget to look at and imagine what the person in Singapore thought if they actually looked at the blog they hit on while surfing.
But what I do, much more deeply, care about is the total absence of hits from Africa. Not because I need an African audience. I'm sure they and billions of other people have better things to do. It is because to my uneducated eye it means that most of the people of Africa do not have access to the wonderful tool that is the internet. We talk about a computer literacy divide in the United States but look at the map. An entire continent that isn't surfing. Of course it isn't just the lack of computers or internet access. There are problems that are much more severe and pressing, such as poverty, AIDs and malaria.
But it is something we should all think about as we play on the web. Is it really "World Wide?"