Even the (very) late arrival of moderator Stephen Fry didn’t detract from the launch of Tim Berner-Lee’s new Web Index on London’s South Bank.
Blaming a ‘nightclub accident’ for causing him to oversleep, Fry told a bad joke about the film Warhorse and added a little gloss to what had already been an impressive line-up discussing Berner-Lee’s new initiative.
Joining Sir Tim on the panel were Wael Ghonim, the Goggle guy who ‘Facebooked’ the Egyptian pro-democracy demonstrations and Juliana Rotich, the co-founder of Ushahidi, the Kenyan crowd-mapping platform.
Africa is the final frontier to benefit from the spread of the web and these two mavens discussed the Web Index that listed 61 countries in order of infrastructure, web content and use, as well as political, social and economic impacts.
Funded by a $1 millon grant from Google, there were no real surprises on the list with Sweden finishing top, followed by the US and the UK. Expect this to be an annual staple and it will be interesting to see its second iteration in 2013.