Exploring the impact of broadband and technology on our lives, our businesses, and our communities.
Lafayette, Louisiana beaten by BellSouth
USA Today has an article about Lafayette, Louisiana, which has been trying to put together a community fiber project for the past year. The southern Louisiana community has apparently been beaten down by BellSouth, which has vigorously opposed the deal.
BellSouth has claimed it is "unfair" for communities to offer a service the company could offer, even though it provides only DSL in the community, a pale shadow of the robust fiber network the city was planning.
At the risk of boring my regular readers, there are two ways to approach community telecom projects. One is to regard telecom infrastructure just like roads. Communities build the roads, but private companies (like BellSouth) deliver services (like dialtone or TV programming) to customers. The other approach is to regard telecom infrastructure like the municipal water or electric system, in which the city itself provides the customer services.
The latter is certainly more efficient, but given that many of our elected leaders still don't take any of this very seriously and given that we have a ridiculously complex regulatory environment, I think the former approach (a public/private partnership) is the only alternative.
Rightly or wrongly, communities that are trying to create public monopolies in this area are losing. The telecoms are outspending them and are buying whatever laws are needed to prevent community investments. But communities must invest to stay viable in the global economy, and Lafayette knows that. From the article:
"The future of Lafayette shouldn't be left to the whim of the big telecommunications companies, insists City Parish President Joey Durel. Installing fiber-optic cable, he credibly argues, is no different from laying down sidewalks or sewer lines.
In fact, the "triple play" plan mirrors the action Lafayette's city fathers took a century ago when they realized the private power companies were passing them by in favor of larger, more lucrative markets in Baton Rouge and New Orleans. To survive, they built their own municipal power system.
Now, city leaders say they need high-speed data pipelines to encourage a research park around the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Without them, the small businesses they hope to attract would turn away for lack of the tools they need.
The city also wants to feed those pipelines into the poorest housing projects in Lafayette as a way of breaking poverty cycles."
Lafayette has the right motivation. They just need to adjust the game plan. And not give up. It's too important.
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SMS and youth
An article in the Roanoke Times yesterday (a NY Times reprint) discussed the phenomenal rise of SMS, or Short Message System. SMS, more often called "text messaging," is the cellphone service that lets you send short text messages on your cellphone.
The article was irritating because it implied that because most SMS users are twenty-something or younger, there must be something wrong with older people. The article, without any data to support the conclusion, said that older people were "more comfortable" with the telephone, implying we old geezers just could not get with the new technology.
I've seen a lot of dumb technology reporting, but this article was one of the dumbest. In conversations I've had with "youngsters" who are SMS fanatics, the only they could tell me they used it for was when they were bored. One twenty-something businessperson told me how great it was because when he was in meetings, he could send messages to his friends. The article also said that SMS was popular because you could use it when you were bored.
So here is the "old geezer," "not comfortable with technology" take on this: when I'm in a meeting, I'm trying to pay attention and contribute to the discussion, rather than text messaging about what I plan to have for lunch. That's not "uncomfortable with technology," that's called being mature and responsible.
The article implied that using the phone was somehow a quaint and old-fashioned mode of communication. No, it's fast and efficient. When I have something to say to someone, it's a lot quicker to pick up the phone than to try to type on a 12 button keyboard the size of my thumb. That's not old-fashioned, it's just sensible.
One unfortunate aspect of this technology revolution we are in is that there is this unsubstantiated belief that youth know more about technology than anyone else. I hear it almost every day. While it is true most young people have a higher comfort level with some of this stuff, the fact that a nineteen year old uses it does not inherently make it good or mean that everyone should use it. Let's not throw commonsense out the window with the crank telephones and VCRs.
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More life without Google
A colleague sent me a link to another up and coming search engine called Vivisimo. It's a bit different than Snap, which I wrote about yesterday, but like Snap, it handles search results in a way that is genuinely useful, as compared to the typical "jillions of hits" Google result.
Vivisimo seems to do two things very well. First, it tries to identify the most likely results, rather than just returning all of them. Snap and Vivisimo both seem to give you about the same number results on a query, which is to say, many fewer than Google, and those returned are of higher quality.
Vivisimo also clusters results, which is really neat. A little expandable outline appears on the left, and clicking various branches of the tree returns subsets of the total set of results. It does this by looking at related words that do not appear in your query. You have to try it to appreciate it, but once you try it, I think you'll see what an improvement it is over Google.
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Northern California studies best practice in community networks
The Redwood Technology Consortium has won a grant to collect data on the best practices of community networks around the country. The RTC represents technology interests for the North Coast region of California, centered in the Eureka area.
This is a great project. As I've often remarked, it's more about education than technology, and the RTC is doing right by trying to learn from other projects. Too many communities end up reinventing the wheel, and in the process, spending too much money and getting bad advice from local "experts" who typically have no experience in managing communitywide technology and telecom efforts.
The usual pattern is to appoint a local IT director from a school system, a corporation, or other large institution to head the project. But institutional networks operate under budget, staffing, and technical constraints very different from heterogeneous communitywide networks. Communitywide projects have to be approached in a very different way, with a heavy emphasis on education and relationship-building. Technology itself is also much less an issue for community projects, in the sense that there are now well-established tools and platforms for community portal sites, and for infrastructure development, the market is now mature, and the emphasis for infrastructure should be on tying communities needs and goals to the investments, rather than rushing out to buy a lot of "stuff."
The North Coast area is fortunate to have a Tech Council taking the lead on these issues. One of the problems with community investments in telecom and technology is that they typically fall across many public and private institutional boundaries, meaning that there is no one entity that has ownership in the same way, for example, that a town owns and manages public roads. It truly is a public/private enterprise, and tech councils are a great way to bring stakeholders together and to sustain the process.
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Consumer's Union jumps into broadband, cellphone issues
Consumer's Union, the publisher of Consumer Reports, has a site called Hear Us Now that has some useful information on policy and regulatory telecom issues that affect consumers. Among the topics on the home page are cell phone lockdowns, which is the scam used by cellphone companies to force you to buy new phones even if you have a perfectly good one already. CU estimates 100 million cellphones are discarded each year just in the U.S., which is an appalling waste of resources.
They also have information on what states are trying to block the ability of communities to invest in telecom infrastructure. Unfortunately, they also have form letters you can send to legislators expressing your "concerns." Good concept, bad implementation, as doing it this way is really little better than spam. Nonetheless, the site overall is quite useful.
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Open Source software and the iPod
In a brilliant marriage of a free Open Source piece of software and the iPod, medical radiologists around the world are using iPods to store the huge image files generated by CT and other kinds of scans and x-rays. Eweek has the story of a frustrated radiologist who helped develop the free OsiriX software that allows radiologists to store and manipulate the images on the iPod.
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Life without Google
Can anyone imagine life without Google? More than any other Internet service, with the possible exception of email, the availability of Google has become a kind of icon for the changes the Internet has brought over the past ten years. It's even become a verb.
But Google has not changed much since it's start. And over the past year, I've become frustrated with Google results. Too often, a query returns tens or even hundreds of thousands of results. After the second page, you realize most of them have nothing to do with your query. Many other queries return junk starting on the first page; enter the name and state of virtually any town in the U.S., and what you usually get on the first couple of pages is mostly junk--bargain basement hotel room resellers running link farms so that they show up first.
Google as a company, as far as I can tell, has done only two things: they developed a pretty good search engine about six years ago, and figured out how to make Internet ads work. But on the search engine side, they don't seem to have done much since the company started.
I've looked a a bunch of competitors, and as frustrating as Google is much of the time, it's always been better than most of the alternatives. Until now. You might want to bookmark this site and try it a few times:
Snap is doing things entirely differently than Google. Snap queries that I've compared with Google results look very promising. Snap, in my limited trials, has typically returned many fewer results that are much more relevant. Snap also offers you easy ways to resort the results according to different criteria, including what other people have been looking at, which can be both interesting and useful.
Snap is the first search engine that I've thought could dethrone Google. And it could happen quickly. Give it a try.
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Music sales up
The NY Times (reg. required) has a short story on the music industry. Music sales are up 1.6% this past year, for the first time in four years.
What happened? Apple legitimized the online music market with it's highly successful iTunes Music Store, and a horde of competing online music services rushed in to give consumers a wide array of choices. Music sales went up.
The music industry, which fought online music sales for years, and still is, actually, has been dead wrong. The music conglomerates have claimed that illegal online music sales were ruining the business, and instead of innovating, the music business ran to Congress to halt innovation with awful legislation like the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act).
But Apple and other innovative companies weren't buying it, and found a way to give consumers what they wanted--affordable and convenient online music stores.
The music industry still has massive problems; artists still get too little of the royalty payments, and record companies are still charging the online stores the same fees they charged distributors for CDs, even though record company costs are now essentially zero.
But ordinary consumers have won, in a small way. Broadband (music downloads really don't work over dialup) brought music lovers increased choice in the marketplace, and allowed a host of new music companies to enter the marketplace and increase competition and choice.
Broadband is working.
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Cities should chart their own destiny
Here is an excellent multi-page opinion article that discusses the plight of towns and cities in light of the recent Pennsylvania legislation that forces communities to ask Verizon's permission to develop broadband systems.
As you read this, it is important to remember that we still have a "seven blind men and an elephant" problem when talking about broadband. It means different things to almost everyone, which is part of the problem. As I've been saying for years, "It's not about the technology." What communities need to spend more time on is education--of businesspeople, of elected leaders, and of local government officials. If you can get most thoughtful people and leaders in the community using the same language to describe the same things (in the context of broadband), you've accomplished something very significant, and greatly simplified the challenge of getting an appropriate telecom infrastructure for the community.
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Rio Rancho, NM provides a model for citywide wireless
Here is an excellent article full of details about the citywide wireless project in Rio Rancho, New Mexico. Rio Rancho is a fast-growing suburb of Albequerque. Here is the quote that shows that Rio Rancho leaders "get it."
"We see it as an economic development tool—today's business needs good quality access, Palenick said [the city administrator].
That's exactly right. It's an economic development tool, just as water and sewer were (and still are) economic development tools in the Manufacturing Economy of 40 years ago. It's not some esoteric luxury for a few privileged residents, WiFi is part of a package of services that can both bring businesses to a community and/or help existing businesses lower costs and expand services and markets. It can also help fuel the growth of home-based entreprenueurial businesses and startups.
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