Technology Futures

Florida is synonymous with the space program, and Lockheed Martin's replacement for the space shuttle will be assembled and launched from Florida. The U.S. has not designed and built a new space vehicle in two decades, but the shuttles are nearly worn out. The new launch vehicle is a more traditional rocket design that will carry six crew to earth orbit.

This is part of the plan to have two different vehicles to support the space program. One will carry crew to and from earth, and the other will stay in orbit and will be used for satellite repairs, space station support, and travel to and from the moon.

Blogs certainly have not caught on the way blog advocates thought. A Gallup poll says only 9% of Internet users read one regularly, and those numbers have not changed in a year. In Internet time, that's a very long time.

I have always been more interested in the technology that enables blogging, rather than the blogging itself. The weak link in blogging is the writing.

The fact that it is easy to blog does not automatically make us all bloggers. Good bloggers are good writers, have something to say, and are able to say it in a way that is of interest to more than their immediate family and friends (a very fickle audience at that).

But as blogging has become common, the tools to blog have also become much better, and are having effects on other parts of the Internet and the Web. It turns out blogging tools are perfect for newspapers, who usually have a few good writers sitting around drinking coffee, smoking, and chasing interns. More and more papers are finding out blogging tools are part of the answer to their question, "How do we move the paper to the Web?"

And almost anyone who maintains a Web site for community, civic, or personal use can do it better and with less effort using blogging tools, even if the site itself is, strictly speaking, not a blog.

Blogs are not going away, and the number of blogs will probably shrink to a number that is more representative of good writers, rather than who spent five minutes setting up a free blog site.

We still have only barely scratched the surface of how technology and the Web can enhance and improve community life. There is still much to do and many opportunities to pursue. Blogging and vlogging (video blogs) will play a part.

Benedict College, in Columbia, South Carolina, is hosting a Technology Summit that is focused on how broadband and technology can improve and enhance life in urban neighborhoods and rural small communities. I'll be giving the opening keynote talk next Tuesday.

Out in Vancouver, British Columbia, a broad consortium of public groups, government, and businesses are hosting the 2006 Summit on Community Technology. Canada has committed substantial sums to improving broadband access in rural communities, and a hot topic at the meeting will be how to make best use of those funds. I'll be delivering the opening keynote at that meeting as well.

Stephen Levy is a knowledgeable technology columnist for Newsweek, and his article on network neutrality is short and articulates the issues clearly. As Levy puts it, the Internet may end up with two classes of service: "steerage and first class," with nothing in between.

Such a split would stop the development of new services, and create de facto monopolies for the companies that are already big--think Google, AOL, Yahoo!, MSN. All four of those companies were tiny once, and the reason they were able to grow was because network neutrality allowed them to.

Once the Internet is split by access providers (the telephone and cable companies, for the most part) into free and fee-based classes of services, Levy, Vint Cerf (one of the original Internet developers), and many other believe innovation and competition will come to a halt.

What worries me is that there are too many calls for legislation. Do we really want Congress deciding how the Internet should be run? I don't think so.

The solution is to break the infrastructure stranglehold that the telephone and cable companies have over communities. Community infrastructure investments will not only get them to play by community rules, but as One Cleveland has shown, they can make money using community infrastructure.