Exploring the impact of broadband and technology on our lives, our businesses, and our communities.
Community Web Portals: The Benefits
The benefits of well-designed, modern community portals are numerous. Among these are:
Increased traffic for other sites in the community. There is a popular myth that a successful community portal is a "problem" because it may take traffic from other established sites in the community. Anecdotal reports suggest just the opposite. A good community portal, by its nature, drives more traffic to other sites in the community that the portal links to. So there is no reason for the managers of established sites to oppose a community portal effort. In fact, they should support one, as it will likely increase traffic for them.
One way this works (increased traffic for other sites) is by using RSS feeds. The community portal, by centralizing local RSS feeds from other sites in the community, makes it easier for residents and visitors to find out what is going throughout the community; the RSS feeds increase traffic at the sites that publish an RSS feed. Your important community sites (e.g. Chamber of Commerce, tourism site, local government site) do publish RSS feeds, don't they?
A good community portal, with other sites in the community pointing to it, makes it easier to find the community on the Web. The community portal has the potential to score higher in the search engine ratings because of it's broader and inclusive approach to community information. Search engine rankings and the location of the community in the rankings is especially important for tourism efforts and for businesspeople who may need to travel to the community.
The community portal is a recruitment tool for families and Knowledge Economy workers, business owners, and entrepreneurs who want small town quality of life. All of these potential residents are using the Web to research places to live. The community portal can be a valuable asset in attracting Knowledge Economy families (often with six figure incomes), or it can be a strong negative (if your community site is years old, out of date, and dusty from lack of use). The community portal is a critical part of any economic development effort. The portal is more than a listing of local community groups and meetings; it is a vital part of your economic development toolkit to project an image of a dynamic and "connected" community that has a savvy, tech-ready workforce and an informed citizenry. Businesses wants to move to communities that are comfortable with technology and that are clearly making modest investments to stay current.
The community portal markets the community broadly across a wide variety of interests. The portal has a dual purpose. One purpose is to inform residents and businesses within the community about current activities, groups, and commerce. But the second, equally important activity is to let others, from outside the community, learn more about the community itself. As a marketing tool, the community portal becomes an important part of tourism efforts, a way to get travelers and visitors to stop and spend money on lodging and meals, to market local businesses to customers outside the community, and to project a modern and vibrant image to the world. The community portal is the way the rest of the world sees your community. So if you want your community to be seen as vibrant, attractive, and great place to live and to work, then the portal Web site must be of the highest quality to project that image.
A feature-rich community portal with multiple ways to inform community members about what is happening in the community (e.g. community calendar, discussion forums, RSS feeds, blogs, automated reminders, etc.) has the potential to increase civic participation. Formal and informal studies in Blacksburg, Virginia and in other communities with active community portals indicate that when residents have the right information at the right time, they tend to get more involved in the life of the community. In other words, they are more inclined to get out of the house and attend community meetings and to take part in community and civic activities.
The community portal is also a tool for workforce development. With features like blogs for all users and the ability to distribute posting privileges, many people in the community have the opportunity to acquire new skills by using the community portal as an interactive, hands-on learning tool. As residents acquire these skills, their marketability in the workplace increases and the community becomes more attractive to relocating businesses as well as to businesses already in the community.
The community portal project can become an ongoing technology resource for the community at large, constantly reviewing new Internet-based services like RSS news feeds, blogging, Voice over IP telephony, and other developments. The portal can provide evaluations, links, and resources on the site itself to help residents and businesses in the community make informed decisions. As part of the training and education component of the effort, short courses and seminars can be offered on topics of interest to the community. This regular and constant focus both on education and innovation continually increases the capacity of the community to make appropriate technology and telecommunications investments to address a wide variety of public and private needs.
Finally, the community portal project can save money. By becoming a valuable technology resource in the community, residents, local businesses, and local government, over time, should spend less on technology and get more value for the funds that are expended. As an example, the community portal can help raise community awareness about the value of bandwidth aggregation. As more and more bandwidth users in the community use that information to pool buying needs, the community benefits directly by having more funds available for core needs and objectives. Indirectly, increased investments, especially by businesses on the core business rather than on overhead, will, over time, lead to increased economic development, new job opportunities, and a community that is vibrant, livable, and prosperous.
A PDF version of this paper is attached for easy download.
| Attachment | Size |
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 D9_Web_portals.pdf | 77.42 KB |
Broadband Information:
New York Times comes out against communities
The New York Times (registration required) has a very biased article about Philadelphia's plan for citywide wireless broadband. The paper interviewed mainly opponents of the plan, and seemed to go to great lengths to interview those opponents, while trivializing successful community projects. Worth a read just to understand the anti-community sentiment out there.
It's unfortunate that the MSM (MainStream Media) is unwilling to make the effort to report both sides of the issue. I'm not arguing that the Times should be in favor of community technology projects, but rather that their reporting should strive to present both sides of the issue fairly.
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Anti-community legislative roundup
WiFi Net News has a long but informative roundup of all the anti-community legislation in process around the country. While it appears some legislators are resisting teh lobbyist-led push to keep communities at the mercy of the incumbents, it appears that the Philadelphia project (where the City wanted to do a citywide WiFi effort) has motivated the telcos and cable companies to get busy to protect their marketplace monopolies.
While most of the news sites are calling this "anti-muni" legislation, I'm deliberately calling it something else--"antic-community" legislation, because I think that's a better term.
This is an out and out assault on the rights of communities to control their economic future. If the incumbents were open and honest about their plans and were offering good and affordable services, none of these community projects would be underway. But this is an issue of community survival. When Hong Kong is running fiber past a million homes, are communities in the U.S. supposed to sit back and be content with either twenty year old copper technology (DSL, cable modems) or nothing at all?
Affordable broadband is the economic lifeblood of communities. Without affordable broadband, the small businesses of America (remember that small businesses create 75-90% of new jobs) cannot compete in the global economy. While the incumbents are protecting marketshare, communities are becoming increasingly less competitive from and economic development perspective.
Finally, I think communities ought to be regarding their investments like they manage roads, and not like water and sewer. My first choice for communities is to build digital roads and let the private sector create jobs, deliver services, and use those roads to create prosperity in the community.
Creating a new municipal monopoly (i.e. the way water, sewer, and electric is handled) is my second choice. In either case, communities should have the right to make those choices.
Technology News:
Cellphone jammers take off
A New York Post article talks about the growing popularity of cellphone jammers. The devices, which are illegal but can be bought on the street in New York City, are giving relief to people sick of loud-mouthed cellphone users. They seem to be especially popular with users of public transportation, where you don't necessarily want to listen to the details of someone's love life while taking the train into Grand Central Station.
Some of the jammers are no bigger than a cellphone, and operate with a radius of fifty feet--just right to cut off the chatter in a bus or train car.
I think we're still in the novelty phase of cellphones, in which appropriate use and etiquette are evolving more slowly than the constant increase in cellphone users. Ten years ago, a similar debate was taking place about the incivility online in Usenet groups and discussion forums. Today, you don't see much worry about flame wars and rudeness. It's not that rudeness and namecalling have disappeared; it is just that most people know to ignore such behavior.
Over the next year or two, I think many of us will turn our phones off more often and become less accessible as the novelty factor wears off and we realize that there is more to life than walking around with the phone glued to our ear.
Technology News:
Motorola to build Skype cellphones
Motorola has announced that it will build a GSM cellphone (the European standard now being introduced in the U.S.) that is also "Skype ready." This means if you are in a WiFi hotspot, you can make calls for free via the Internet. Not in a hotspot? Then the phone uses the old cellphone system.
Skype is a popular free VoIP service that was founded by two of the originators of popular peer to peer services including Altnet and Kazaa. Skype to Skype calls are free, and the company charges for calls made to the old telephone network (i.e. what most of us use).
It's not clear exactly what the future is for services like Skype. The company's software is proprietary, so they control their user base, unlike some other Open Source VoIP services like Free Word Dialup. Skype is popular right now because they have a more finished product that is easy to install and use. Some of the Open Source software is a bit rough around the edges.
I'll stand by my prediction that telephony as a business is dead, dead, dead. In the future, voice calls will be like email--we'll all have it and use it heavily, and it won't cost us a dime to call anyone, anywhere in the world.
Business opportunity: voice and video calls to the moon and to Mars will cost money for a while because of limited bandwidth. Real time calls to the moon will be just barely possible; the latency will make for a slight delay, but it will be manageable. Real time calls to Mars will not be convenient, as the latency will make it very difficult to have a conversation fluidly. According to my calculations, the latency to Mars will vary between about 4 minutes and 20 minutes, depending on the relative positions of the earth and Mars.
You might ask, "What happens to the phone companies?" The phone companies have to recognize that their only option is to think of themselves as access providers rather than service providers. And they are lumbering in that direction, albeit very slowly. The acquisition of AT&T and MCI by local dialtone companies gives the latter the long haul circuits to better serve the access market.
But I'm not at all confident that any of the incumbents will make the transition. They have made it this far by firing all their help and outsourcing everything they can. Most phone companies today consist of some call centers, a billing center, and an infrastructure based on 100 year old technology, and that is not much of a business. I'm exaggerating somewhat, but not much.
What's next? As the phone companies continue to lose customers to VoIP services, look for them to start abandoning services to some communities, starting with rural communities with a high service cost. If your community does not have a plan to get community-managed infrastructure in place, you should. You are going to need it when the phone and/or the cable company pulls up stakes and moves on, sometime in the next 5 to 7 years.
Technology News:
Digital Cities Conference
If you are interested in community broadband, you may want to take a look at the upcoming Digital Cities Expo, which will be in northern Virginia (Reston) in April.
The conference will have sessions covering the economic, legal, financial, technological, and infrastructure issues surrounding municipal broadband (Disclaimer: I'm one of the speakers).
Technology News:
Indiana update
The Indiana bill that would have restricted the rights of communities to invest in telecom has died in committee.
The Internet is providing an alternate channel for citizens and community leaders to deal with these issues. In the past, bills like this often got passed into law quietly before anyone even knew about them. Today, most legislatures post proposed legislation on the Internet, open to all to see, and lots of people have the opportunity to review this stuff before it is too late. It's a useful counterbalance to lobbyists.
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VoIP being blocked
Om Malik reports on news from law professor Larry Lessig that some VoIP services may be blocked or degraded on some of the incumbent networks. I predicted this many months ago--that the monopoly infrastructure carriers would eventually block VoIP because it competes with their own "antique" phone systems.
Congress and the FCC have generally been friendly toward to VoIP phone service, so expect this to become a huge political issue. The phone companies have the most to lose--namely their entire business, but the cable companies also want to sell telephone service. These dinosaurs will pour billions, if they have to, into the pockets of legislators to get laws that let them keep their monopoly control of their infrastructure, and by extension, monopoly control of the communities that they serve.
This is going to get very ugly. Communities can begin to innoculate themselves from this infection by making prudent investments in telecom. It's the only way to break the monopolies.
Technology News:
WiFi and the Sock Puppets
MediaCitizen has a good summary of the efforts of the big providers to squash municipal projects. The article itself has little new information, except for a nugget of pure gold, in a box about half way down the page.
He cites St. Cloud, Florida, which operates a large WiFi network for citizens. The average savings on broadband access exceeds the average tax bill for residents, and keeps $3 million to $4 million dollars per year in the local economy.
It is nice to begin to see the results of some of these networks. I've been saying for several years that if you do the math, community investments in broadband will pay off handsomely if you can divert those telecom payments to local and regional suppliers.
Just a reminder--I don't think municipaliites ought to be providing telecom services directly to citizens. Instead, community investments ought to lower the cost of doing business for private sector companies, and those investments should help create an open, competitive marketplace. Do I think that projects like the St.Cloud effort are bad? No. I just think that over the long run (5-10 years) communities that view telecom infrastructure like roads will be better off than communities that treat it like water or sewer.
Technology News:
Colorado steps on community rights
Add Colorado to a growing list of states that have bills pending in the legislature that would take the right to determine their own future away from communities.
Like other states (are you starting to see a pattern here?), the Colorado bill would require communities that want to invest in broadband to ask the private sector first. That permission is not likely to be forthcoming, and according to the report, even if the private sector declines to offer broadband service, the community is still stuck.
There are some issues here that are worth reviewing.
First, the article talks about (some) broadband initiatives as a way to raise revenue. Some communities are seeing it this way, but they are crazy. It makes no sense at all to invest in public infrastructure as a hidden tax scheme. Why on earth would you spend money that way when using it as a tax collection mechanism makes the community less competitive from an economic development perspective? This is an education problem--community leaders need help understanding telecom is not a way to balance the local budget, but a way to create jobs and create an economic development engine.
Second, it is important to keep our eye on the ball. Hong Kong just announced it is rolling out Gigabit Ethernet to more than a million homes, beginning later this year. Meanwhile, I just got a flyer from Verizon touting DSL. The flyer explains how fast their 1.5 megabit service is because it actually permits 384 kilobit upload speeds. That's right...here is Verizon's math:
384,000 bits/second = 1.5 million bits/second
Huh? Meanwhile, in places like South Korea and Hong Kong, they are getting broadband service hundreds of times faster than we are getting here while our own legislators are trying as hard as they can to hold their own citizens and businesses back.
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