Rolling Homework: Web Buses!

I don't know if this project is a money-saver or not. But for all those kids around South Dakota with long rides to and from school, maybe we can maximize our educational impact by transforming all of our buses into rolling Web classrooms:

One school bus in Arkansas’ Pope County has been transformed into a mobile classroom equipped with computer screens mounted to the ceiling, earphone jacks, wireless Internet access and a separate scanning device to record bus activity.

The five 19-inch customized computer screens stream math and science content from PBS, NASA, the Discovery Channel, CBS News and the Smithsonian Institution for students to watch on their hour-long rides to and from school. The screens also include video-conferencing capabilities [Lauren Katims, "High-Tech School Bus Teachers Students on the Road," Government Technology, 2010.12.14].

I know DSU athletes get to travel on a Web-capable bus. Does the tour bus the MHS boosters bought for our athletes have that capability? Kids could travel to games during the day and still watch class via webcam!

Web buses could have application beyond giving the kids a chance to do homework and web-chat with teachers on the way home. Perhaps we should start up a Web bus service for commuters from Madison to Sioux Falls. Just hook up some satellite wireless and let all the adults enjoy a couple extra hours a day of laptop productivity while the bus driver keeps things between the ditches.

Madville Times Tech Changes -- Suggestions?

In the coming weeks, I plan some significant technological changes on the Madville Times. I'd like your input.

I may be liberal in politics, but I can be darned conservative when it comes to information technology. I'm still using Windows XP. I still set my Start menu to the Classic settings so it looks like the customizations I made on my NEC Ready 120LT when I got it eleven years and two laptops ago.

When it comes to blogging, I've stuck with Blogger for over five years and with the same basic three-column template ("Thisaway Blue" by Dan Rubin with three-column modification by Ashwini Khare, blogger beta templates) for over three years.

I approach I.T. change with trepidation... but I'm ready to do it. Here's what I will change:

1. The Big Change: I'm going to move from Blogger to Wordpress. I still believe Blogger is superior to Wordpress.com for free blogs. However, as I look at Wordpress.org, the paid Wordpress platform, I am finding enough plugins, coding options, and keyboard shortcuts (yes, the ability to use the keyboard and keep my hand off the mouse is that big of a deal to me) to be comfortable with switching. Doing what I want to do with Blogger would also cost me a couple bucks more a month... and I'm darned cheap.
   
2. Layout: I will keep the three-column layout, but I am going to move the main content to the left and put both sidebars on the right (see drawing). That layout lets the main content load before all the links and graphics in the sidebars. That allows you and search engines alike to get the main info first. If you're on a skinny screen, you're less likely to have to scroll to read the main content.
3. More Layout: The template will change. Fonts, colors, and sizes may switch here and there.

Now let me be clear about what I'm not changing:

1. I'm still writing. My blog, my voice, my responsibility.
   
2. I'm deleting nothing. You'll still be able to read over 4400 posts and over 18,000 comments right here. I'm also attempting to import the full content of the Madville Times into the new platform.
3. I will still include South Dakota blogrolls and RSS feeds in the sidebars, as well as recent comment feeds, graphics, ads, the tip jar... probably more stuff than a good Web designer would advise. But I think of my sidebars as bookshelves, a South Dakota library for anyone interested. Maybe I'll clear some clutter by creating separate pages, but I still want to feature as much of the South Dakota blogosphere on the front page as I can.
   

Now I recognize that changing the format of the blog can make folks like grudznick really cranky. I thus welcome your suggestions. What would you like to see me do? Design preferences, widgets you find useful on other blogs, things you want me to keep, things you'd like me to do more or less of (photos? videos? on-site reporting? weather?)... I'll listen to pretty much any suggestion short of "STFU". If I like your ideas, I'll add them to the blog-migration to-do list.

Design, content, you name it—the comment section is open for your thoughts. Or you can send me a private note. Fire away... and stay tuned!

Memo to LAIC: Update Physical and Virtual Main Street Storefronts

My wife and I lament the pitiable state of many building façades in downtown Madison. Too many of the storefronts have tacked up tacky plastic and metal signs over

The Lake Area Improvement Corporation mostly ignores downtown. They briefly touted, then cold-dropped a Main Street and More! program that achieved nothing. The LAIC is apparently too busy pouring money into insider deals for housing developments and its federally subsidized industrial park on the edge of town. The LAIC's only demonstrated interest in building downtown came in its involvement in the real-estate shell game that has led to big ICAP move, which is another example of Madison's reliance on government handouts and socialism.

If the LAIC can't be bothered to promote real downtown renovation and capitalist opportunities, maybe we can arouse their interest in a little virtual downtown renovation. Mike Knutson at the Rural Learning Center discovers a really cool economic development project undertaken by the smart people in Ord, Nebraska. Since 2007, the Ord Chamber of Commerce has offered its downtown businesses $5000 no-interest loans to put toward fixing up their storefronts. Now the Ord Chamber is expanding the acceptable use of those loans to support updating online storefronts.

The Ord Chamber explains the new program on their blog (their blog, Dwaine. Their blog.). The program doesn't rely on a big federal handout. It got rolling when a local bank applied for an won a $25,000 grant from the Federal Home Loan Bank of Topeka.

The LAIC loves signs and façades; our economic developers should be all over a project that makes our downtown look better on the street and online. How about we raise $25,000 for a physical and virtual storefront renovation loan program this way: For every dollar us regular folks contribute, the LAIC will match with a dollar taken out of LAIC exec's Dwaine Chapel's $100K-plus salary. We could redirect $12,500 from unaccountable salary to real Main Street improvements... and Chapel would still be one of the best-paid Brookings commuters in town.

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p.s.: The Dakota Drug building, one of the best-located retail properties on Madison's main street, has been on the market for two months. $99,900 gets you two stories and 6800+ square feet of prime retail opportunity. As of this morning, the LAIC still has not added this choice property to its Available Properties webpage.

Corrupting the Youth: Blogger Speaks to Deuel HS Journalism Class

In another sign of the erosion of our public school system, the Deuel High School Journalism class recently invited a certain well-known East River blogger to discuss propaganda. Fortunately, journalism and speech teacher Samantha Walder then invited me to repair the damage done to young minds.

Kidding aside, Mrs. Walder invited me to Clear Lake yesterday to talk about blogging with her eager journalism students. Deuel's journalists this year are all girls—the journalism class is offered the same hour as shop.

The Deuel HS Journalism class, intrepid reporters for the Birdwatcher, pay rapt attention.

In addition to learning traditional reporting and print layout, the Deuel HS journalists have been churning out an online version of the Deuel School District news since January 2009. Their blogging platform of choice: Blogger. Oh yeah.

Don't worry, parents: Mrs. Walder (right) was on hand to provide adult supervision.

An encouraging sign that Deuel HS is teaching media literacy right: their open wireless network. I was able to log into the network with my trusty little netbook and browse all sorts of webpages during my presentation, including my own blog. Some school districts have blocked the Madville Times and Blogger sites in general, much to their detriment. Not Deuel. The journalism students there have accessed and studied the Madville Times and other blogs in class. Exposing students to a wide range of online content won't damage their brains; to the contrary, it will make them smarter, more discriminating consumers and producers (conducers!) of online media.

Surely I was making an important point here.

I opened with a little history of my involvement with blogging, then spent the bulk of the hour answering student questions. They kept me going all period, asking about my favorite topics, motivations for writing, commenters, and other blog details.

Trickiest question: one girl asked if I thought Orson Scott Card had influenced the development of the World Wide Web with his incorporation of something very much like blogging into the plot of Ender's Game. How's that for a curve ball? I suggested Card might have been picking up on previous ideas like Vannevar Bush's famous memex. I couldn't think of the name on the spot, but I also mentioned the forgotten inventor of the hyperlink, Belgian inventor Paul Otlet.

The biggest point I wanted to make (and I might have amidst the excitable torrent of techno-journalistic observations that flowed forth) was that blogging has been a great learning tool for me. Blogging has focused my attention on South Dakota politics and history. Blogging has also expanded my social network and my definition of community. As I said to the Deuel journalism students, my neighbors aren't just the people here on the western shore of Lake Herman or around Lake County. When I say neighbor, I think of the kids in that Clear Lake classroom, their blogging teacher Mrs. Walder, the guys on Sunday's blog hunt, and everyone else in South Dakota... even that Noem lady.

And to top it off, one of the girls brought chocolate cupcakes. That's what education needs: more cupcakes! That, and more blogging, more authentic, public use of the Web like the online news produced by Samantha Walder's students on the Deuel Birdwatcher.

Social Media Study: South Dakota Good Place for Captions

They could at least have made us legendary.

NetProspex issues a really cool report rating cities, corporations, and industries on their use of Twitter, Facebook, and other social media. Given that one report earlier this year found South Dakota had the highest percentage of residents with Facebook accounts of any state in the Union, I was curious how we'd rate in this study of social media in general.

[map of top cities using social media, from 2010 Social Business Report, NetProspex, p. 22; click image to enlarge!]

Alas, we don't. For NetProspex, South Dakota and its High Plains neighbors are just a convenient empty space to squeeze in captions.

But we do learn where the leaders are in tweeting, Facebooking, and other clicky diversions:

Top Industries	Top Companies	Top Cities
Search Engines and Online Portals Advertising and Marketing (e.g.: @Buzz52: Mad Men last night-OMG! C-Hndx ++smokin!) Banking Traditional Media (not the laggards we might think they are!) Toys and games	Google Microsoft Amazon Juniper Networks Adobe (No South Dakota companies make the top 50)	San Francisco, CA San Jose, CA New York, NY Austin, TX Boston, MA

NetProspex takes time to note that the Midwest is the "Least Social Media-Savvy U.S. Region." What? Have they not seen Travis Dahle's Twitter feed? Now there is some legendary tweeting. :-)

Midco Resists Subpoena for Customer Info in Video Piracy Case

Last February, when legislators like Noel Hamiel, Nancy Turbak Berry, and Mitch Fargen (yeah, you, Mitch), threatened to decimate the South Dakota blogosphere with the ill-concieved Blog Control Acts, I offered five counterplans that would better serve the goals of the legislation in protecting citizens from anonymous libel. My first counterplan was to use current law to subpoena service providers like Google and Midco instead of individual bloggers to obtain Web user information in cases of suspected wrongdoing.

I might have overestimated the willingness of Midco to play ball with such a plan:

Midcontinent Communications, an Internet, phone and cable provider in Sioux Falls, is refusing to provide information about an estimated 140 customers who are accused of illegally sharing copies of the film "The Hurt Locker" through peer-to-peer networks.

...The subpoena sent to Midcontinent is asking for the names, addresses, telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and Media Access Control addresses for all the customers whose IP addresses are listed.

...[Midco VP Tom] Simmons also said providing the information would take a lot of work, time and money."We're going to expect some degree of compensation for all of that to jump through all the hoops that they are requiring," he said [Kelly Thurman, "Midco Resists Subpoena in Lawsuit," that Sioux Falls paper, 2010.09.04].

I am pleased to see Midco takes protecting customer information as its default. I am also heartened to see that they are resisting having to act as unpaid police. Midco's resistance to these subpoenas shows one of the major flaws of the thankfully defeated Blog Control Acts: bloggers and nearly anyone at a computer would have had to invest significant amounts of money, time, and study in Internet surveillance and legal advice that would have driven most casual users away from the most free press ever invented.
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Update 2010.09.06: David Newquist differs with me (and with prevailing court opinion) about the responsibility for comment-section libel. He agrees with me, however, on the general quality of comment sections, especially on KELO, as refuges for subliterate ad hominem wretches.

Broadband Essential for Entrepreneurs... But U.S. 23rd in Fast Web

Memo to all rural economic development specialists: Mike Knutson at Reimagine Rural notes that broadband is essential for entrepreneurship on the prairie:

Those of us who live and work in rural communities know the importance of high speed Internet connections. Because of it, the barriers of distance are broken and more businesses are possible in small towns. In fact, just the other week I met with an entrepreneur from Howard, SD whose business would not be possible without it. The owner has an engineering background, and he needs the Internet to connect with clients around the country. He’s a creative guy and wants to live in a rural community. Without broadband, he might have to consider moving to a city [Mike Knutson, "Broadband: An Entrepreneurial Requirement," Reimagine Rural, 2010.07.28].

In just two decades, broadband Internet access has become as essential to business growth as telephone and electricity. The broadband need Knutson highlights poses a challenge to my local self-sufficiency paradigm: I like to advocate building as much of our economy as possible on local people producing locally used goods and services... but lots of creative people have money-making skills that just can't find a sustainable market in small places like Howard or Madison. Even if you have a product or service that you can make a living on exclusively within the South Dakota market, you need fast Web to get your message (and your images, and your video!) out to your customers in Sioux Falls, Milbank, and Hill City.

Unfortunately for all of us, the United States is lagging in broadband deployment. In a survey of 57 countries, we rank 23rd in getting good Internet and all of its concomitant business opportunities to everybody. Why are we lagging?

The United States... trailed the rankings in a number of the five index components. [Analyst Ben] Piper says competition—or the lack of it—is to blame for the high prices and low average speeds in the US.

"With essentially zero intra-platform competition, US service providers have little incentive to innovate offerings or differentiate beyond par," said Piper ["U.S. Ranks 23rd in Broadband Development," StrategyAnalytics, 2010.07.20].

What? You mean the free market is working better in those darned socialist countries like France and Germany and Lithuania than it is in the U.S. of A.? My world is being turned upside down all over today.

Let's hope some of those mystery companies LAIC's Dwaine Chapel is confabbing with behind closed doors are broadband companies to bring zoom-zoom Internet, competition, and entrepreneurship to Madison.

Engage:SD -- Rural Learning Center Offers Social Media Help for Non-Profits

The Rural Learning Center is giving me all sorts of things to think about this week. RLC's blog, Reimagine Rural, announces an interesting new project, Engage:SD. The project's purpose is to help small non-profit organizations learn how to use social media—not just billboard Web pages, but blogs, wikis, Facebook, forums, and all the other online tools people can use to interact, share, and build texts and ideas together.

What will Engage:SD actually do?

1. Engage:SD is offering eight online seminars on using online tools for branding, sustaining community conversations, and organizing non-profit action and events. These webinars run from July 27 (that's next week! sign up already!) to December 21.
   
2. They'll give five $2500 grants for technical assistance in developing social media strategy. Non-profits focusing on rural community or economic development get first dibs, but RLC is open to other applicants who can make the case that they can put a social media grant to good use.
3. They'll also host some in-person skill-building workshops where non-profit staff can come learn to use Facebook, Twitter, Wordpress, Flickr, and Delicious (what, no Blogger? ;-) )

I dig this project. It is exactly the sort of collaborative effort rural organizations need to acquire social media skills. Most rural non-profit groups are too small to have staff dedicated to marketing or Web work. Take our local Habitat for Humanity chapter: their Facebook page and website, along with their Shelter Fest online info, aren't products of rigorously designed social media marketing campaign sustained by an information systems specialist. They're all set up by my wife, the board secretary, who marshals her marketing experience, sparkly enthusiasm, and occasional Web advice from her blogger husband into Web presence for the organization. That Web presence happens because the group just happens to have a volunteer interested in that kind of work who can find a few spare moments amidst the general business of the organization to tinker online.

Engage:SD offers small non-profits like Habitat ECSD some training and practical tips that they probably couldn't afford on their own. The Rural Learning Center can snag a social media expert and share her knowledge with a whole bunch of groups at once, making a difference in a bunch of communities simultaneously in a way that scattered individual non-profits could not.

If you're running a little non-profit on the prairie, fighting the good fight for small-town arts or business recruitment or social justice, you'll want to look into Engage:SD. This program could give your group a little Web boost to help you connect with your community and get things done.

BlogNetNews.com Shut Down, Domain for Sale

Father Tim e-mailed me the other day asking if BlogNetNews.com was broken. I logged in—or tried! Sho' 'nuff, no BNN. As the South Dakota editor, I've received no pink slip or other administrative memo, so I was as surprised as TLF+. (But hey, what does unpaid help expect?)

So I go Googling and learn from BlogNetReports Oklahoma that David Mastio shut down the server last week due to dwindling ad revenue. Mastio may also be busy dealing with plagiarism at his day job, editing the Washington Times.

Quantcast stats confirm that traffic to BlogNetNews.com flatlined on Wednesday, July 14, after drawing 7K–12K visits weekly during 2010. If Quantcast can be believed, BlogNetNews.com's best traffic was in February 2008, peaking over 30K weekly visits (and that's for all aggregator sections; I don't have data specific to BNN's South Dakota channel).

The failure of the site doesn't surprise me. With South Dakota blogs helping each other out by aggregating RSS feeds in their sidebars, and with the ad-free ease of Google Reader and other personal blog aggregation services, blog-ficionados don't have much need for an out-of-state website that profits off our local production.

I would be curious to hear some post-mortem discussion of traffic benefits among local writers. Every now and then I'd get a referral from BNN, but by far my biggest sources of inclicks are the blog sites of my fellow South Dakota writers, as well as my Facebook page and KELO. Fellow South Dakota bloggers, how much referral traffic did you get from BNN? And have you noticed a decrease in traffic since the service ended last week?

The domain remains in David Mastio's name through November 29, and it is for sale. Make an offer! (Update: Estimated worth as of 2010.07.20: $29,028... same dollar figure as height of Mt. Everest in feet!)

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Other posts on BNN's demise:

• Jamie Jeffords, "BNN Is Kaput," Eye of Polyphemus (SC), 2010.07.18
• Monoblogue (MD)
• Lehigh Valley (PA)
• Cognitive Dissidence (WI)
  

Obama Stimulates South Dakota Small Town Broadband

We're not following Finland in declaring broadband a fundamental human right, but we're working on making universal access to the information superhighway a practical reality. On Friday, the Obama Administration announced an additional $800 million in stimulus dollars to boost 66 broadband projects nationwide.

Two South Dakota outfits get a piece of this broadband stimulus pie:

1. Triotel Communications of Salem gets $12.3 million to lay fiber-optic cable (that's the fast stuff) to homes in Canova, Alexandria, Emery, Farmer, Salem, and Spencer. Triotel says the project may benefit over 4000 people, just about 1000 businesses, and 100 community institutions. Interestingly, Triotel's homepage features a banner link calling on us to oppose the FCC's National Broadband Plan... apparently based on the plan's setting rural braodband standards 25 times slower than national standards.
2. Highmore-based Venture Communications gets $5.2 million (to be supplemented with $1.7M in private capital) to run fiber to homes and businesses in Cresbard, Faulkton, and Orient. Over 2000 people and dozens of businesses and institutions stand to get faster Internet.

Among neighboring states, Iowa is living highest off the broadband stimulus hog, winning $69.8 million for six broadband projects. On an entirely unrelated note, these stimulus grants are administered in part by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, headed by Secretary and former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack.

But South Dakota's $17.5 million is no sneezable sum. Iowa and Montana were our only neighbors to get more of this broadband stimulus, and most of Montana's money is $15.5 million dedicated to building a fiber network everywhere on the Crow Reservation.

Of course, we all know that South Dakota's reliance on federal money is bad, bad, bad. When will Kristi Noem go to Salem and Highmore and tell them to send this Executive Branch pork back to Washington? Hmmm... maybe she can get some support for that argument from Wisconsin Democrat and chair of House Appropriations David Obey, who wants to cut $602 million from the total $7.2 billion of stimulus dollars targeted at broadband to offset war costs.

Hottest Political Web Property in South Dakota: TheBjork.com!

Not just Björk; The Bjork! [Björk pic from here; The Bjork pic from here]

I just found the best political domain name in South Dakota, and it belongs to a candidate from right here in Madison. Who is it? Independent/Glenn Beck candidate for District 8 House Jason Lee Bjorklund is online with TheBjork.com (No umlaut, please). We can talk Bjorklund's politics later—right now, folks just want to go to the lake (typical human behaviour). Permit me, therefore, to restrict my comments to my entirely superficial admiration for Bjorklund's domain name choice. There's got to be some Google juice spillover the candidate will get from the queen of Icelandic surreal-pop, right? The marketing association catches the thoughtful hip who want to unravel cookie-cutter media messages from blow-dried talking heads. With a domain name like this, Bjorklund can shout to voters, "There's more to life than this! It's in our hands! Declare independence and vote for an army of me to shake up Pierre!" And on the off chance that Bjorklund could possibly, maybe lose in November, he still has a domain name with zip, verve, even big time sensuality, available for all sorts of other ventures, not some silly Web albatross like KarpenForPUC.com or KristiForCongress.com that's pretty useless once you lose the election. TheBjork.com could one day have some serious resale value, which could make Jason violently happy. Now if I could just get him to campaign in a swan dress. 100,000 Web hits per day, guaranteed.

Update 2022.06.26: Google Blogger unpublished this post 12 years later, claiming that it violated their malware and viruses policy. I  have not attempted to transmit any malware or viruses. The only thing I can speculate may be wrong is that TheBjork.com doesn't show any Bjorklund info any more (last I heard, Bjorklund ran for an SDGOP convention voting spot in Minnehaha County this year and got trounced by Rep. Chris Karr). I'll deactivate those links and see if that makes Google happy.

Recovery.org Transforms Government Spending Transparency

You may not like President Obama's economic stimulus package, but you should at least like President Obama's use of the Web to account for that stimulus money. Recovery.gov isn't just another government website. According to Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board chairman and Inspector General Earl Devaney, the stimulus-tracking website has permanently and positively transformed the concept of government transparency:

...it's transformational. I think that the government is going to do business like this in the future. This is probably the biggest experiment going on right now, and they'll take the good and build on it and we will probably learn a lot of lessons as we go along [Earl Devaney, quoted by Chad Vander Veen, "Earl Devaney, Chairman of the Federal Recovery Board, Talks About Building and Running Recovery.gov," Government Technology, 2010.06.15].

But wasn't there some ruckus last fall about recovery money being spent in non-existent Congressional districts? Yes... and that ruckus wouldn't have happened without the transparency of Recovery.org:

...the downside to transparency is often embarrassment. When we went live [with stimulus spending data] in October, there was a lot of outcry about the data. Some of the data was bad. There are 99 data elements that the recipients [of stimulus funds] had to send in to FederalReporting.gov and get right. One of the big snafus was that turns out not many of the recipients knew what congressional district they live in. So they just put in two numbers, they didn't care if they were the right numbers because the system allowed them to move on to the next question. Well, when we had a database full of incorrect congressional districts, that didn't make Congress very happy. There's a technical fix to that; we tied the ZIP codes to the congressional district, and if the ZIP code entered by the user doesn't match the congressional district, the user is told there is a problem. That corrected that problem in the next reporting period, so that data got a lot better [Devaney in Vander Veen, 2010].

Devaney sees himself and a couple dozen other inspectors general now backed up by thousands and thousands of reporters, bloggers, and regular citizens searching Recovery.gov for information on local projects and eager to print critical news stories or hit the "report fraud" button if they see something questionable. He says the stimulus money has as much potential for waste and abuse as past government spending programs. The difference is that it's a lot easier for us to find out about it, alert the overseeing agencies, and stanch that waste and abuse.

All thanks to a website and citizen participation... and an Administration that understands the value of both.

Blogger Outage Over! Madville Times Still not Switching to Wordpress

Whew! We're back! Since about 7 p.m. last night, Blogger.com's authoring tools were offline for a number of users. You and I could read this blog, but I couldn't post any new material. Comments were also acting weird as well—my apologies to any of you who lost good zingers! Perhaps it was an angry God, punishing us secular leftists for embracing counterfeit marriage. ;-)

Following some stressed and cranky comments in the Blogger forum and on Twittter from fellow withdrawal-suffering bloggers, I heard some predictable rumblings about switching to Wordpress. A 19-hour outage certainly is enough to drive consideration of substitute products.

In my book, head to head, Blogger still beats Wordpress with an easier, cleaner, and faster publishing interface and much less spam in the comments.

And in five years of using this product, I have never encountered a Blogger outage of comparable magnitude. I'm still not convinced migrating to a full hosting account at MadvilleTimes.com would be any better—how many times has Dakota War College reported in the past five years? With free Blogger.com, users get what they pay for and then some.

Nonetheless, I apologize, dear readers, for any inconvenience you experienced in not being able to enjoy the latest Madville Times news and commentary over breakfast. Big primary tomorrow, so stay tuned!

AP Stylebook: "Website" Now One Word!

The AP Stylebook has added a new "social media" section. Among the profound declarations: website is now one word, uncapitalized. Funny: that's how I've been writing website all along, but until now, AP has preferred Web site. I love waking up to find I'm no longer wrong. But take note: Web page remains two words.

By AP rules, you should still capitalize Web when referring to this worldwide wonder. And for Pete's sake, keep the hyphen in e-mail, e-book, and e-reader.

AP now recognizes unfriend and defriend as acceptable verbs. Of course, you can make the world a better place by focusing on befriending....

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Update 2010.07.04: Then again, if you're writing for the Web, do you listen to an anchor of the old media, or do you follow the new Yahoo style guide? Yahoo says no hyphen in e-mail. Choices, choices....

U.S. 26th Worldwide, South Dakota 15th Nationwide in Download Speed

• Today's global download speed average: 7.71 Mbps.
  
• My breakfast download speed in the heart of America: 0.98 Mbps.

Ookla releases data on broadband speeds worldwide, derived from its SpeedTest.net service. The ten countries with the fastest Internet (speeds in Mbps):

1. South Korea (34.18)
2. Latvia (24.43)
3. Moldova (21.76)
4. Japan (20.56)
5. Sweden (20.09)
6. Åland Islands (19.85—real place! citizenship requirement: add cool accent marks to your name)
7. Romania (18.63)
8. Lithuania (18.04)
9. Bulgaria (17.67)
10. Netherlands (17.25)

What, no U.S.A.? We're 27th, at 10.16 Mbps. how is it we invent the Internet only to see 25 countries make better, faster use of it?

Now the gap isn't just because we're such a big country with hard to reach places. Rural states do drag the average down: Web is slowest in Alaska, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. But our fastest city, San José, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley, is 17th among metros worldwide, with a speed of 15.17 Mbps. Even where we'd expect serious American zoom-zoom Internet, we still lag places like Seoul, Hamburg, Bucharest, and Sofia.

South Dakota does beat the national average: our average download speed is 10.67 Mbps (I'm getting a tenth of that). Ranking 15th nationwide, we beat the pants off North Dakota, which pulls files in at 7.66 Mbps, and oh-so-urbane Iowa at 7.45. Minnesota is the only neighbor that gets files faster, at 11.56 Mbps.

Some critics have pointed out Ookla's data is not scientific: Ookla takes averages from SpeedTest.net users. Those users are all voluntary, so it's not a random or representative sample of all users in each region. That self-selected sample may skew the average higher: SpeedTest.net users may tend to be techies who know about the service and are interested enough in computer's Web performance to test it.

Transparency, Context, and the Sex Offender Registry

A couple weeks ago, after receiving some court documents from an eager reader, I questioned the usefulness of the sex offender registry. The wise Dr. Newquist supported a point that guides North Dakota law, that the registry can do more harm than good and quite possibly turn some relatively harmless offenders into more desperate, dangerous criminals.

According to an August 2009 Economist article, the Georgia Sex Offender Registration Review Board sampled its registry and concluded that 65% of folks on the list "posed little threat." 30% were "potentially threatening," and 5% were "clearly dangerous."

Social media researcher danah boyd speaks to the Gov 2.0 Expo about sex offender registries as an example of how government transparency is not enough: we can release lots of data, but we must include context and help people develop media literacy so they can properly interpret that data.

Boyd provides a draft of the presentation text. Among the important passages:

The problem with the registry is not its intention. Of course we want to give people the tools to protect their children. The problem is also not simply one of transparency. In fact, the transparency of these lists allows us to call into question how our laws are enforced. The problems that stem from the registry stem from the fact that people misinterpret what the data means. When the list of registered sex offenders is made available out of context, it's easy for people to misinterpret what they see. And boy do they ever. In most of your minds, a registered sex offender is automatically Evil Incarnate. So when someone has that Scarlett Letter attached to their chests, they are immediately judged without the circumstances and situation being understood. Transparency may allow us to see who's registered, but for this information to be used effectively, it needs to be communicated in context. In short, we need people to not just have access to the data, but have access to the context surrounding the data [danah boyd, "Transparency Is Not Enough," Gov 2.0 Expo, 2010.05.26].

Boyd also notes that she has done research that adds some important context to the statistics about the danger of sexual solicitations minors face on the Internet:

Consider the statistic from 2006 that 1 in 7 minors are sexually solicited online. This statistic flew around the press and was employed by Attorneys General across the U.S. to argue that the Internet is dangerous for children. This statistic was from a highly reputable source - the Crimes Against Children Research Center. The problem is not the statistic; it is accurate. It's what it implies without further clarification. Most people interpret this statistic as suggesting that 1 in 7 minors are sexually solicited by older sketchy adults seeking to meet minors offline for sex. Yet, over 90% of sexual solicitations are from other minors or young adults and 69% of solicitations involve no attempt at offline contact. Finally, the researchers used the term solicitation to refer to any communication of a sexual nature, including sexual harassment and flirtation [boyd, 2010].

When boyd publicized this research, a state attorney general called and told her to "go find different data." When she stuck by her research, that AG proceeded to trash her in the press.

The lesson here is not that we can't trust statistics or that we shouldn't look to data. Quite the opposite: the lesson here is that when we get statistics and data, we need to get even more information to put the data in proper context.

North Dakota Chats up South Dakota; Minnesota Ignores Us

Rebecca Blood turns my attention to Lexicalist.com, which analyzes online text and demographics to figure out who's talking about what where. You type in a word, Lexcialist calculates the prevalence of that word in online conversations by state, sex, and age.

So I type in South Dakota. The results:


Lexicalist.com ties most of the conversation about South Dakota, 81.2%, to speakers/bloggers/tweeters in South Dakota. Among outsiders, we figure most prominently in the consciousness of our northern neighbors: North Dakotan online sources contribute 6.2% of mentions of "South Dakota (certainly 5.2% are prefaced with the phrase, "Gee, why can't we be more like..."). Wyoming produces 4.0% of South Dakota mentions; Iowa 2.5%. Our Minnesota neighbors provide only 0.7% of South Dakota mentions, a tick fewer than even Montanas make... and Montanans have Yellowstone and the Rockies to distract them. Minnesotans talk about North Dakota twice as much. What gives?

Plug "Minnesota" into the Lexicalist search query, and you find that Minnesotans provide only 35.3% of their own mentions. 13.0% come from North Dakota, and 10.2% come from South Dakota. (I leave it to the Minnesota Department of Tourism to speculate as to what words precede our mentions of our easterly neighbor.) Hmmm... are South Dakotans more self-absorbed than Minnesotans? Mentions of Minnesota are more spread out among other states, suggesting their marketing and top-of-mind-awareness are better than ours... or that they just get more online press thanks to the Twins.

One more random note for the watercooler: The three states that talk about New York the most are New York (12.6% of mentions), New Jersey (5.7%), and North Dakota (4.3%). South Dakota ties with Alaska for talking about New York the least, not even registering on Lexicalist's count. Hmmm....

Blogs Are Press, Can Protect Anonymous Sources, Says NH Court

Before the 2011 Legislature takes another swing at the Blog Control Acts, they'll want to review the latest ruling from the New Hampshire Supreme Court, which agrees with me and Aaron Barlow that freedom of the press applies to blogs and websites just as well as the traditional press:

In a First Amendment case that had big implications for the future of online journalism, the New Hampshire Supreme Court said freedom of the press is a fundamental right that extends beyond newspapers and periodicals to any kind of publication that serves as a vehicle for information and opinion.

For the first time, New Hampshire’s high court set a precedent for deciding whether websites can be forced to release the identity of online commenters. It instructed lower courts to weigh the media’s right to protect sources more heavily than the plaintiff’s concerns in lawsuits over defamatory comments made online. Similar precedents have been set in other states [Ashley Smith, "Court Backs Website on Free Speech," Nashua Telegraph, 2010.05.07].

The ruling addresses a case that covers exactly the situation South Dakota's legislators wanted to regulate: a pseudonymous blog commenter accused a mortgage company president of fraud, and the company demanded the website identify the commenter. The high court's ruling does not give nameless commenters free rein, but it does say the mortgage company doesn't get free rein to prosecute perceived defamation. New Hampshire's supremes have told the lower court to reconsider the case, this time viewing the website as a member of the press with full First Amendment right to protect the identity of its anonymous sources.

When the Founding Fathers used the word press, they weren't thinking of professional reporters and publishers pretending to objectivity. They were thinking of pamphleteers and other rabble-rousers like Thomas Paine and Alexander Hamilton who got hold of a press and published their arguments.

If you're reading this, you have a press at your fingertips. Just like government, the press is us. Use it wisely.

KJAM Broadcasting Online

KJAM is now live-streaming its AM signal online. I don't imagine folks will be tuning in worldwide to listen to the same music they can get from a number of generic classic hits format stations in their own neck of the woods. But this new service may find an audience among traveling locals and Lake County ex-pats who want to keep up with Madison area news and sports.

Of course, they still have a long way to go to catch up with the cultural richness of South Dakota Public Radio, which gives us two online broadcasts or the sheer awesomeness of the best radio station in the world, CKUA. Note to Richard M.: CKUA is a public, non-profit organization, and it provides better music and cultural programming than any free-market radio station I've listened to. That's what I mean about private broadcasters providing the bland content that is a larger audience's second choice instead of the high-quality programming produced by the community effort of CKUA. (For more on that concept, read Yochai Benkler.)

Daugaard Promotes E-Government... but for Consumers or Citizens?

Seeing Dennis Daugaard is making a campaign stop at the Madison 9-12 meeting next week reminds me that I still need to finish reading his big economic plan (now nicely available in plain text as well as PDF). I've had some fun picking through some of the good, the same-old same-old, the stinky, the wrong, and the explosive parts of the plan.

Now I get to a part that I can't help but give props to. Daugaard's plan includes a plank on digital government, or e-government. Daugaard notes that Game Fish and Parks, the university system, and the state legislature are already making good use of the Internet.

...But too many of our interactions with the state are still paper-based and require a trip to a state office. I will inventory the most common interactions that people and businesses have with state government. The state will create “step-by-step” online portals to guide users to the correct website or state office. Ideally, users should be able to complete common interactions with state government entirely online.

Online services are significantly more convenient – they can be accessed at any time and from any place. They can also result in considerable cost savings – although they require an upfront investment, they will lead to increased efficiency [Daugaard campaign text, 2010].

I don't think I can take seriously any candidate, from local auditor up to governor and president, who doesn't recognize the urgent need to rewire government with the greatest information technology ever created. (Hey, Governor Rounds, are you on e-mail yet?)

My only quibble with the Daugaard proposal is that it appears to be stuck in the mindset that views government as a business and citizens as consumers. The Web is great for services like purchasing licenses, paying taxes, and reserving campsites. Improving and increasing such services online can indeed make government more efficient.

But we mustn't (and Daugaard mustn't) forget that government is not simply some office to which we pay money and from which we receive services. The government is us. Government is a system we design and participate in. The Internet increases our ability to participate in government on a regular basis, to act not simply as consumers but as engaged citizens.

So sure, more license tags online are great. Now, Mr. Daugaard, how about using the Internet to promote participatory budgeting, as they've done in Brazil, Germany, the UK, and even Iowa? How about inviting the public to handle legislative redistricting, as Ohio did last year? How about...

...but wait a minute. What am I doing using the Internet to give politicians ideas on how to engage citizens in government affairs? Aren't the politicians supposed to come up with all the answers and then convince us to buy them? ;-)

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p.s.: Mike Knutson hits on a related theme: Let's think of the Internet not simply as a way to provide services to consumers, but a way to engage citizens in deliberation and decision-making.

Update 15:10 CDT: Read more on civics and the Web from Axel Bruns, who reports on Andy Williamson's keynote from the 2010 Conference on E-Democracy in Krems, Austria:

So, what is it that we do, and how can we do it better? As societies, we have shifted from a culture of community to a culture of individualism; we are no longer just citizens but also (and perhaps primarily) consumers - including of government or democratic services. This is a problem - our behaviour as citizens should still be different from our behaviour as consumers, and if governments treat us simply as the latter, this undermines the democratic process. This applies especially also to online government services, of course [Axel Bruns, notes on Andy Williamson's EDEM 2010 keynote address, "Towards Real Citizen Participation in e-Democracy," Snurblog, 2010.05.06].