KMOX believes that St. Louis is "sitting on the sidelines" when it comes to competing with its Midwestern peers for the coveted experimental Google Fiber network. Google Fiber would deliver home internet speeds over 100 times faster than anything available today. It's possible only one city will get to be the host of this trial network.
KMOX points out that Columbia, Missouri aired a pitch for the Google network with thousands of Mizzou basketball fans holding up signs in support of that city hosting the Fiber network on national television. As was mentioned in my previous post, Topeka recently changed its name to Google, Kansas. St. Louis's Facebook page for its Google bid has just under 200 fans; Columbia has 5,342, while Topeka...err, Google, Kansas claims 14,777 Facebook fans.
What do you think? Is this enough evidence to show that St. Louis is truly lagging in its bid? The city's website is a nice gesture. What else do you think St. Louis should be doing? Why is our Facebook lobbying so far behind much smaller Columbia and Topeka?
UPDATE: Kudos to the St. Louis Social Media and Tech Report for finding a list of cities that have bid for the Google Fiber network. The competition is stiff--many cities large and small are already in the running.
IT’S A GOOD THING IT WASN’T COLDER
7 hours ago
2 comments:
Funny that KMOX should be the scold on this one. There was a time when KMOX would have been at the front of the room on this effort. So much for radio in the public interest. Maybe we should require all commercial licensees (radio, multimedia, TV/sat) to reapply every 5 years or so and prove that they contribute to the community. Otherwise, yank the license.
As much as I would like to see St. Louis win this, Kansas already has an edge, at least in the Google Earth department.
The Mac version of Google Earth, has a default position when started up that is centered exactly on the town of Chanute (specifically, on the corner of Lincoln and Main). You can test this by starting Google Earth on a Mac and zooming in from the default start position without rotating the virtual globe at all. This location was set by Dan Webb, who was born and raised in Chanute, graduated from the University of Kansas in 1986, and is now a senior software engineer at Google. Webb is a long time friend of Brian McClendon, who centered the Windows version of Google Earth on his hometown of Lawrence, Kansas.
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