Archive for May, 2007

On the heels of my post about looming employee issues and the drop in interest in computer sciences at HSU, Ars Technica has an article that addresses this very issue. It seems it’s not just here but universities everywhere are facing the the problem of dropping interest. The solution? What a surprise: Make the programs more interesting and relevant to today’s market!

I don’t know the details of what is taught at HSU, but looking through the class offerings in the Computer Science program I see no mention of open source web languages such as PHP, Ruby, Python. Maybe these things are taught, but if so, at least on a marketing level, there should be some acknowledgment of the revolution going on in the open source world and web application development in the program and course descriptions.

We work with a lot of small businesses. But small or large the one question that everyone always asks is: How do I get people to find my web site? Not to be flip about it, but there are two ways:

1) Do a good job providing search engines what they need to have your site show up in organic search results. That is, if someone types in a phrase at Google or Yahoo or MSN , you want to come up at minimum in the first 3 pages of the search results, but best would be on the first page. This is not easy. It takes research, it takes structuring your site properly, it takes writing lots of good content and it takes building incoming links. Read Feedthebot.com for some straightforward tips on how to implement Google’s webmaster guidelines for getting good organic search results.

2) Spend money to market your site. This includes using pay-per-click services like Google’s Adwords, Yahoo’s Search Marketing and other services. It also may include off line marketing such as buying ads in newspapers, magazines and yellow pages that include your web site address. It could also mean radio and television advertising.

That’s it! I’ve boiled it down to 2 big categories. There is some overlap such as paying sites to link to you which would fall in to both categories, but in general, that’s all there is to it. It’s the specifics that get hard. Getting these things done can cost you a lot of time, or money. Sometimes both. So, whenever we talk to clients about a new, or redesigned web site, we always talk about the marketing. What are the expectations for the site? How will those expectations be met? Do you have staff and a budget to help meet those expectations?

But say you have some time and not very much money. Say, you only have $100 or $250 to spend. The blog SEOish offers the views of 7 top web marketers on what they would do with a limited budget. I don’t necessarily agree with all of them. They don’t agree with each other! But it makes for an interesting quick read.

One of the tips that I do agree with use some of that money to buy some good books in order to learn all you can about this field whether you hire someone to help you or not. Among the books mentioned several times is one of my favorites, Aaron Wall’s SEO Book. (Disclosure: That’s my affiliate link, so if you click this and buy the book, I get a little reward). Get it. Read it. Read his blog.

Senator Daniel Inouye (D - Hawaii) has introduced the Broadband Data Improvement Act  which, if passed is designed to direct the FCC to provide a higher baseline for what it measures as broadband.

The bill also addresses how the FCC gathers data on broadband coverage in the a given  area. According to the Ars Technica article:

Under current practice, if a single address in a ZIP code can receive high-speed access, the entire ZIP code is counted as “served.” The new bill would require far more granular reporting by making carriers report data at the ZIP+4 level. The FCC would have to produce reports that show all geographical areas “not served by any provider of advanced telecommunications capability,” and that map would look substantially different from the current, ZIP-code based one.

The bill also provides $40 million per year through 2012 to states to improve their broadband coverage data gathering and mapping.

Apparently much of the bill was inspired by the success of the Connect Kentucky program. The current regional working group on broadband for Del Norte, Humboldt , Trinity and Mendocino counties is also using Connect Kentucky for some of its modeling on developing just such a project. The  timing of all this movement in the Federal government couldn’t come at a better time as the state and the region gear up for a major push to bring broadband connection and deployment up to speed (sorry) for rural areas.

The common wisdom is that there are few job opportunities in the region, especially for college graduates. Most young people assume that good jobs can only be found out of the area, usually in some city like SF, LA, Portland or Seattle. But at recent event celebrating a few industry groups (in this case forestry, education and research, and information technology), the main focus of the panel discussion was the lack of qualified people to fill open postions.

How can this be? Potential employees feel there are no good jobs while employers are having problems finding good people for the jobs they have. Part of the problem may be that expectations on both sides are just too high. Employers ecpect young job seekers to come fully formed in to the market and start contributing as a full member of the staff. New job seekers, on the other hand may be expecting too much in terms of compensation, comparing the scale here to what they hear people are getting for similar postions in those hot urban areas. It seems some kind of dialogue between employeers and employees (or their representatives) might help.

But there are a couple trends that dialogue might not so easily overcome. One is that the baby boom generation is moving toward retirement and there just aren’t enough people in general from subsequent generations to fill those positions. This trend is affecting much of the developed world, not just the north coast.

Another disturbing trend, particularly for the tech industry is the drop in interest in math and computer sciences in current student populations. According to Pam Godwin of the HSU Career Center this drop in interest is blowback from the Silicon Valley bubble burst a few years ago. I think this is only partly true. The trend now is toward small companies started by entrepreneurs with or without computer degrees. Web programming languages have become easier and easier and all the training needed can be found on the web, for free or much cheaper than traditional college paths. Why go to school and get a job in a cube farm when you can team up with a couple friends and make a Web 2.0 company in a few months and get a bunch of money when Yahoo! or Google comes calling. At least that’s the new siren call.

I don’t have any good answers  for those of us on the north coast who will be needing new tech employees in the next few years. But this is going to be a huge issue going forward.

A House hearing led by Democrat Ed Markey took on the FCC in defining broadband at 200 kbps. Comparing that standard to 50 mbps in Japan for household makes our broadband policy laughable. Markey would like to see the standard raised to 2 mbps. Others think think the baseline should be low enough to include most of the wireless networks. As noted here earlier the FCC is finally looking at their broadband standards, but so far nothing much has come out about it. Continued pressure from Congress can only help.

The article also covers comments from Brian Mefford, CEO of ConnectKentucky a project that has been doing a great job covering the state with broadband, including rural areas. ConnectKentucky is being looked at as a reference point for our own regional broadband effort.

The notorious Buhne Tribune blog has gone off line. According to the article, the outing of the Captain’s real identity led to the demise of the blog: “One of the big reasons for his blog’s popularity was the mystique that came with it, he said. Once a real name and person was attached to it, it just wasn’t the same.”

Plus, people weren’t sending him email tips as readily.

I think this is the inevitable path for anonymous blogs. The world of information is just too wide open to keep  the mystery of anonymity alive for very long.  And if the mystery is one of the primary points of  fascination and popularity, when that goes, so goes the blog.

There is a trace still left of the Captain on line. A transcirpt of a KHUM interview from last year can be found here.

Best of luck Ryan Hurley and thanks for the traffic  from your blog back to here.

Ars Technica is reporting a new Senate bill to roll back the recently upped copyright charges for music played over Internet radio stations. This bill follows a similar one submitted a couple weeks ago in the House of Representatives. Perhaps it will be easier for the two houses to agree if each bill passes. No word yet on the White House opinion on this subject.

As always,  visit this site to voice your support.

I’ve been pretty critical of our country’s broadband policies that have led to us falling further and further behind other nations that have properly seen telecommunications as a vital part of the modern infrastructure equal to roads, power and water. Some of this has just been lack of vision and drive to excel while the failure to hold telcos accountable for their failure to live up to commitments made in return for millions of dollars of government subsidy might be seen as corrupt and criminal.

But things appear to be changing at last. From the Federal government where the FCC is finally taking a serious look at broadband deployment, to Senate Democrat Jay Rockefeller’s non-binding resolution to bring 100 mb service to everyone, to a House Sub-Committee hearing on rural broadband, at least some focus and energy is being devoted to the issue. I am hopeful this increased focus will bring about real policy changes so that telcos and cable services will be forced to make higher levels of service available to more people at reasonable rates. This is just too important to economic survival and to safety and security to be left totally up to the free market.

At the State level, there is the Governor’s Broadband Task Force which has been set up to recommend policies and actions that will bring California’s telecommunications infrastructure to a level to be competitive in the global economy. As noted before there is some emphasis on covering the entire state, meaning rural areas, as well.

On a regional level, Redwood Coast Rural Action’s (a loosely knit organization of community leaders from Del Norte, Trinity, Humboldt and Mendocino Counties) Broadband Work Group is setting up a team that will produce a working model of telecommunications planning for the entire region. Details of what this group will produce are being hammered now, but there is a sense of urgency about this project and some serious money behind it. In general terms, the product should lay the groundwork for improved broadband services and deployment to even the smallest communities in the region. Our area has been chosen to serve as a model project because of the excellent advocacy and planning done over the years by individuals and groups such as RCRA and the Redwood Technology Consortium.

And finally, I have it from good sources that the alternate fiber running east-west through Humboldt and Trinity counties has traction. If those sources are correct, that new fiber could be completed by as early as this Fall. I am keeping my ear to the ground and fingers crossed on this. So if you see me on the street somewhere in that awkward  position, you’ll know why.

It’s not clear exactly why, but the deadline for web casters to pay a huge new royalty fee has been postponed from May  15 to July 15. Good news for those of us who think this new rate is bad for the public, bad for Internet radio and bad for the artists whose music is heard on these webcasts.

I’m sure it’s still not enough time for a new bi-partisan bill introduced in Congress that would essentially reverse the ruling by the Copyright Royalty Board. Still, it’s worth supporting the bill by contacting your representatives and urging them to get behind the legislation and help move it along as fast as possible.

One of the highlights of Broadband Forum III on Thursday was the unveiling of a nifty new site designed to educate people about the ecology of the redwood forests. A joint project of Humboldt State University students and high school students as part of Cybertribe, the web site is a fun, interactive, visually appealing tour of the flora and fauna amongst our giant trees.

Once you get past the opening splash page (they do provide a way to ’skip the intro’) you get to a beautifully rendered portrait of a forest dense with life. Many of the elements in this forest are clickable and lead to page that provides some great information on the plant or animal you clicked on. While not particularly deep in content (there are only 12 information pages) sophisticated technically (it’s pretty basic Flash), it’s pretty impressive for students and will be a great way for kids to learn about one of our region’s most famous assets. I hope there will be more of these collaborations.

Today’s Broadband Forum, the 3rd in a series, struck me as the end of the road for these events. For one, the morning session was devoted to revisiting the affects of the recent fiber outages that took place in December and January and dire warnings about the next time. I would be very surprised if anyone in the room was not aware of the consequences of relying on a single fiber line tenuously strung along the 101 corridor and the advantages of an alternate fiber line not owned by at&t. Maybe I’m jaded for talking about this stuff for years.

The afternoon events were a little more interesting. Sunne McPeake, President and CEO of the California Emerging Technology Fund (CETF) praised the region for its efforts and endurance. She made it clear that this will be rewarded by increased focus from her newly formed organization and from other state agencies. That was nice but her only concrete example was yet another report, a year away from completion that will justify this increased focus.

To be fair, some of the panel discussions had some merit, though the general message seemed to be that we need to work as a region to leverage our aggregate voice to get state and corporate bigwigs to hear us. That’s not a new thought and, I believe, this is already happening.

Maybe it was just me, but what I felt over all was that the theoretical discussion has been done over the last couple years and people who can actually make things happen are now doing so. This was the implicit message coming from the stage and from many people in the audience.

I am sure the networking that was happening in the interstices of the program was extremely valuable. And I am not saying we shouldn’t stage another Forum. But maybe the next one should have a different focus. Perhaps the next Forum should be called Future Forum. In this event the assumption will already be made that redundant and ubiquitous broadband (true broadband, not just 256k downstream) is, or will soon be, available to 90% of the region. The gritty details of how this is or will happen are being worked out by the politicians. investors and the engineers already.

If we can make that assumption then we can ask, what’s next? We already know the current demand for telemedicine, education, and commercial services. But what else will emerge or is already emerging? Where is the rest of the world headed and how can we collaborate with that world? What else can we offer the rest of the world to justify the attention and the money that are now focusing on getting the pipes built? This Forum would turn more of a focus on the collaboration between the engineers and artists, programmers and entrepreneurs, cultural visionaries and media producers the doctors and the systems administrators, the people that will fill those pipes. That would be fun.

Oh. And let’s use a building that doesn’t feel like a walk-in freezer. Maybe some of the speakers’ jokes will get laughs…

Broadband Forum III takes place tomorrow with the theme: “Rural Connections: Where Should We Fit in California’s Broadband Future?” While California and our region work to plot out our telecommunications future there is news that the FCC is finally going to take a serious look at broadband deployment throughout the country. Our whole perspective needs to be changed on this issue. We need to plan and demand as much as we can on the local and state level, but the Federal government has a huge role to play in setting policy and goals.

Part of the problem is the way the FCC defines broadband which is any connection of 256 KB and above. That’s a very low standard given the kind and amount of data traveling over the network. That was broadband 8 years ago, but surely not today. And what about tomorrow? The FCC also counts a single user in a zip code having broadband as if the entire zip code also has broadband. Even with these extremely low standards as measurement the U.S. now ranks 15th in the world in broadband deployment. This is shameful.

I realize that some of the other countries that are leaping ahead, such as Japan (where one third of the homes and businesses already have fiber connections, with 50 megabit service going for as little as $27/month), do not have some the the demographic and geographic challenges as we do. But for the wealthiest country in the world, and the one that invented the Internet, these challenges are not insurmountable with real leadership.