Municipal Wi-Fi Initiatives and RSS & Mashup mp3
Now Playing: John Mayer/Alicia Keyes mashup mp3
Topic: Web 2.0
Citywide broadband infrastructure projects have been in the news for some time, perhaps since Philly started an initiative and was almost shut down by Verizon's protest.
Despite the legal wrangling in PA (Verizon waived its right of first refusal, part of a new law that says cities must submit a written request to the local telcos before starting a municipal wi-fi initiative), several other cities including San Fran & Google, are exploring the idea.
I briefly talked to my old EDC boss (now the
assistant city manager in KC) about the prospects of that city starting a wi-fi initiative. Too political, he said, remember the telcos are big supporters of local and city government, you'd need to have real guts (or a lot a political capital in reserve) to pull it off. Well the idea itself must be getting traction or be a hot area for future growth because the Yankee Group just started a
Municipal Broadband Market Research and Advisory Service.
Check out C|Net's
big picture view of this story and the web of related stories. Reminds me a lot of
tag clouds, ala
Flickr,
Technorati, or
Del.icio.us, but I haven't seen it applied to news stories before (is Google listening to this, visually representing its Google News). Kudos to
LivePlasma for powering this, it's a cool (and probably a useful) tool that should be integrated into academic research databases to find related information or sources.
Soon after
Apple introduced Podcasts to iTunes, I stumbled upon this
mp3 mashup RSS feed via Del.icio.us. The first song that I heard was this
John Mayer/Alicia Keyes mashup and I really liked it (I put it on repeat as I often do with new songs). That was my first experience with the power of RSS, finding great content (music in this case) from a completely unexpected source, pushed right down to iTunes for me.
Though I loved the song I didn't understand the podcast side of iTunes well enough to know that the mp3 remained on my system. I thought it had been inadvertenly deleted or replaced when the feed refreshed with newer mp3 files. I was pleasantly surprised to find it again tonight and it sounds as good as it did when I first heard it back in June--
John Mayer (Daughters) and Alicia Keys (If I Ain't Got You) mashup mp3 compliments of
MashupTown.com
Posted by cph19
at 1:52 AM EDT
Updated: Saturday, 15 October 2005 1:58 AM EDT