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photo in Schmap LA

Emma Williams contacted me a few weeks ago about including one of my photos of Echo Park in this year’s Schmap guide to Los Angeles. It’s not one of my best photos, by far, but I am honored it was included. In July 2008, during my summer biking autopia, I snapped this photo as the LA Critical Mass finished up in Echo Park.

Learn more about Schmaps.

Wi-Fi on local buses

Triangle Transit is trying out a new program to offer passengers wireless internet access while riding a select few of the regional bus system’s routes.

Triangle Transit, in partnership with Verizon Wireless and RCS Wireless Technology, will be offering FREE Wi-Fi access on select vehicles (beginning Monday, Nov. 30th) for the next 60 days. The free Wi-Fi access will be available on select trips of the 105 route, as well as the 500/550 and 600/650 Express routes.  Please visit http://triangletransit.org/wi-fi to view a list of the select trips.

None of the routes listed by Triangle Transit are my usual routes, so I won’t be able to test out the wi-fi. Once the trial is live It’s live now, so if anyone can share their thoughts on it, please leave a comment.

nicomedia Newsletter #1

Clients and friends of nicomedia,

As many of you know, I started the website and digital media design company nicomedia to specialize in cultivating an internet presence for small businesses, non-profit organizations, and individuals. I work with a range of clients, from scholars and artists to doctors and lobbyists. In keeping with both my philosophy of making information as accessible as possible and with the transformative power of the Internet, this newsletter series is designed to empower you to manage your online presence as effectively as you can.

You have a new or newly refreshed website. How do you get people to look at it?

In this inaugural issue, I suggest four ways that you can attract new viewers to your website. More traffic to your site often leads to new donors for your non-profit, new customers for your store, or new clients for your business.

Search Engines

Chances are, most of the visitors to your website come from a search engine like Google, Yahoo, or Bing. Making sure that search engines know about your website and can read your website, then, is critically important to the success of your website. Designing a site so that search engines can easily access the keywords they need to connect the right people with the right website is a process called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). All websites that I design (or redesign) employ the best practices SEO design. Once the site is up and running, the primary tool we have for further leveraging useful information from the site is Google Analytics.

Google Analytics http://www.google.com/analytics/ is code, which you can embed in a website, that helps us track how the website is being used. Who links to your site? When someone lands on your site from Google, what keywords were they searching? How many people look at your site per day, per month, per year? All of these questions and more can be answered through Google Analytics. If I designed or redesigned your website, then Google Analytics is already installed. I use this to track how your site is being used and how to better optimize it. If you would like to receive a free, automatically-generated monthly report on your website’s traffic, just send me an email.

Social Networking

Social Networking can do more than keep you up-to-date with your friends. Premised on the idea that personal connections and advice matter as much as (if not more than) the vetted authority of a high Google ranking, social networking sites are the fastest growing segments of the Internet today. A recent WIRED magazine article noted that “over the past year, Facebook has… become one of the most popular online destinations. More than 200 million people—about one-fifth of all Internet users—have Facebook accounts.” LinkedIn, the most popular professional networking site claims “more than 45 million users representing 150 industries around the world.”

Because of their popularity, don’t underestimate their power to drive new traffic to your website. It is both simple and free to create accounts with Facebook and LinkedIn. As each website walks you through the process of creating your profile, be sure to add the url of your website in the appropriate place. It will be obvious.

Both Facebook and LinkedIn walk you through the process of creating your profile, but if you run into problems or have questions along the way, give me a call. I am happy to guide you through.

Once you create your profiles, be sure to add me as a Friend (Facebook) or add me to your Network (LinkedIn).

Business Directories

Ever wonder how businesses show up in Google Maps? You can make sure that your business shows up by adding yourself to Google’s Local Business Center. Visit http://www.google.com/local/add and
follow the instructions on the site to make sure that the address and contact information for your business is correct. Now you’ll show up when someone’s searching within Google Maps using a keyword related to your business.

Email Signature

Perhaps the simplest thing you can do (and you can do it right now) is make sure that your email signature has all of the contact information a future client, customer, or donor would need to contact you. If you add the url of your website to the bottom of your email signature, most email programs will automatically recognize the url as a hyperlink. And there you go, it’s that much easier for recipients of your emails to check out your website.

stolen goods and the power of the internet

Like the good folks over at the Independent, I too have recently been reading Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody, a collection of arguments and vignettes on the power of the Internet. The salient point that the Indy picked up on is how, by abolishing the high costs of printing, publishing, and distributing information, the Internet is forcing The Newspaper to reassess its traditional role as the weekly standard for a community.

A few weeks ago, I ran into Lenore Ramm of Eclectic Glob of Tangential Verbosity at the DPAC Blogger Bash. She told me of a friend who’s bike had been stolen and how, in an effort to retrieve the bike, the friend created a website. While stories of using blogs and monitoring eBay and Craigslist to recover stolen goods have become almost commonplace, take a second to think about what this means for just how pervasive the Internet has become to our conception of community.

Just two examples to focus my point:

• Neighborhood listservs are now among the most reliable sources of hyperlocal news. Warnings about loose dogs on the streets, plants to give away, yard sales announced, café music benefit show funds raised, even homes sold — no topic is off-topic as long as it happens in the neighborhood. When friends ask about finding housing in my neighborhood, I refer them to the listserv and encourage them to join.
• There are also a growing number of cities with local blogs that cover on-the-ground civic reporting with as much reliability and insight as the municipal papers. Bull City Rising and Church Hill People’s News (Richmond, VA) come to mind.

And while there have always been start-up attempts at taking a cut from the local publishing market, Shirky’s point is that never has it been so easy to obtain the means of publication. Until the advent of the Internet, publishing an independent organ for the sole purpose of recovering a $700 bicycle just would not have been possible.

So, on March 21st, a bike was stolen in Old West Durham, and now the whole world can know about it. Any computer attached to the Internet can browse to http://findmybicycle.blogspot.com/, learn how to spot the features that make the victim’s bike unique, and get in touch with the owner. “I’m hoping that we demonstrate the power of social media!,” says the website’s creator.

So world, although it may add some perverse pleasure to your life to know that bike thieves spend eternity in a special circle of hell for their miscreant deeds, the owner of a silver Trek 7500 FX will find more pleasure if she gets her bike back. Even more still if a community helps her find it.

Time Warner Cable getting greedy

A colleague first made me aware of Time Warner Cable’s move to sneak bandwidth caps into their existing markets. Now the news seems to be exploding in the blogosphere.

I received this from FreePress.net just yesterday.

We Want More Internet, Not Less
Just as Americans are suffering economically, Time Warner Cable is trying to squeeze us even further, forcing customers to pay a steep Internet penalty for exceeding an absurdly low monthly limit. This is ridiculous. Instead of meeting growing broadband demand, Time Warner Cable is gouging Internet users.

And when I posted the issue to my Facebook profile, a free-marketeer friend had the following to say:

While we are at it, we should insist on air traffic neutrality where you pay one price to fly all you want. Or ocean neutrality where you pay one price to fish all you want. Movie neutrality where one price allows you to watch all the movies you want (I guess Netflix already does this despite not having to.)

Phillip – don’t you think that people who hog bandwidth should pay more for reducing the bandwidth available to other net surfers. Do you think it’s unfair that cell phone companies charge differently for different times of the day so as to reduce network congestion? Or that charge me by the number of pages loaded?

Of course there is the small matter of monopoly providers of broadband access. But with competition I would expect that people would pay for the bandwidth they value and reduce the tragedy of the commons that occurs when I try to watch Netflix Watch it Now movies.

Right now, since I live in an area without real competition, I’m happy to raise awareness of TWC’s doings by any means available. I’ll lobby Congress if Congress is the mechanism by which I can stop TWC from switching their pricing mechanism midstream.

Should network providers charge more from individuals or businesses who use more bandwidth? Sure. But I should also have realistic options from my Internet Service Provider about which bandwidth cap I can sign up for. Right now, Time Warner Cable offers unlimited megabytes of downloaded data, within a context of limited download speeds. And that seems reasonable.

Think of it as if the Water Department offered residences unlimited use of water, through a pipe of predetermined width. That is, you could use each month as much water as you want. More precisely, you could use as much water will fit through a residential-sized pipe per month. The difference between business-class and residential-class service would be the diameter of the pipe.

For the most part, ISPs like TWC  have determined their monthly charges in this way. They allow unlimited use of the service, piped into your home at a predetermined speed. That is, they use speed caps, not cumulative caps.

Surely I’m not suggesting that the Water Department shouldn’t charge my neighbor more than me when he waters his entire property, driveway included, every week. That’s right, I’m not suggesting that at all. Water is a precious limited resource. YouTube isn’t.

A better analogy might be cable television. For years, the model for cable television pricing has been based on the number of channels to which one wants to subscribe. Once I sign up for basic, premium, deluxe, or the super-over-the-top-all-movies package, I can watch as much TV as I want. Whether I leave a television turned on 24/7 or tune in for just the nightly Daily Show, the cable company isn’t going to charge me any more or less.

Cable TV providers have somehow avoided the “tragedy of the commons.” Never in my life has the television program I’ve been watching been “slow” because all my neighbors also have their televisions turned on.

So why isn’t TWC keeping cable Internet priced like cable TV? Because people are dropping their cable TV. TWC’s move to implement download caps is a typically monopolistic response to the growing popularity of Netflix on-demand, Roku boxes, Apple TV and other ways of streaming the TV you want to watch into your home, without signing up for TWC’s cable television service. And if they can set their bandwidth caps low enough, they’ll find a wellspring of new revenue. Business Insider reports that

…[i]n Beaumont, [TWC] had been testing caps of 40 gigabytes per month. That’s less than it sounds, especially as companies like Apple (AAPL) and Netflix (NFLX) increasingly offer hi-def movie services. (A hi-def movie can take up about 4 gigabytes.)

We think Comcast’s (CMCSA) caps are more reasonable — about 250 gigabytes per month. But Comcast is mostly trying to manage its network and weed out pirates. Time Warner Cable seems to be looking for new revenue growth areas as subscriber growth slows.

I think my friend is right on; TWC wouldn’t be able to get away with this if there were real competition. AT&T’s new service has not yet reached into my part of town, but as soon as it does, I’ll consider switching. But I’m also not going to wait (nor encourage) competition from another big business.

As for the suggestion that we ought to push for ocean neutrality while we’re at it… First, as a vegan, I probably don’t have a lot to say about this. But as far as I understand an individual’s fishing license, you can fish as much as you want with your license. If I could get away from work every day and go fishing, the state isn’t going to charge me any more than my friend who can fish only on weekends. Pricing based on volume comes into play only for commerical fishing, which just isn’t a relevant analog to home Internet service.

Like Woodward and Armstrong say about Justice William Douglas’ unabashed liberalism, I am “for individuals over government, government over big business, and the environment over all else.”  In this case, by contacting members of Congress through freepress.net, I’m OK with using the government to protect the individual and stick it to the corporation.