About a month ago I changed cell phone providers to Verizon. As part of my new package I purchased Verizon\’s \”BroadbandAccess\” service (also called EV-DO – evolution-data optimized). EVDO is currently the country\’s fastest 3G data service, providing access at 400-700 kbps with bursts up to 2.0Mbps. Now that I am experiencing true anywhere anytime broadband access, I have some questions about the long term viability of city WiFi projects. Both Philadelphia and San Francisco have proposed free or low cost WiFi networks of roughly the same or slower speeds than EVDO. Why invest in a WiFi infrastructure that requires many small, overlapping nodes with limited geographic range, that are susceptible to interference, and presumably have higher maintenance costs, when mobile phone companies already provide comparable wireless data services without the new infrastructure costs? I assume it has something to do with the cost of access and the perceived ubiquitous availability of WiFi devices. However, the cost of the card required for EVDO access was less than $30 and Dell and Lenovo/IBM both plan to integrate EVDO wireless access into future laptop models, much like WiFi and bluetooth. As the cost of 3G access comes down and as speeds go up it seems likely that cell phone networks will replace the current dominance of WiFi. Will this lead to another chapter of the digital divide? With those who can afford it using mobile phone networks, while those who cannot being relished to a slower, outdated, less reliable WiFi infrastructure?

Phil Howard at the University of Washington just released his book on the role of ICTs in political campaigning. New Media Campaigns and the Managed Citizen is a solid empirical study, it is one of the few thorough studies out there and will become a must read for anyone studying political communication. I have included the formal book description and contents below:

\”The political campaign is one of the most important organizations in a democracy, and whether issue- or candidate-specific, it is one of the least understood organizations in contemporary political life. This book is a critical assessment of the role that information technologies have come to play in contemporary campaigns. With evidence from ethnographic immersion, survey data, and social network analysis, Philip Howard examines the evolving act of political campaigning and the changing organization of political campaigns over the last five election cycles, from 1996 to 2004. Over this time, both grassroots and elite political campaigns have gone online, built multimedia strategies, and constructed complex relational databases. The contemporary political campaign adopts digital technologies that improve reach and fund-raising and at the same time adapts its organizational behavior. The new system of producing political culture has immense implications for the meaning of citizenship and the basis of representation.\”

CONTENTS
Introduction: the hypermedia campaign; 1. Political communication and information technology; 2. Producing the hypermedia campaign; 3. Learning politics from the hypermedia campaign; 4. Organizational communication in the hypermedia campaign; 5. Managed citizenship and information technology; Appendix: Method notes on studying information technology and political communication.

There was an article in yesterday’s Inman News (a real estate news service) on the growth of Internet based neighborhood search services. It focused on the problems that some Web services have in defining the boundaries of neighborhoods. It also provided an interesting statistic, that 15 percent of all searches on the Web are local (unspecified source). Unfortunately there was an error in my quote, \”localization\” should of course be \”glocalization\”. Back in 1999 Barry Wellman and I did a user study for onemain.com (now Earthlink). We found huge demand for local content, but users were completely unable to find local content at the time. It seems that this need is now partly being met. It is interesting that almost every site I have seen focuses on the \”outsiders\” view, that is what content an outsider would like to know about a neighborhood. Few if any provide content from the perspective of what an \”insider\” might want to know. This includes the ability to communicate with other local residents. Another finding from the 1999 Onemain study, low interest in local syncronous chat forums – based on my experience with Netvill, E-neighbors and i-neighbors.org, this is something I think remains true today. Asynchronous email lists are the way to go.