Attending Blog Business Summit in Seattle

Just wanted to let everyone know that I’m traveling to the Blog Business Summit in Seattle tomorrow through Friday. It looks like it’s going to be really good. John Batelle is speaking, as well as Robert Scoble, Chris Pirillo, Matt Mullenweg and more. There are also attendees from some major players on the Internet, and in the blog world.

I plan to blog as much as I can from the conference. Check back the rest of this week for updates from Seattle! bk

New Orleans Wifi Alert: following the blog trail

There is some buzz building around the muni wifi project in New Orleans. Is there news here or not? Well, there may not anything breaking, but there is a certain amount of momentum building around the story.

We are excited to welcome Earthlink to New Orleans as a muni wifi provider. Over the next few months New Orleans will be transitioning from a wifi network erected by the city post-Katrina to a wifi network that Earthlink is currently deploying around New Orleans. This is great for New Orleans as it will offer two tiers of paid wifi service at below current market rates for DSL and cable. Additionally, Earthlink will continue to offer the free wifi that has been offered to everyone in the French Quarter and the CBD since Katrina. Earthlink says it will offer the free layer of wifi is temporarily while the city is rebuilding. Let’s hope that it follows through on this commitment as experts predict the rebuilding will last 5 to 10 years.

The free layer of wifi access is a critical component to the goodwill that Earthlink has received from us and many others. It would be a wonderful thing to offer free wifi (albeit equivalent to dialup speeds), subsidized by the paid services, to New Orleanians as long as the company can. This is a city with very low internet connectivity and large poor communities. I feel that the commitment to free access, as long as it lasts, is the reason that I will select Earthlink as my network connection. I am happy to subsidize internet access for people who can’t afford to get online, and I want Earthlink to know that the goodwill that I’ve extended them is based on the commitment to free access. Even though the free access has always been deemed temporary, according to Earthink, we have free access right now, and a socially responsible business model is something that a lot of people in this community can get behind. Keep it around as long as possible guys.

New Orleans Wifi Reading Primer (please add more links in the comments):

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