A subject I've been passionate about for some time is the issue of universal access to the Internet. By this I refer not just to the actual connection, but also the social infrastructure that allows for intelligent use.

Recently President-elect Barack Obama reiterated his committment to ensure that all Americans have high-speed access to the Internet, and while here in Canada our urban centres are well connected, many of our rural communities are not.

What has always frustrated me about this issue is the techno-centric approach that government policy and advocates have focused on. The idea that the Internet is just a series of tubes is something that is easy to laugh at, yet it accurately reflects the utilitarian culture we ascribe to it.

I always couple culture with technology in the same light as political economy, and what access strategies generally lack is a focus on education, literacy, and creating local capcity to maintain the infrastructure required to get communities connected.

There's a chicken and egg scenario with rural broadband access in which companies are unwilling to invest unless there is demand and yet the demand may not exist due to a lack of awareness.

Similarly I think there's a need to grow your own Internet, invest in local infrastructure, and create the demand from the inside out.

I cover a lot of subjects on my weekly CBC Radio column, and I'm always fascinated by which ones garner the greatest listener response. Something that is particularly interesting to me, and apparently a lot of listeners, is the upcoming explosion of wireless devices making use of the spectrum called White Space.

For those who missed it, or want to hear it again, you can download my CBC Radio Toronto appearance on Metro Morning with Andy Barrie.

And these are some of the articles that came out around the time of the announcement.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/05/fcc_approves_white_spaces/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7709775.stm
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/11/06/BUDO13VRLV.D...
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/05/technology/internet/05spectrum.html
http://www.efluxmedia.com/news_Google_Prepares_Its_Strategy_For_Attackin...

If you're a friend of mine on Facebook I have a video on my profile from Newsworld that was recorded in the spring on the same subject.

The 7th Annual Seneca Free Software and Open Source Symposium is coming up, and it is a great event worth checking out if you want to learn more about what really drives the Internet. Unfortunately I won't be attending this year, however I have given presentations in past years, including this improvised rant from last year:

I use a lot of Google's services, in part cause they tend to work really well, but also to try them out and share my thoughts with friends and colleagues. About a month ago Google announced their Chrome browser, which nicely coincided with my purchase of a new windoze desktop computer. So instead of installing any additional software on it, I just started using Chrome.

A month later I'm still using Chrome, but it is far from perfect. YouTube doesn't always work with it, and Google Docs is kind of buggy. The irony of course is that these are both Google owned applications, so they're supposed to work seamlessly with Chrome, and yet they don't. With that said, Gmail is super fast, and I tend to browse the web with dozens of open tabs at a time. In this regard Chrome is great.

However I have had to install Firefox to load certain pages and do certain things on the web due to Chrome's overall flakiness. I'm going to continue using Chrome, and hopefully it will evolve and improve like all Google products.

I do of course have to mention the whole controversy with Google's user agreement, although it too seems to be evolving, yet personally I'm a little acclimatized to less personal privacy and tend to engage the surveillance society in strategic and chosen situations.

As I started my day I tuned into to watch my friends on CBC News Morning and the lead story is about more massive cuts and layoffs at General Motors. While this is obviously an economic and labour story, Danielle Bochove at one point summed up the situation when she said, "It's become a story about speed."

GM had already made cuts and plans to respond to rising fuel prices, however they were clearly not enough. In fact GM found that the speed by which the economy is changing is far faster than expected, as is the speed by which consumers are buying smaller cars.

Unfortunately the Canadian Auto Workers had just concluded a new contract with GM, and these announcements effectively undermine it, showing the drastic measures GM is taking.

I work with organizations quite a bit smaller than GM, however my primary focus tends to be helping the client accelerate their corporate culture so as to be more responsive and capable of handling the pressures of our network age.

The ability for an organization to move quickly and respond to changing conditions is crucial, and yet there are many risks to speeding up, and I suspect increasingly we're going to see the wrong way far more often then not.

Take General Motors for example. While they definitely need to move faster in the direction of smaller and more fuel efficient vehicles, they also have a commitment to their workers and their families. So their ability to respond quickly and increase their overall speed as a company must also include working with their unions rather than negotiating in bad faith which they've done.

The old and obsolete school of seeing your workforce as hostile and expendable will only result in slowing down your ability to rapidly respond to changing conditions.

Successful organizations will unite the leadership structure with the combined intelligence and labour of all the diverse employees and customers/constituents that are part of the enterprise.

April seemed to fly by so quickly I was unable to post any of the reviews or thoughts I had over the last month. While I have been posting some items to my private network, I still have several posts I will be publishing on my blog in the days and weeks to come.

On Sundays I tend to spend my late afternoon and early evening going over my rss feeds and news sources in part to look at the week past but mostly to get a gauge on the week ahead.

The big news over the weekend of course is that Microsoft has backed off in their quest to buy Yahoo. The irony for me is that this past Thursday morning I did a series of interviews on CBC Radio in which I speculated that the merger was inevitable. I still believe this to be the case, however it seems the likelihood of my being right is getting lower and lower.

Check out this series of headlines from the New York Times:

• May 1st: Microsoft Outlines Its Yahoo Strategies
• May 2nd: Raising Yahoo Bid, Microsoft Steps up Talks
• May 2nd: Higher Offer by Microsoft Brings Yahoo to Table
• May 3rd: Microsoft Withdraws Bid for Yahoo
• May 4th: Will Microsoft Really Walk?

That's just the New York Times. The blogosphere as a whole is just exploding with posts, and even I am breaking a month long hiatus to post on the subject. Ironically a lot of the talk is on the death of Yahoo, and the degree to which their price will fall in the morning. This suggests to me that Microsoft may be doing all of this to drive the price lower so as to finally acquire Yahoo.

Yet who knows what will happen, and it goes to show that just when something appears to be certain it will quickly transform into something entirely different. Expect the unexpected!

One of the things I'm committed to doing in 2008 is organizing more public events. Last year, I ran a number of private interactive and intellectual discussions, which nurtured a desire to develop a larger and more public configuration for them.

To use a software development metaphor, my first public event was an alpha test, in that it was a raw and open exploration of a few concepts I've been developing or have seen in the wild and wanted to try myself.

Recently, there has been considerable innovation when it comes to event organizing, with the emergence of the BarCamp phenomenon as well as the Open Space movement. I am inspired by both, but still see room to incorporate my own sensibilities and experiences.

I've spent the last few years working in television and really studying the direction that industry is going, while also absorbing everything I can about production, both behind the scenes and on-camera. My approach to organizing events has been deeply impacted by this exploration of the television aesthetic and, conversely, my approach to television is heavily influenced by my love of live, interactive events.

The context to all this is, of course, the Internet, where I spend most of my time, and I'm always thinking how to bring the culture and properties of the Internet to live events and broadcast television. Often it has been the focus and/or subject matter. However, in the future, my intention is to run events in which the Internet is so ubiquitous as to no longer require explicit attention.

That is why I chose politics as the focus of my first event. I hoped to capture the zeitgeist of our time (with Obama inspiring a new generation) and tackle a subject that everyone should be able to relate to, one that lends itself to debate and disagreement.

For quite a while now I've been arguing that the traditional conference configuration is obsolete. Of course I'm not alone in asserting this. The incredibly popularity of the Camp phenomena represents a grassroots demonstration of why interactivity and spontaneity are becoming assumed qualities for any gathering big or small.

It's no surprise therefore to watch the fallout from the Mark Zuckerberg Q&A at the SXSW conference in Austin this past weekend. The session was hosted/moderated by journalist Sarah Lacy, and by all accounts it was a total disaster. Why? Sarah failed to either prepare for the panel itself, or be able to effectively engage the energy of the audience.

Add to this the power of twitter to give the audience a collective voice that can effectively organize and overwhelm the stage first with tweets than with heckling.

I've been organizing an event to be held at MaRS on March 18th, and one of our plans from the beginning was to have a big screen with an active twitter feed. This was meant as one of many means by which the audience can become an integral part of our event.

For a long time I've been working on ideas to expand the spontaneity and interactivity of live events, and this upcoming event at MaRS will serve as one of a series of beta tests I'll be doing to test out some of my concepts.

This past week I was overwhelmed with responses from a number of media stories. A couple of Blackberry business articles, a couple of Facebook expert articles, an article about a Hong Kong sex scandal, as well as some TV and radio appearances, first about the bust of a child porn ring, and then about the bust of a Quebec based Hacker cell.

In general my policy is to respond to anyone who takes the time to get in touch with me. Yet I've now had to revise this policy to only reply to people who show respect rather than outright hostility. Something about the audience that reads the National Post that brings all sorts of trolls out from under the bridge.

The CBC audience on the other hand is a pleasure to interact with. Even when they strongly disagree with me I find CBC viewers and listeners to be intelligent and engaging. One particularly pleasant email I received was from a "middle-aged mother" who will remain nameless, but I suspect represents a typical Canadian, from an average family. For the sake of argument, let's call her Louise.

Information overload is a growing problem that most of us face each and every day. Email, phone calls, voice mail, facebook notifications, and that doesn't include the endless flow of spam. However there's no reason all this constant communication can't be tamed and organized so that we don't feel the stress and anxiety associated with being under a waterfall of information.

While some may feel powerless in the face of technological change, resigned to the notion that all this email and information is necessary for their work or personal advancement, the reality is that the cost of our desire to always be connected is high and still growing.

For example the research firm Basex Inc examined the economic impact of information overload on the US economy, and their findings point to a steady growth from one year to the next. In 2005 the cost of information overload to the US economy was $588 billion dollars and in 2006 that figure grew to $650 billion.

Perhaps a more tangible way to articulate this cost is via a similar study conducted by Intel, which estimated that people on average lose 8 hours of every week to information overload.