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Google Fiber rally planned for SLO

March 7, 2010

A rally to help make San Luis Obispo one of the test cities selected for the upcoming Google Fiber project is being held on Tuesday, March 16 at 5:30 p.m. in Mission Plaza.

Google, the search engine giant, plans to test ultra-high speed broadband networks in one or more locations across the country. Google executives promise that the new Google Fiber will deliver Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what is currently available.

Cities have until March 26 to submit their applications to Google.

Tuesday’s rally is being organized to increase awareness of Google Fiber and encourage people to help promote San Luis Obispo for consideration.

Scheduled speakers include Tim Williams of Digital West, Dave Garth of the San Luis Obispo Chamber of Commerce, and Amy Kardel of Clever Ducks. Wine and cheese will be served.


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I got to hand it to Google’s executives, they’ve gotten a ton of free publicity from this promotional endevour.


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The problem with Google is that they are becoming the monster that Microsoft never was… and — in my humble opinion — rather ruthlessly.


At least with Charter and AT&T, I am unaware of the strict censorship of web sites as imposed by google. And are you aware that one of the biggest secrets at Google is how they rank blogs and sites? It is based on their ‘business model’ that assigns ‘credibility’ values to each site. In case you haven’t figured it out… the ‘credibility’ score of a site is determined by them in what seems to me a rather arbitrary and capricious manner. Does google like the site or not?


Lastly, what part of the Cal Poly soul had to be sold to get involved with Google on this venture?


Roger Freberg


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I’m starting to think that Roger Freberg doesn’t like his pagerank. Now, when not enough folks know about your website to link to it, the obvious response is to blame Google and, oddly enough Cal Poly (?) instead of… I dunno, making your website better? EVERY major search engine uses a similar algorithm to assign a rank to each page it indexes. Without such an algorithm, there would simply be too much junk and spam to search through.


Page rank acctually seems like a relatively clever way of doing this. It looks at how many ‘good’ sites link to a given site. The more links there are, and the closer the links reflect the subject matter of the page, the better the page’s rank. It’s possible to game the system, sure. Google, BING, etc. play a cat-and-mouse game with spammers who attempt to make it look like their pages are trustworthy and worth looking at. It’s kindof like the political concept of ‘astroturfing’, or making a particular position appear to have grassroots support when it doesn’t.


Oh, that reminds me. Remember the spat over ‘Net Neutrality’? Charter and AT&T have vowed to slow their competitor’s data traffic down as it becomes technologically practical. They are fighting like hell to make this legal. Google on the other hand, fought for network neutrality. This makes me trust Google as a bandwidth provider far more than I trust Charter or AT&T.


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funny, young mussleman, my site and blog are merely for vanity… and to share recipes with far flung family members. ;) You accept google at their word… ah, to be young.


As for the googly boys and girls, I don’t blame google, per se, except for the fact that they continue to black listed my site on and off ( until yesterday)… it would happen just after I would criticize Cal Poly’s administration…so much for free speech on the net. Personally, I like it when google acts badly, except when they whacked my wife and daughters sites as well…. which took a bit of work to get them off that particular practice.


You can worship at the alter of google if you wish, but I feel a lot better with a crowded and more competitive field… it keeps everyone honest.


So, for now, BING and Yahoo and anyone else suits me just fine.


Roger Freberg


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Quite frankly, I don’t believe you when you say that your pagerank drops whenever you criticize Cal Poly. Even if you are observing a drop in Google’s ranking for your own site, you are looking at an entirely too small sample size to say anything about Google biasing search results in favor of Cal Poly. Even if I did believe you, I’d blame Cal Poly’s PR department long before I’d blame Google themselves. Google simply has nothing to gain and everything to loose by doing something like that, where as Cal Poly’s PR folks would have everything to gain and nothing to loose for trying to game the search rankings.


However, I have to very much agree with you on the subject of choice and competition. This is why I dislike monopolies and vendor lockin (like Microsoft has a long history of doing). Having Google as a provider of high speed Internet means that there’s another competitor in the local broadband market, which means higher speeds and lower prices. How is that bad?


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It would be ‘nice’ to have options other than Charter or At&t.

Also an opportunity to try-out all the dark fiber buried around here.


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