NEVADA CITY Mar. 12, 2010 - We just got through with Superbowl Sunday and now here comes Superhype Sunday.
This little town is trying hard to put together a presentation that will convince Google, the biggest and most successful company in history, to pick Nevada City as the installation site of fiber optic Internet service. A rally downtown Sunday, March 14 at 1 p.m. will be video recorded along with a march of eager citizens up Broad Street, ending with music, dancing, food and drink at Miners Foundry. The event will be melted down and submitted to the big G.
The search engine giant announced in February that it is looking for communities in which to test its new super-high-speed Internet delivery system, Fiber for Communities. The plan is to test ultra-high speed broadband networks in one or more trial locations across the country. The networks will deliver speeds more than 100 times faster than current DSL and cable speeds, with 1 gigabit per second fiber-to-the-home connections.
Competition, as you might guess, is furious. One city has renamed itself. Topeka, Kansas is now Google, Kansas...at least until they lose the competition. Remember when the little town of Clark Texas got free satellite television service for all of its 125 residents by changing the name of the place to Dish, Texas?
But, not all the news is good. A spokesman for Spiral, a local Internet connection provider and spearhead of the attempt to attract Google, says the system would "use existing facilities." That's cable strung from above-ground poles. That was state of the art back when the telegraph was the cutting edge of communication. Today it'll work just fine even while looking ugly.
In other news, the Postal Service (sic) has announced that its business plan, formulated right after the Pony Express stopped running, isn't working any more. With the clear insight of a buggy whip manufacturer a few years after Henry Ford started making affordable automobiles, the Postal Service is raising the price of buggy whips.
It's also cutting a day or two of mail delivery. About all that will do is slightly delay the delivery of Netflix movies. Not to worry, soon you'll be able to download movies directly to that big new flat screen TV. They're working on it now.
Another dinosaur business model is phone book publishing. Who needs three Nevada County phone books? Who uses a phone book anymore? There are a bunch of web sites where you can find a phone number fast, and get it with a map and driving directions.
See you here in Google City at the renaming ceremony.
Editor's note: The Mountain Messenger, California's oldest weekly newspaper since 1853, is published on Thursdays from Downieville, California.
The Mountain Messenger can be purchased for half a buck at the National Hotel (sidewalk), Nevada City Post Office (sidewalk), Nevada City SPD (outside), Nevada City Express Mart (outside) and in front of Safeway, Brunswick area.
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