The report says broadband has become essential for U.S. Jobs, economic growth, global competitiveness, and democratic engagement. The FCC said many Americans are poor or live in rural areas that will remain unserved without reform of the universal service program and other changes to U.S. broadband policy that spur investment in broadband networks by lowering the cost of deployment.

The report concludes that the goal of universal availability – deployment to all Americans – is not being met in a timely way, and proposes to address key recommendations from the FCC’s National Broadband Plan to connect all Americans as quickly as possible, including:

*Reforming the FCC’s universal service programs to support broadband through public-private partnerships;

*Unleashing spectrum for mobile broadband;

*Reducing barriers to infrastructure investment, including delays in access to poles and rights-of-way;

*Collecting better broadband data to assist policymakers and consumers.

The report also updates its definition of broadband from 200 kilobits per second downstream, a standard set over a decade ago when web pages were largely text-based, to 4 megabits per second (Mbps) downstream and 1 Mbps upstream.

“There is no question that this reduced award is still severe, even harsh,” she wrote in her decision. “It not only compensates the plaintiffs for the relatively minor harm that Tenenbaum caused them; it sends a strong message that those who exploit peer-to-peer networks to unlawfully download and distribute copyrighted works run the risk of incurring substantial damages awards.”

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Russian President Dmitry Medvedevtweeted his first thoughts yesterday in the type of greeting message often seen by people starting out on Twitter:

Hello everyone! I’m on Twitter, and this is my first tweet.

Subsequent English-language tweets have been somewhat bland and pretty safe (eg, “Russia will continue to do its best to remain a predictable business partner for everyone”), hopefully reflecting the tweeter’s getting a sense of using the tool.

“The tweeter” means the editorial team behind the two accounts, certainly not the Russian president himself. That’s not unlike the Twitter account of US president Barack Obama: he’s not the tweeter either.

It’s interesting to note who the Russian president’s accounts are following -  the English-language account follows just three others at the moment: Barack Obama, The White House and the Kremlin Russian-language account. And nice to see the Americans reciprocating the follow as well as re-tweeting Medvedev’s first tweet. The new super-power diplomacy!

Medvedev is the most high-profile world leader using Twitter recently, joining over a dozen other heads of state on the micro-blogging social network including erstwhile political peers like Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.

One world leader on Twitter who has just become not a world leader is Kevin Rudd, the now-ex prime minister of Australia from today, who joined Twitter in 2008. I wonder what he’ll do with the name of his Twitter handle: ‘kevinruddpm.’

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Some of the other ideas include: Among the ideas — simple, direct, and right on-point: save money by eliminating unnecessary on-hold music; cut back on washing of SF-government cars; use 311 to boost revenue through over-the-phone credit card purchase of ID cards, parking cards and ticket payments, muni visitor passports, maps and merchandise — even marriage licenses!: and auction off city-owned (and unwanted) furniture, vehicles, computers etc.

This is a great government example of innovation. My state of Massachusetts supplied another recently. It started with the White House move to put public data available. So Massachusetts wanted to be one of the first states to have an open data site.  Then they ran open competitions for who could develop the best iPhone apps to creatively use the open data such as bus schedules.  I really like these creative ways to support innovation in a budget constrained environment by crowd sourcing it.

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Despite this, many experts say that the potential of the Internet has just been barely tapped. As day goes by, more and more ideas are hitting the Internet. This trend gives users more and more options in the way that they go about their lives.

Open Data Apps for Government Usage

The implementation of open data applications in the world’s governments may be the most ambitious goal yet. In many cases, governments take care of everything that their citizens will need. Most of the time, citizens are in the background of anything that their governments are doing. This means that they are not really informed about the details of their government’s works and that they are made to take their government’s word for everything.

The use of open data apps by governments aims to address all of these. It aims to make citizens informed and empower them to participate in the way that they run their country. Open Data is not really new but it has been often overlooked since its entire impact is not really felt strongly yet. Many analysts say that we are only in the dawn of the open data app era.

Open Data Apps are apps specifically made for the public that enables them to have access to public info kept by their governments. Some of these apps deliver information about public finances, taxes, new city projects, and many more.

“Open data apps are becoming ever-more effective, but insofar as they have actually had a dramatic ‘effect’ on the systems that most influence our lives, we still have a long way to go,” remarks Jake Brewer, Sunlight Foundation’s engagement director.

Usefulness of Open Data Apps in Public Governance

As has been mentioned, the purpose of these open data apps is to make the public informed and aware of the things that are constantly happening around them. Apps that would help them get updated on how their local government is managing their funds, where their tax money goes and others are important.

Projects like the aptly-named Apps for Democracy have recently begun to gain popularity. Media attention following these apps are said to be just the beginning of a more informed and open worldwide community.

The Open Data Apps basically bring a lot of good to the public. An immediate effect of the “open government” is it makes governments transparent and accountable. It is a fact that most people want their governments to be always accountable and transparent. They want to make sure that everything is being addressed and that no problems are left unsolved. Most people air their grievances to their governments but most of the time to no avail.

Open Data Apps will enable the public to be in the know about the progress their governments are making. This will also make it easier for them to report their problems, submit suggestions and help their governments in addressing the issues of their communities.

Issues with Open Data Implementation

A lot more issues needs to be addressed to be able to make significant progress towards achieving the “open government.” One of these is the improvement of overall application access. Most apps made by developers are targeted for specific brand users alone. For example, most apps are intended and can be used by iPhone users. This brings us to the fact that not everyone in the United States or any other country is using an iPhone. Many people have zero access to these applications.

The SeeClickFix app has been wildly successful but some other open data apps do not reach their full potential as their designers envisioned. Another pressing problem is the fact that developing these apps costs a lot and small web developers simply cannot shoulder everything. This is why some apps have to do with mediocre software, far from the ones that their developers have envisioned.

Nowhere to go but up

Despite all these pressing problems, one cannot deny the fact that Open Data Apps are already here. They have arrived and are continuously making progress in making governance more public. Blueprint Research and Design president Lucy Bernholz says that the best apps are those that are built not only by a team of developers but also with the help of community users themselves. She adds that aside from airing public grievances, it is also important that the government have access to what its citizens need solved.

The significant progress of Open Data Apps will surely make governance easier and make lives better. Web developers should work hand-in-hand with the public and the government itself to make that the “open government” comes to fruition. Governments should open up to the idea and work it out with developers so that their citizens would be informed and always in-the-know of everything that is happening to their communities.

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An e-health records infrastructure and the tax system are supposed to be the two major focuses of this push, according to Fran Foo.

More specifically, she then reported, “Federal government chief information officer Ann Steward said most of the budget funds would be spent on applications development, as more than 15 agencies benefited.”  And storage and security are going to be something that everyone involved will keep in mind.

It should be interesting to see what results from this push.  So long as Australia’s policies and its size don’t prevent any of its solutions from being deployed elsewhere – and so long as its solutions aren’t extraordinarily expensive – this IT experiment should prove to be a learning experience.

Keep an eye out for employment opportunities if you live in Australia (or would be happy to move there), too, since many people may be hired as a result of all this excitement.

What is interesting in the O’Reilly article this morning was the discussion around security clearances for the military and for contractors. The security clearance routine is almost a rite of passage, if you want to work in government or the military as anything you have to be deemed trustworthy by a series of investigations. The more secret squirrel information you are going to see, the higher the clearance level, and the deeper the investigation into your past, your activities, and your beliefs. Anyone who as sat through the “lifestyles” polygraph test can attest to some very interesting questions that are designed to elicit a reaction from the person taking the polygraph. It was one of my more unique experiences that I can never talk about.

What was very cool about my military experience is that I was literally living with anywhere from 7 to 175 of my closest newest friends depending on where I was and what team I was with. The military attempts to foster a deep sense of loyalty to not just the people you will fight and die alongside, but a sense of trust throughout the entire community from your immediate supervisor all the way through the President. But it was all based on “trust but verify”. Your clearance was the “verify” part of the process.

The military experience is one with a very small town feeling, we all know our neighbors, we all live in a fish barrel, and if you have a clearance, in many ways you are living in a fishbowl. Everyone knows everything about you that you have publicly and in many cases privately stated. It is the old TV Show “Cheers, where everyone knows your name”. Cheers monetized alcoholism, Facebook wants to monetize conformity into a social norm based on a person’s stated friends, likes, and interests. Either way there is a monitization component to the process that might offend folks, and indeed does raise worries about what web sites are doing and how people are tracked across the internet.

Facebook is offering a “panopticon” into your life, the more you share the more you are part of the “group”. This is the same kind of social pressure to conform that happens in high school or in other groups where norms can be enforced publicly. Military people, especially military people with high level clearances will get this concept immediately. Kids in High School will get this immediately, the pressure to conform and be like anyone or everyone else is what Facebook is offering, under the gentle guidance of having what you do so immediately public that deviation from the societal norm could result in losing a job, or a clearance, or friends.

The panopticon can be many things, but as we move deeper into social networking we are going to learn things about each other that will homogenize us into the populations that we deal with on a daily basis. Those that fall outside the norm behaviorally or socially within that small group of people will quickly be drummed out of the group. Internet consumers already have a long experience with this by combating trolls from the early days of the internet. Facebook simply provides us a one stop shop, are they really all that they seem; are they socially and culturally going to fit into the culture/society of the work place? Are they who they state they are?

Clearances aside, we have plunged head first into this world without a safety net, without guidelines, and without any recourse under law that is firmly established to protect people or keep companies from building the “walled garden” panopticon that social networking can represent. When the CEO of the major social network states they do not believe in privacy, that organization will implement the fishbowl process that we see with government and security clearances. We all know everything about each other, and we know how startlingly similar we really are, regardless of where we are in the world.

The thing we need to remember, and the thing that we seem to continually forget is that anything we post on the internet is public. If we are going to understand this we need to start hammering this message home as much as we hammered home the message “don’t click on that attachment in email”. While education will not solve all problems, there are still people who click on those enticing email attachments, it is at least a start. The public debate we are having now is good, but it is time to start reminding people that what they post is public, open to public interpretation, and societal pressures to conform to societies determination of what is right and appropriate behavior. We see this in military communities around the world, including those with security clearances. This small town fishbowl is starting to be incorporated into everyday lives, how we live, what we do, where we go, what movies we watch, what music we listen to, and even to what we had for dinner.

The good thing about the internet is you can find a support group for just about anything, the question is how much do you want to post about yourself, and how much do you want people to really know about you?

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From the Library of Congress blog… How Tweet It Is! Library Acquires Entire Twitter Archive… “Every public tweet, ever, since Twitter’s inception in March 2006, will be archived digitally at the Library of Congress. That’s a LOT of tweets, by the way: Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets every day, with the total numbering in the billions… Expect to see an emphasis on the scholarly and research implications of the acquisition.” If interested, here’s the official Tweet from the Library of Congress announcing this!Of interest, they (The Library of C) also operate the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program www.digitalpreservation.gov, which is pursuing a national strategy to collect, preserve and make available significant digital content, especially information that is created in digital form only, for current and future generations.

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Get ready, everyone, for four weeks’ of intense message-pushing, stunts, posters (Photoshopped or not), door-knocking, leaflets, TV debates, party election broadcasts (TV ads by any other name), and more.

What about digital forms of communication? Where will these tools fit within the political communication toolset?

It’s easy to see where the traditional web and other well-established methods of communication will fit. Websites have been a fixture of elections for the past decade and this one will be different only in how the web today offers politicians, their parties, the mainstream media and anyone else with a message opportunities to make use of the more interactive formats that developments in technology enable.

Opportunities to really engage with people.

And social media – where does that fit into the grand scheme of things?

Not very far at all in connecting with the voters, according to a study by Ovum as reported in PaidContentUK.

Despite much chatter that the UK’s upcoming May poll could be “the first social media election”, such a thing is looking unlikely.

Analyst group Ovum says parties have only gone as far as using social web tools “aimed primarily at communication and collaboration within the established caste of politicians, journalists, and interest groups”. That’s not very inclusive.

“The parties acknowledge that social media can be used to mobilise activists, engage new audiences, or harvest a long tail of donators,” says Ovum senior analyst Vuk Trifkovic. “However, unless the parties have a surprise up their sleeve, we do not believe that social media will play an integral part of the campaign efforts in the forthcoming elections.”

The flip side to this view is in a survey by PR firm Fishburn Hedges which, PR Week reports, shows that the next Parliament could see a huge number of social media-savvy MPs, many Generation Y types, sitting in the chamber tweeting and Facebooking during PM’s Question Time.

Fishburn Hedges questioned more than 100 candidates likely to win or retain their seats at the next general election.

The agency found that Facebook already plays a central role in much of this generation’s campaigning. The vast majority (83 per cent) of candidates are using Facebook in their campaigns, while 50 per cent use Twitter in the same way. Significantly, a massive 84 per cent also intend to use social networking tools such as Facebook, Twitter and blogs to communicate with their constituents if they are elected to the House of Commons.

Some 82 per cent of candidates also said that once an MP they would treat communications from constituents received through social media such as Twitter and Facebook with the same priority as those received by letter or email.

Oh the disruption! Maybe this is exactly what British politics needs: new thinking, new behaviours, new ways of engaging with people. This is the precise act of bringing new behaviours and expectations into the workplace that I hear about and discuss with communicators in organizations.

Whatever politicians and others welded toThe Establishment do with social media, or not as the case may be, believe one thing – this general election will be marked out by how ordinary people use social media to propel discussion, critique election campaigns, challenge politicians, put forward alternative points of view, and generally voice their opinions using informal tools and channels to connect and engage directly with others and influence opinion.

If any politician thinks he or she has control over any political message, he or she will think again when you read the stream of real-time comment on Twitter and see that cameraphone video of your “spontaneous” soapbox speech outside the Town Hall up on YouTube within ten minutes.

Maybe that’s the milestone we’ll see from this election in 2010 – the year that social media did have an impact on the outcome of the election campaign.

And that the impact will have come directly from the people. Powerful stuff.

[Later] I was reflecting on what I’ve written in this post and thinking about the last general election in 2005 when “social media” wasn’t a term used much and, when it was, it really meant blogging.

So what role did I think social media would play in the general election of 2005?

[…] One of the very interesting things to see is the role bloggers may play in the election campaign.

Will we see blogger commentary and opinion reflecting every political point of view imaginable? Will we see the rise of political blog commentary reach the relative influencing levels such as we saw in the US presidential election last year? Will we see those politicians who blog use their blogs as innovative campaign communication channels?

In short, will we see blogging become a ‘mainstream’ communication channel within the overall media space?

Yes, I believe we will see all these things.

Hmm, an early adopter’s wishful thinking in 2005.

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The Spectrum Dashboard allows users to review how spectrum bands are allocated and used and also allows users to identify license holders in specific areas.

The beta version provides information covering frequencies between 225 MHz and 3.7 GHz – the range of spectrum usable for mobile broadband.

The Spectrum Dashboard features enhanced search, mapping and data download capabilities in the following services in that range: 700 MHz Band; Advanced Wireless Service (AWS); Broadband Personal Communications Service (PCS); Broadband Radio Service (BRS); Educational Broadband Service (EBS); Cellular; 2.3 GHz Wireless Communications Service (WCS); Full Power TV Broadcast; and Mobile Satellite Services (MSS).

The goal of the Spectrum Dashboard is to increase understanding into how radio spectrum is being used in the United States. It allows users to browse, review and analyze spectrum data as it relates to broadband deployment, both at the local and national levels.