Cable

[This post is for Greg Scott, who caught me in the middle of a rant about RCN over at Twitter.]

For about 4 months now I have noticed the change in service : I will get to YouTube but the pages load as slow as molasses. Other times, if I'm doing a search in Google, the page will take forever to load.

Today though, it's pretty obvious what's happening : I can't get into Google from my home connection. No Google. No Gmail. No YouTube. So I pinged people on Twitter and asked if anybody was having problems getting into Google.

Erica G replied from Boston :

I'm on RCN in Boston and having trouble connecting to Yahoo and tinyurl this evening. # [...] And actually, thinking of it, for the past several weeks I haven't been able to load YouTube videos properly, either. #

Melanie Notkin, who is also in NYC, reported the same issue. Maria Niles is on Comcast California, but she has had similar choppy access to YouTube in the past several weeks, making her wonder if she's living in China.

Why is this so important to blog and not dismiss as a possible "blip" or outage? Well, if we take into consideration all the services Google provides, the search company may indeed be the largest and most trafficked network of websites in the world. YouTube alone would make Google the largest video broadcaster at least in the United States.

Are you going to tell me RCN just happened to degrade service to the biggest web network and web services provider in the United States? As Seinfeld would say ... I. Don't. Think. So.

UPDATE 23 MAY 2007:
Click here to listen to the podcast

Last saturday I facilitated a session at the Personal Democracy Unconference, which took place at Pace University's downtown NYC campus.

To those who don't know what means unconference, the concept is an interesting take on the old formula. People come in with a topic or set of topics they'd like to talk about. All the topics are placed written on a piece of paper and placed on the wall, next to an empty schedule grid. Once the organizers give it a go, facilitators place on their preferred time slot and/or negotiate with other facilitators the timing of their session.

The session I facilitated was titled, Reframing Net Neutrality as a Civil Rights Issues. I honestly wasn't expecting more than a few people but was amazed when about a dozen strong came to the corner where I was set up. Nancy Scola, Aldon Hines, Cheryl Contee, Ruby Sinreich, Ed Cone, Heather Holdridge and so many other amazing people came to discuss this important issue that has been amazingly bogged down by too much geek speak.

What's at the core of Net Neutrality? There's people who can put this better than me, but at the heart of the debate is the issue that internet providers should have the right to distinguish all sorts of bandwidth usage in order to better manage their resources and provide better service. The concern is that companies like YouTube may literally clog the internets and it's tubes.

Thanks to Culture Kitchen's ad lineup, I just learned something I really wanted to know but wouldn't have known to look for any other way, probably. (Keep watching those ads, y'all!)

If Ira Glass' --yes, that's the possessive with an apostrophe and NO extra S! -- new tv show is destined to be as good as his "This American Life" on radio, then I finally have educational justification to add the network airing it to my cable service. His NPR show on superpowers, with John Hodgman interviewing regular folks on the street about whether they'd choose flying or invisibility and why, was an instant classic. And the show about what three things we live and die for -- talk about power of story. . .Ira Glass doesn't tell stories the way anybody else does.

Episode 1 - "Reality Check"
Three stories of people who hatched plans in the hopes of making their dreams come true, but were snapped back to reality by unpleasant outcomes: an elementary school student tries to solve a common childhood problem; a rancher resuscitates a beloved pet, which later turns on him; people team to give an unknown rock band the greatest night of its life.

I remember the last bit, about the unknown rock band, from the radio show. There was a LOT more to it than this, about creativity and community, whether contrived spontaneity and ambush improv is fair (a la Borat?) and whether it's true, for the players OR the unsuspecting audience -- I'm still thinking hard about the cultural questions of meaning it raised for me.