Does "Yes We Can!"  apply to broadband for all?

President Barack Obama campaigned on widening broadband access to underserved and rural areas; and there now is talk about including this effort in the economic stimulus package.

There is an interesting post in today's Bits blog in the New York Times technology section about that very topic.

There's an easy way to embed video into your site if you're using Site Builder.   Site Builder now allows for video to be placed in your site in the same way as JPEG images.  Files need to be in either Windows Media Video (.wmv) format or Flash Video (.flv) formats.

As with JPEG images, the file must be on your hard drive.

The video file is uploaded to your site’s File Library and the 4-digit code that the File Library supplies for that file can then placed wherever you want the video (or JPEG) file to appear. A player bar with user controls is automatically generated.

The 4-H Child Safety Online Training site uses video in this way.

With this method, the video does not begin playing automatically, visitors to your site use the player bar to start the video. As I've mentioned before when talking about broadband issues - it's a good idea to mention the size of the video file, so that dial-up users know what they're getting into once they hit the play button.

This method also works well, because the rest of the site loads quickly and dial-up users don't have to wait for the video to load to see the content of the site.

Mike Poe is conducting a training on this next week and will post a complete tutorial after that training.

Yesterday morning I heard a short news item on KQED radio about a new study from the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) on Californians and Technology. Before you click away thinking this is going to be a boring, wonky post - bear with me and read on!

While this new study is interesting in how it presents data on how Californians are using technology; it led me to a paper from July 2007, which relates to last week's post about broadband.

That study, entitled Broadband for All? Gaps in California's Broadband Adoption and Availability, shed additional light on the challenges we face in serving clients who do not have access to broadband service.

According to the PPIC study, "the share of California households with high-speed Internet ranges from under 30 percent in the rural Sierras (21%) and northern part of the state (29%) to just over 50 percent in the San Francisco Bay Area (51%) and the greater Los Angeles area (52%). After controlling for individual characteristics such as income and education, the analysis finds that more than half the regional differences remain, indicating that availability — or the lack of it — is the cause" of a lack of wider adoption of broadband services.

What I found sadly amusing was the explanation of the way in which the FCC reports broadband availability - which is the primary source of data for policy makers. The survey author explains that the FCC tends to overstate broadband adoption levels because they of how they collect and report the data. If there is one broadband subscriber in a zip code, the zip code is deemed to have broadband service.

You can see that this can paint an inaccurate picture in rural areas where zip codes can be large and service may be available in one part of the zip code but not throughout. According to the FCC 99.8% of Americans live in a zip code where broadband is available, and 90% living in the least populated areas have broadband.

The study clearly states that wider adoption of broadband is a supply issue, not a demand issue. Until service providers are given an incentive, they're not likely to expand service in less densely populated areas because it is economically less advantageous.

And good luck trying to figure out what part of the geographic area you serve has broadband. This apparently is closely held data.

You can watch streaming video of the presentation of this study at the Public Policy Institute's web site, and you can also download a free copy of the paper.

Thanks for bearing with me - I promise to get back to basics next week. On deck: color!

According to the USDA's 2007 Farm Computer Usage and Ownership Report, 61% of California farms had computer access but only 54% owned their own computers; and just 42% were using computers for farm business.

Of the 61% of California farmers who had computer access, 36% were using dial-up service.

While California fares slightly better than the national average, the challenge of using bandwidth intensive content and features in Web sites used by clients using dial-up services remains very real.

So how do you integrate bandwidth intensive elements into your site and still have a site that is dial-up friendly?

I posed this question to ace Communication Services web designer Alex Zangeneh-Azam. Alex suggests putting video links on an interior page, two or three pages into your site, rather than embedding them into your home page or on a program header page. He also suggests setting the link to open in a new window, the way this page out of the RREA site functions:

The Land Stewards

The new window that opens also contains text that loads quickly, so that visitors with slower connection speeds have something that engages them while the video loads.

By having the video open in a new window, visitors can immediately decide if they want to wait for the content to load or close the window. And you haven't lost them, because your originating site is still open.

Another tip, depending on the design of the site, is to let visitors know the size of the video, and an estimate on how long it will take to load and buffer. This is a corollary to the "large PDF file warnings" that I suggested a few postings ago.

Keep in mind that service availability changes - and penetration of high speed services in new areas is expanding faster than the USDA can conduct a survey. But if you're living and working in a remote area without high speed service at home - it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that your clients are in a similar situation.