It wasn’t quite the same lively Macworld keynote without Steve Jobs, but it looks like self-deprecating Phil Schiller, Apple’s VP of worldwide product marketing, did an admirable job of introducing a whole slew of products, including the new Macbook Pro (17-inch version) and the new DRM free iTunes music store, without so much as mentioning Steve Jobs. Of all the product launches, I was most impressed with Apple’s new software – iLife ‘09 and iWork ‘09. In this day and age, when it is widely assumed that all apps are moving to the Internet, Apple has done the opposite and given its desktop apps a big boost. What I was impressed by is how the company has brought the Internet into these applications. The new version of the iPhoto application now allows you to seamlessly upload photos to Facebook and/or Flickr. Without much effort, it also allows you to geotag the photos, helping bring “location” into the desktop.

• iPhoto ‘09 automatically scans photos to detect people’s faces, and when you assign a name to any face iPhoto will automatically find more pictures of that person in your desktop library. It also lets you easily publish photos to Facebook or Flickr. The Places tool automatically imports photo location data from a GPS-enabled camera or iPhone, and you can manually assign a location to any photo, group of photos or event.
• iWeb ‘09 allows publishing to any hosting service, and it can also automatically send updates to your Facebook profile.
• On GarageBand, you can download music lessons from famous artists like Norah Jones and Sarah McLachlan, using the new GarageBand Lesson Store, available inside the GarageBand ‘09 application.
• Apple also launched the in public beta of iWork.com, a new service Apple is developing to share iWork ‘09 documents online.

Essentially, Apple has adapted its applications to accomodate new user behaviors that involve web services like Flickr and Facebook. In doing so, it is giving people a reason to keep using their desktop applications longer, for tasks that are more complex than, say, typing out a quick document. With these upgrades it has stayed true to its philosophy of focusing on user experience and usability.

This Internet-in-the-desktop approach is something we have talked about for a long time — probably too long. Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie, in an interview with me, extolled the virtues of a hybrid environment and said that in the future, Microsoft Office is going to live both on the desktop and in the cloud. Apple’s new iWork.com is an attempt to do just that for the iWork productivity suite.

In bringing Internet into its desktop apps, Apple is also trying to overcome its lack of web savviness. A case in point is iWork.com, which carries the beta tag but is more like an alpha. For now, you can’t edit other people’s docs; you can only leave sticky notes on them or chat about them. On the issue of collaboration, as hipsters would say, iWork.com is an epic fail, considering that even tiny startups are able to offer those features. It seems that, in order to actually edit the document, you have to download it and make change offline. If they want to be taken seriously, they’ll have to get it up to par with Google Docs; I hope they do.

That said, Apple’s newest upgrades show that, with enough creativity and the right functionality, desktop apps can still live on. As Tony Bennett sang to close the 2009 keynote, “the best is yet to come.”

With reports from Josh Pigford and Liz Gannes at Macworld in San Francisco

I spent five times as much on Christmas presents this year as last year.

That is, I spent $500 in one frenzied day of shopping. Last year, I spent $100 a day over 10 days of shopping.

OK, I made those figures up, but you can see the problem with such selective statistics. I can pretend my spending increased fivefold when in fact it was really cut in half. And yet that’s how Amazon slices and dices its closely watched holiday sales numbers.

Amazon says customers ordered “over 6.3 million items ordered worldwide on the peak day, Dec. 15″ (or a “record-breaking” 73 items per second!). That raises more questions than it answers. Why focus on just one day? Do “items” include individual MP3 files? Why not just tally the total dollar value of all the goods it sold? We could be buying more items but spending so little on each that Amazon’s total sales decline.

So when Amazon released its annual “best-year-ever” PR release after Christmas, the celebration was even briefer than a Festivus party at the Costanzas. Amazon’s stock rose 4.6 percent early Friday to $53.79, but closed pretty much unchanged at $51.78.

Observers noted that not only was the shopping season shorter this year by five days, but the growth rate of Amazon’s “peak day” slowed to 17 percent this year from 35 percent in 2007. Others chided Amazon for being tightfisted with numbers during a holiday season in need of good news. Paul Kedrosky went gloomier, suggesting Amazon could itself fall victim to weakening sales.

Instead, Amazon offers slightly cute and completely useless factoids, like how far all the Coldplay CDs that Amazon sold would stretch if laid side by side (an exercise useful only if you bring in a steamroller).

Amazon’s technical expertise is good enough that they are capable of offering a window into the mind of the American consumer — which has changed drastically in the past three months. We saw a taste of this further down into the press release, where Amazon listed the top-selling products this season in each major category.

Among gadgets, consumers weren’t going for the cheapest-priced items, preferring quality at good value. Apple’s iPod Touch was a bestseller, as was an Acer netbook retailing for $370 and a 52-inch Samsung HDTV at $1,800. Nintendo’s Wii, unsurprisingly, dominated video game sales.

Culturally, Amazon’s sales suggest consumers fixated on dark tones. The gothic “Twilight,” with its tale of forbidden and protective love, topped books and its movie soundtrack also sold well. Apocalyptic themes in “Wall-E” and “The Dark Knight” resonated in DVD sales. The darkness fetish even extended into the toys category, where Eyeclops night vision stealth goggles were the top seller.

Insight into how long this sour mood might last. Too bad that Amazon, so good at collecting this kind of data, is so bad at sharing it.

In thinking about what an economically bleak 2009 will mean for the Internet, I kept coming back to something Chris Anderson wrote a few months ago, back before the tech world awoke to the full impact of the credit crunch.

Anderson (disclosure: he edits Wired, a publication for which I sometimes write) talked in October of a “gift economy.” Riffing on Clay Shirky’s notion of a “cognitive surplus,” he imagined this excess ability expanding as unemployed workers engage in labors of love for free, if only to do something valuable with their time and/or advertise their skills.

As a result I think you’ll see a boom in creativity and sharing online as people take matters into their own hands. Today, if you’re in-between jobs you can still be productive, and the reputational currency you earn may pay dividends in the form of a better job when the economy recovers.

I don’t mean to downplay how hard it is to be unemployed. But with tens of thousands of skilled tech workers being kicked into a hostile job market, the effects could prove to be positive for the Internet and its community over the long term.

Of course, employed engineers and other creative workers already apply their skills — in the service of their employers. Many are bored by the stifling grind. Not long ago on Hacker News, a developer complained how, as much as he loves coding, he just doesn’t like work.

Yeah, the million-dollar question from ‘Office Space’, find a way to make a career of whatever you’d do if you didn’t have to have a career. It’s possible, but it’s the “career” part I hate. I fail to understand the Protestant Work Ethic. I don’t see any reward in work, just lost time.

The notion that being creative in thrall to an employer results in as much “lost time” as watching a “Gilligan’s Island” marathon is a seditious one — and naturally it resonated with other developers. The post and the 188 comments are a great read. Many said they could have written it themselves, and it wasn’t very long before someone quoted Einstein:

The thought of having to expend my creative energy on things that make practical everyday life more refined, with a bleak capital gain as the goal, was unbearable to me.

I wonder what kind of creativity could be unleashed by workers who, though deprived of a steady paycheck, are freed from such tedious tasks. Some could come up with new ideas that help vault the web to a more advanced stage. Others may make micro-contributions that are equally powerful in aggregate. Such creativity could then foster an entirely new generation of startups, which would eventually lure away some of those who had remained at steady jobs all along.

That would be true to the Internet’s history, which advanced through vacillations between programming subculture and commercial enterprise. And currently, the pendulum is swinging back to subculture once again. Only this time, the web has a stronger capacity to both welcome those with free time and amplify their skills.

It’s not just coding, it could be Wikipedia-like community projects. It could be some of the legions of journalists setting up sites like VoiceofSanDiego, or improving the quality of self-produced videos on YouTube (which are reportedly starting to pay well for a few.)

Of course, money will be hard to come by for such labors of love. Some of the best ideas since the last downturn have failed to find a viable business model. A gift economy would be an especially profitless form of innovation. But that notion lies at the heart of the hacking ethic.

Or as Shirky put it, in distilling his notion of cognitive surplus into a general principle: “It’s better to do something than to do nothing.”

I can think of a few worse mottos for 2009.

Traditional media outlets like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times have begun to use some of the tools of social media — blogs, Facebook pages, even Twitter accounts. But they seem a lot less eager to adopt some of social media’s core principles, including a commitment to the two-way nature of the medium and all that it represents. This means a lot more than just talking about “the conversation” and how great it is to get links or comments. It’s about taking those comments seriously, responding to them regardless of whether they are positive or negative, and incorporating that approach into the way you do your job. It’s about looking at “journalism,” broadly-speaking, as a process rather than an artifact.

This is something that most of the blogosphere, or at least the part of it that cares about accuracy and integrity, does pretty well. Sites like GigaOM and others update their posts when information is added or corrected, and in many cases link to critical or differing opinions (and if they don’t, they should). In that sense, truth — to use a loaded word — is not absolute, nor is it something that a single entity has a monopoly on, particularly around a developing or complicated issue. The most we can hope for is that an outlet of any kind, whether it’s a blog or a traditional newspaper’s web site, does its best to represent an issue fairly and completely, and that requires additions, updates, links and discussion.

The WSJ arguably failed that test on Monday, with its story on Google and how its position on “net neutrality” had allegedly softened.

There has been, and will no doubt continue to be, debate about whether the Journal’s perception of Google’s behavior is correct. Some believe that Google is actually giving itself a benefit that others can’t match (except, of course, other large web companies such as Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon, etc.). Others see it as a natural move by a large Internet company, and no threat to net neutrality at all. Whether you agree depends on what you think net neutrality is supposed to mean, and what Google’s role in it is. If you want to understand more about the issue and the way the Journal described it, read some of the links in David Weinberger’s post.

What isn’t in dispute, however, is that Google completely disagreed with the implications in the article, as company representatives made clear in a blog post written not long after the story went up on the Journal site. It’s understandable that Google might take issue with the story, of course, since it paints the company’s behavior in a negative light. But that’s not really the point.

What is important is how the Journal responded to these criticisms, both from Google and Lawrence Lessig (who was also quoted in the Journal story and noted, in his own blog post, that the description of his views was simply not accurate), and from other sources. Was the story itself updated? No. Were any links to the blog posts in question included, even as supplementary material? No. There was a blog post on the Journal site that mentioned how the story had “gotten a rise” out of the blogosphere, which included a couple of links, and then on Tuesday there was as second one, also with links to additional posts at Wired and elsewhere, as well as a description of what “edge caching” is.

No response to Lessig’s factual assertions about his views and the way they were described was provided. There is no acknowledgment of it apart from the Journal’s second blog post (which someone reading the original story might or might not even find). To any self-respecting blogger, this seems like a failure. Why not put all of that information, whether they be links to critical blog posts, updates on factual errors, or something else that is relevant, inside the original story? Why not allow those responses to help expand the way people look at the story? They’re going to do so anyway, once they come across them on their own. Is the Journal simply hoping that they won’t, and the story will remain pure and unsullied by criticism?

That’s an old-media approach. It’s a way of saying, either directly or by implication, “The truth is whatever we say it is.” Any critical responses, even from two of the major players in the story, are relegated to a blog post that gloats about the reaction the story got, but does little to treat it as valid or worthy of inclusion. As Scott Rosenberg of Salon points out, online media provides the tools for a real conversation, one that changes the way people look at an issue, and for a real “journalism as a process” approach to the news. It’s a pity the Journal couldn’t spot — or take advantage of — such an opportunity when it presented itself.

Google’s V-P of search products and user experience, Marissa Mayer, ruined the official coming-out party of the Chrome browser when she said yesterday that the company would soon take it out of beta. She spoke a day too soon — must be the jet lag, as she’s been in Paris attending Le Web — for the release of Chrome’s final version takes place today. And while it might be the fastest beta-to-full launch offering from Google yet, the question remains: Is that enough?

On their blog, Google’s Sundar Pichai and Linus Upson talk about improvements such as more stability, better video playback performance, and massive gains in speed. The final version also has better bookmarking capability and privacy controls. What more’s, the company claims it’s developing an extension platform, along with support for Mac and Linux. It will need those versions in order to get broader adoption.Despite being available for more than three months in beta form, Chrome’s share of the browser market has remained abysmally small. According to some estimates, it has a market share of less than one percent, below Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Apple’s Safari.

There have been some recent gains in the browser’s market share mostly because Google has been promoting the browser on its home page, according to browser tracker Net Applications’ Hitlink, even though it had “initially refused to place a one-word privacy link on their home page claiming a 28-word limit for the page.” Google Chrome is available only for Windows platform for now.

The browser, it seems, has hit a bit of a plateau, a fact that’s reflected in its share of traffic on this blog. As you might remember, I wrote about the first one month of Chrome, noting that it had about 5.6 percent of the total traffic to GigaOM, and between 2.24 percent and 6.13 percent across our network of seven sites.

The information collected by Hitlink mirrors the plateau on Chrome’s share on GigaOM, and it seems to have actually slipped to about 5 percent. I guess Mozilla’s John Lilly was right in not worrying too much about Google.

The marginal growth in the browser’s market share is not good for Google, which needs the browser to grow as part of its overall cloud-centric computing vision. This desktop share is critical for the company if it hopes that Chrome is going to be a dominant player on mobiles and other alternative devices. Apple has shown this kind of desktop-to-mobile seamlessness (well almost) on its Safari browser.

Earlier this month, Google launched its extension framework for Chrome, which we pointed out was a way for the company to tie the browser into apps that run on Google’s App Engine. In other words, it was offering an entire ecosystem for cloud-based applications.

With the Chrome extensions, Google has made it possible for ISVs to launch ready-made niche applications for the cloud. It’s the same thing Facebook did with its API and Salesforce did with AppExchange; in Google’s case, ISVs now have a turnkey channel that can reach small businesses easily.

As we have noted time and again, Chrome is of critical importance to Google, but at its current market share, with moribund growth, the search giant isn’t going to realize many of its grand dreams anytime soon.

With the release on Monday of a software platform known as Native Client, Google has moved even closer to fulfilling the early promise of a “web operating system” — a vision originally offered by browser-software pioneer Netscape Communications.

Over a decade ago, Netscape was the technology name that made users smile and competitors tremble. And one of the things that kept Microsoft awake at night was the fear that Marc Andreessen’s company might be able to turn the browser into a kind of web OS. Using a new software scripting language known as Java, the theory went, Netscape would be able to offer services and features through the web browser that would compete head on with software installed on PCs.

That fear was a big part of the impetus for Bill Gates’s famous “Internet tidal wave” memo in 1995, and it was also a big reason why Microsoft started pushing its own scripting language for the browser, known as ActiveX. As it turned out, Netscape was never able to follow through on the early promise of a browser OS. Not only was Java too clunky, insecure and ill-suited to the purpose, but Netscape never really took advantage of it, and the browser wars that Microsoft triggered with the release of Internet Explorer soon turned in the software giant’s favor, as Netscape became bloated and unfocused.

Now, Google is offering its own scripting language known as Native Client, which the company no doubt hopes will be seen by developers as a friendlier version of ActiveX. What it will allow browsers to do is run code in the language understood by a user’s PC, rather than having to translate everything on the fly. In a nutshell, that means browser-based software and services will run faster and be able to offer more functionality than they can now. Browser-based services that could replicate all of the features of a desktop application would become a reality.

As several observers have noted, the combination of Google’s new Chrome browser, its Gears software — which allows web apps to store data for offline use and synchronize it later — and the Native Client language makes for something that is awfully close to being a web OS. Applications and services could run on any computer, storing data whenever an Internet connection wasn’t available and effectively erasing the boundaries between desktop and web. And all it requires, of course, is that everyone adopt and adhere to Google’s new language and standard (both Microsoft and Adobe have been trying something similar with Silverlight and Flash/AIR).

Is the world ready for a Google-ized version of ActiveX? Perhaps not. But if the company does manage to get enough support for Native Client, the web OS could become a reality — and the knife that Google is already holding to Microsoft’s neck with its web apps could cut a little deeper.

Yahoo, the beleaguered web giant, is planning to launch a new program that essentially turns its email offering into a platform on which to run applications, much in the same way Facebook does, according to some of my sources. Yahoo is keeping a tight lid on its plans, but I’ve managed to gather some interesting details.

The program is expected to launch in beta relatively soon with half a dozen small applications running in a sidebar inside the Yahoo mail client (Evite is one of the services that is said to be building a nano-app for this new Yahoo Mail-as-a-platform). Users’ address books would act as a social graph, essentially turning Yahoo Mail into the basis of a whole new social networking experience.

Last fall, I pointed out that the only way for Yahoo or Google to challenge the social networking incumbents like Facebook was to leverage their email infrastructure. Using email to build social experiences was first figured out by startups such as Xobni and my personal favorite, Xoopit. With relationship buckets pre-defined by the address book, which contains everything from web-based addresses to geo-local data (physical address) to mobile numbers, email clients are already rich with the very data set that Facebook is so desperately trying to build — and hoard.

In November 2007, a senior executive at Yahoo told The New York Times about the company’s plans to use email as the starting point of a social experience, dubbing it “Inbox 2.0.” “There will be some sort of profile system attached to Inbox 2.0,” said Brad Garlinghouse, who was at the time running Yahoo’s communications business. He went on to add, “The profile page is where you can expose what you want people to know about you.”

Garlinghouse, well known for writing the so-called “Peanut Butter Manifesto,” has since left the company, but Yahoo has been building on the Inbox 2.0 idea, most recently launching such a profile effort as part of its Yahoo Open strategy. The launch of the Mail-as-a-platform would help the company fully realize its Inbox 2.0 vision.

With its more than 200 million email subscribers, Yahoo has an unique opportunity with this platform. In particular, it plays to Yahoo’s strength in making complex technologies simple for a mass market audience, a trick Google is still struggling to master.

Of course, its success will depends on a number of things, such as developers feeling comfortable enough with Yahoo’s migraine-inducing policies and inspired enough to come up with applications that are useful — and don’t involve vampire bites and throwing virtual snowballs.

Yahoo also has to overcome its own culture of consensus (or confusion). If it does, this could be the start of a long climb back for a company that is currently viewed as a laggard.

Well, well, well — maybe there’s a place for human beings in the new media landscape after all. Who would have guessed? The revelation comes courtesy of Gabe Rivera, the creator and programming genius behind a series of news aggregation sites including Memeorandum, Ballbug and Techmeme. He has just admitted that the algorithms he uses to find the latest hot news haven’t been working all that well, and that as a result, he has added the services of a (gasp!) human being to the mix to try and improve things. That would be Megan McCarthy, a former writer for Wired.com and the gossip site Valleywag.

Rivera posted a job ad on Craigslist recently, looking for what he variously described as a “news technician,” “news analyst” or “configuring editor.” As the young Techmeme founder noted in the ad, the type of job he had in mind — the one Megan McCarthy has apparently been hired to do — had never really existed before, but “will become increasingly important in the years ahead.” Anyone who has tried to follow the news coming from hundreds or even thousands of different sources, using a combination of overstuffed RSS readers and other tools, knows that Rivera is right — there is a fire hose of data gushing 24 hours a day, and filtering through it all is becoming harder and harder.

Not that long ago, it was assumed by many that algorithms would be the answer. Aggregators like Yahoo News and Google News, along with more specialized (and in some cases short-lived) RSS “meme trackers” such as Techmeme and Tailrank, were seen as the killer app for information overload — automated news readers that would be able to sort through the headlines and figure out what was important. And some of them, including Memeorandum and Techmeme, manage to do that pretty well. But they are still missing, as Rivera describes in his frank and honest assessment of the flaws in his methods, an important ingredient: the ability to tell when a story or headline just doesn’t belong.

The hiring of a human being to tweak the selection of headlines at Techmeme and possibly some of Rivera’s other sites is just another sign that algorithms aren’t the final solution to the information overload problem, and that it’s going to take software and human beings working together to make sense of the information coming out of the fire hose. Even Google, the king of the algorithm — a company whose automated PageRank methods have helped to create more than $100 billion worth of stock market value in just a few years — has started allowing people to influence its search results directly, through its recently-launched Search Wiki features. Although the choices people make only directly affect the results they see, the search giant has suggested that in the future those choices could affect a site’s overall PageRank.

Looks like there might still be a few jobs left for us human beings after the robots take over.

With the change in administration it’s time to stop pussyfooting around the issue of broadband access in the U.S. It quite honestly sucks. Yes, some people have access to FiOS, but others have access to speeds that rank even lower than the lame 768 kbps classification of broadband adopted this year (!) by the FCC. Uneven coverage and a lack of competition mean that we in the U.S. pay more for our broadband than many other countries and that about 1 percent of the population can’t get access at all. This has got to change, and the private market isn’t going to do it because it simply isn’t profitable to string fiber, coax or even copper everywhere people have settled.

With consumer groups and industry players calling for a broadband bailout, I’m inclined to agree, even if it does mean Google gets more broadband subscribers for free. The government needs to get involved, and it needs to throw some money at the problem — albeit in a highly organized way. I’ll argue later about what should be done, but first here’s a few reasons why it’s important. Broadband is like electricity and running water — every town, if not every person, needs access to it. Not to watch cats on treadmills or download porn, but because it gives people cheaper access to the world.

Educational Access

Today the New York Times ran an article about the rising costs of a college education and offered up the idea of distance learning as being one solution to rising costs. I don’t think distance learning can substitute for the entire college experience, but having participated in several distance learning classes, it can be used in conjunction with meetings online or weekly in-person meetings  to create a rich learning and discussion environment. Broadband makes that possible today, and faster speeds will only add to the interactivity of those online environments — making a college education more accessible. The kids who most benefit from this are not living in FiOS areas; they are in poorer areas where ISPs try to avoid or delay launching high speed services. I know, I live in one of those areas. The government needs to step up to improve this access divide.

Medical Care Improvements

Broadband also can save on medical costs and improve access to health care. A release issued today highlighted radiologists’ frustration with quality of care. Ninety-four percent of radiologists surveyed blamed missed or delayed diagnosis on the inability of medical imaging systems to communicate with information systems of physicians and hospitals. Delivering radiological scans via broadband requires fat pipes and rapid speeds, but the benefit to patients, insurers and doctors would be many: fewer scans, faster delivery of images where they are needed, and lower costs associated with the process.

Telecommuting Expansion

Another benefit of better broadband would be the ability for people to telecommute. This has far-reaching benefits, from fewer cars on the roads to increasing a family’s resilience in the face of economic uncertainty. As a telecommuter, when I change jobs I don’t have to sell my house, uproot my husband’s career or leave the network of friends and family who support us. The more people who have that flexibility, the less traumatizing job loss can be both for the individual family and for a particular region.

Those are a few of the reasons the government should care about broadband access. Broadband can help promote an educated citizenry, could help lower the costs of providing health care and could increase workforce flexibility and decrease traffic. So while older generations of legislators might deride the web as a series of tubes, the truth of the matter is those tubes could be the lifeblood for citizen access to education, information and services. We need policies and funding to make sure broadband reaches everyone, and we need it today. It would’t be a bailout. It would be an investment.

With the change in administration it’s time to stop pussyfooting around the issue of broadband access in the U.S. It quite honestly sucks. Yes, some people have access to FiOS, but others have access to speeds that rank even lower than the lame 768 kbps classification of broadband adopted this year (!) by the FCC. Uneven coverage and a lack of competition mean that we in the U.S. pay more for our broadband than many other countries and that about 1 percent of the population can’t get access at all. This has got to change, and the private market isn’t going to do it because it simply isn’t profitable to string fiber, coax or even copper everywhere people have settled.

With consumer groups and industry players calling for a broadband bailout, I’m inclined to agree, even if it does mean Google gets more broadband subscribers for free. The government needs to get involved, and it needs to throw some money at the problem — albeit in a highly organized way. I’ll argue later about what should be done, but first here’s a few reasons why it’s important. Broadband is like electricity and running water — every town, if not every person, needs access to it. Not to watch cats on treadmills or download porn, but because it gives people cheaper access to the world.

Educational Access

Today the New York Times ran an article about the rising costs of a college education and offered up the idea of distance learning as being one solution to rising costs. I don’t think distance learning can substitute for the entire college experience, but having participated in several distance learning classes, it can be used in conjunction with meetings online or weekly in-person meetings  to create a rich learning and discussion environment. Broadband makes that possible today, and faster speeds will only add to the interactivity of those online environments — making a college education more accessible. The kids who most benefit from this are not living in FiOS areas; they are in poorer areas where ISPs try to avoid or delay launching high speed services. I know, I live in one of those areas. The government needs to step up to improve this access divide.

Medical Care Improvements

Broadband also can save on medical costs and improve access to health care. A release issued today highlighted radiologists’ frustration with quality of care. Ninety-four percent of radiologists surveyed blamed missed or delayed diagnosis on the inability of medical imaging systems to communicate with information systems of physicians and hospitals. Delivering radiological scans via broadband requires fat pipes and rapid speeds, but the benefit to patients, insurers and doctors would be many: fewer scans, faster delivery of images where they are needed, and lower costs associated with the process.

Telecommuting Expansion

Another benefit of better broadband would be the ability for people to telecommute. This has far-reaching benefits, from fewer cars on the roads to increasing a family’s resilience in the face of economic uncertainty. As a telecommuter, when I change jobs I don’t have to sell my house, uproot my husband’s career or leave the network of friends and family who support us. The more people who have that flexibility, the less traumatizing job loss can be both for the individual family and for a particular region.

Those are a few of the reasons the government should care about broadband access. Broadband can help promote an educated citizenry, could help lower the costs of providing health care and could increase workforce flexibility and decrease traffic. So while older generations of legislators might deride the web as a series of tubes, the truth of the matter is those tubes could be the lifeblood for citizen access to education, information and services. We need policies and funding to make sure broadband reaches everyone, and we need it today. It would’t be a bailout. It would be an investment.