One of these is really new, the other an attempt to revive some of what was once the backbone of travel in the U.S. Both of them have generated some interesting public reactions and both deserve to be closely watched to see how their success or failure might affect their respective industries. I'll talk about the newest one first, and then later point you to a fun download for the other. New Mexico's new spaceport is now in operation in the arid plains about 25 miles southeast of Truth or Consequences (the official site is Upham, but neither Google Maps nor the Census Gazetteer search engine can find that). The inaugural launch on September 26 was less than inspiring, as the 20-foot Spaceloft XL rocket from UP Aerospace only reached about 42,000 feet (far short of its intended 70 miles) before corkscrewing off course and crashing in the southern NM desert. The state has embarked on a highly visible partnership with multi-billionaire Richard Branson, whose Virgin Galactic will be the anchor tenant of the spaceport. Branson hopes to launch paying customers from the spaceport into suborbital rocket rides at $200,000 per person. In addition, plenty of people in the state are hoping that lots of additional high-tech tenants follow Branson and make southern NM a hub of future aerospace development. Will it be an economic booster or a boondoggle? It seems like a risky bet in times of tight hydrocarbon fuel supplies, but time will tell. Dan's comment on my last posting referenced a study on Alaskan railroads, which brings me to the other new transportation project, which is more down-to-earth and an attempt to help save some of those fossil hydrocarbons. New Mexico's Rail Runner Express launched this past summer with service from downtown Albuquerque north to suburban Bernalillo in Sandoval County. Some delay with rails and other material deliveries has postponed service south to Belen for now. The state hopes to bring the Rail Runner to Santa Fe by 2008. But while folks seem fine with the idea of the spaceport, the public reception to passenger rail has been mixed. The problem: a quirk of history led to the main line of the Atchison Topeka and Santa Fe railroad (of Harvey Girls fame) bypassing the actual city of Santa Fe and going a few miles to the east (it's since merged with the Burlington Northern to form the BNSF) A later spur line built to downtown Santa Fe is inefficient as it adds quite a few miles to the Albuquerque-Santa Fe trip, so the state wants to build brand-new track branching from the main line south of the city into Santa Fe. Several alternative routes have been proposed and public comments are being gathered. This makes many homeowners anxious. They seem to fear noise, pollution and the idea that the terrible vibrations of a passing train will undermine their homes. Personally, I would love having a train into town to pass within shouting distance of my door, but that's just me. Oh yeah, now for the fun -- you can download a nifty Rail Runner screensaver from the New Mexico Dept. of Transportation website. It comes in two versions: with our without soundtrack. The latter has guitar music in a soft, easy-listening beat (it may become sort of repetitious after a while, but would be good to nap to) and occasional clanky-clattery rail-crossing noises. They also put out a cool refrigerator magnet, but I'm afraid I can't send you one of those over the web! Continue reading →

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Tech-ade blog (Federal Trade Commission)

Welcome to the Tech-ade blog, your gateway to continuous coverage of all aspects of the Federal Trade Commission’s upcoming hearings on Protecting Consumers in the Next Tech-ade. This blog will explore new technologies and their impact on products and business practices, with emphasis on the implications such developments will have for the consumer over the next ten years.

A story about the blog: FTC creates blog to chronicle series on Internet tools by Aliya Sternstein. FCW (Oct. 25, 2006) Continue reading →

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Google seeks better access to government information By Daniel Pulliam, GovExec (October 25, 2006).

As much as 40 percent of the content on agency Web sites is invisible to Google's crawlers, [J.L.] Needham [a strategic partner development manager at Google] said, which means that for a majority of Internet users who do not know how to look beyond a search engine site, that information is effectively invisible. Needham said he is meeting with a variety of undisclosed agencies to discuss how the information housed in their databases can be made available in the search results from engines such as Google, Yahoo or MSN. One method would be to use Google Sitemaps..

Perhaps of even greater interest is this:

A Dec. 16, 2005, memorandum from Clay Johnson, deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget, states that all agencies must set up their public information so that it is searchable by Sept. 1, 2006. It states that "increasingly sophisticated Internet search functions" can "greatly assist agencies in this area." Agencies also were required to provide all public data in an open format that allows the public to aggregate "or otherwise manipulate and analyze the data to meet their needs" by Dec. 31, 2005, according to a separate OMB memorandum signed by Johnson on Dec. 17, 2004.

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With thousands of documents issuing forth from Congress and its committees every year, it's impossible to keep up with them all. And besides the "official" hearings and reports, there's a whole category of Congressional information that doesn't make it into the FDLP or other distribution channels run by GPO. I'm talking about hearings held outside the official committee structure of Congress and reports researched and compiled by committee staffs (usually of a single party) and published mostly on a member's personal website or one established and maintained with party, not government, funds. There have been a great many of these popping up lately, largely because of the current situation of bitter partisanship in Congress. The Republican House and Senate leaders haven't wanted to hold oversight hearings or conduct investigations into activities of the Bush administration and have aggressively opposed any requests from Democrats to do so. Since the committee chairmen are all from the majority party, they and ultimately the Speaker of the House and Senate Majority Leader get to decide who can hold what meetings in which rooms and when, if ever, they can hold them. As a result, any members who want to look into things have to take extraordinary measures to conduct hearings and investigations. One of the most well-known of these so far is Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio / Status Report of the House Judiciary Committee Democratic Staff. It generated enough interest that a paperback version, with an introduction by Gore Vidal, was published by Academy Chicago (even so, OCLC shows only 139 holdings). This attempt to bring to light problems with the 2004 election in Ohio was due to the efforts of John Conyers, the ranking member of the committee (Conyers also publishes similar material on his personal campaign site). He was denied all requests for meeting space until he finally got the use of a tiny basement room that could barely accommodate all the Democratic members of the committee who wanted to participate, let alone witnesses and spectators (the Republicans boycotted the proceedings). Some more recent efforts have come from the Senate Democratic Policy Committee. It has held a number of hearings, several of them on the situation in Iraq, and posted transcripts and videos to the website. From the beginning of our OCLC Digital Archive, NMSL has been capturing some of these documents for long-term preservation. One early one from 2004 was Report of an Inquiry into the Alternative Analysis of the Issue of an Iraq - al Qaeda Relationship. This report simply has Senator Carl Levin, ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, as the author, with a note in the preface explaining that the research and compilation was carried out by the Committee's minority staff. It was posted as a PDF on his Senate web page and, as of this writing, is still there. Of course, it can also be found in the Digital Archive. So are these government publications or not? For my money, they are -- the elected representatives and their staff people are doing their work on the public payroll and using government resources (among others) to gather information. Even if they aren't "official," they're still worth capturing and preserving, in case some of the websites go dark or the content is taken down later. The quasi-official nature of these resources does raise some issues with copyright and may affect our putting some of them in the Digital Archive. For example, some of the hearings of the Senate Democratic Policy Committee have transcripts with a copyright statement from the Federal News Service, a commercial publisher of Congressional transcripts. These will not be harvested for the Digital Archive. We have yet to address some of these copyright issues in depth. Continue reading →

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When Standards Are Political -- ODF (the Open Document Format) by James Love (October 21, 2006), Huffington Post. James Love, Director of the Consumer Project on Technology, writes about open word-processing formats, why they are important for open exchange of information, interoperability, re-usability, preservability, and more. This article does an excellent job of explaining why this technical issue is an important policy issue. He compares and contrasts Microsoft's "Open XML" with the truly open Open Document Format (ODF). Continue reading →

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