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Google St. Louis, Please
 Google caught our attention – and pretty much everyone else’s – with a pair of recent announcements. The international technology company announced last month that it planned to spend millions of dollars to build out (at least) one fiber network capable of speeds of 1 gigabit per second, about 20 to 100 times faster than any competitor’s. And it said that it was asking cities across the United States to signal their interest in being the test market.
The thought of super speedy Google broadband – and the chance to bring it home – has set off a wicked competition among broadband starved municipalities. Partisans in Topeka have dressed up in special t-shirts; celebratory songs have been commissioned; promotional coupons have been printed; mayors and councils have read resolutions changing their community’s names to Google; fans have launched FaceBook and YouTube (and pretty much any tool developed by Google) campaigns; and – in the background – teams of municipal IT professionals and engineers have been working feverishly pulling together the reams of documentation that Google has requested before the end of March.
Mayor Francis Slay, an inveterate blogger and user of Twitter, has told his readers and followers that he will also propose the City of St. Louis as the first home of the Google Fiber network. And City staffers, volunteers, planners, writers, and a committee of the Vanguard Cabinet have been hard at work on the St. Louis bid for several weeks. This week’s Mini-Poll is a part of that effort, because the pro-Googlers plan to use it to quantify the intensity of public interest in better and wider broadband access. And they hope to see if changing the name of the city for a day or two to something Googlesque would meet with your approval.
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