I read the string of comments here a few days ago about Qwest internet problems, and thought I'd add an update.

After two in-house technician visits, a couple of trucks in the street removing 130' of spare cable and about 15 related phone calls, my problem of super low speeds between the hours of 5pm and 11pm hadn't changed. I pay for 7Mbps. I work at home, and the speed is fine basically all day--the only trouble pops up in the evening, when it's so slow it's impossible to view the 'Instant Watch' Netflix movies. In a whole world of things that need fixing, it's pretty low--but still annoying.

Qwest told me today that it's a known neighborhood-wide issue, and that the infrastructure is on their list of things to upgrade, but won't give even an approximate date for this to happen. I decide to investigate getting out of my two-year contract...at which point their "Loyalty Specialist" gives me 50% off my bill for the next three months. After that, if it's not been fixed, I can call a direct number and apparently...

While we're posting free commercials for happening dot coms, we should mention the debut of the very cool and very locally focused EveryBlock service here in Seattle -- here's the EveryBlock Seattle Capitol Hill page. On it, you'll find news, and fun items scraped from various public databases like the most recent 911 reports, construction permits, and, personal fave, health inspections (be careful with these -- some will put you off food for a week).

None of the content is unique to EveryBlock -- you can find this same info spread across the Internets -- but its value is in cobbling it all together and eventually, assume, learning how to bubble up the most important stuff so you don't have to dig through boring reports about the 15th Ave 7-11's lack of adequate hand-washing facilities. You'll even find a few posts from good ol' CHS in the mix -- though, it seems EveryBlock's fancy algorithm's chooses appropriate content by looking for posts with addresses in the text. So, if EB takes off, expect a lot of 432...

If you haven't seen it yet, Wordle makes gorgeous word clouds using any text you have on hand. Here's the Wordle using Capitolhillseattle.com's latest content. In addition to being cool to look at, reveals we really use the word really too much.

Tried plugging in some of the other local blogs for fun. Liked this version of hillku.

Images: Wordle.net

As online search more and more defines the way we learn about our world and Google more and more defines search, being the first result for a Google search defines success/fail for a web site. For a neighborhood blog, this means earning the top slot for the neighborhood's key keyword. It's an honor. And it's good for bidness.

So it hurts to announce we are giving up our top slot for capitol hill seattle. Go ahead. Search for it. We're gone. We were #1 for over a year. And now we're #30. Page 3.

So, why give up this power, this mark that we were the most useful result for human beings looking to learn about this Seattle neighborhood?

It's the price we pay for our new independence. For our first two years of existence, CHS lived on Google's Blogger platform. It was a good home but we didn't, to continue the metaphor, own the land. It was Google's URL. If we want to own our destiny completely, we needed to be re-born as Capitolhillseattle.com. So we made the break. And here we are.

Problem was Google was very attached...