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DEL.ICIO.USUnwired
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Wired, it appears, is in the eye of the beholder.
Wired magazine has produced a list of most-wired cities, and Atlanta is notably absent from the list.
That’s interesting because just a few months ago, Forbes named the city as the most wired in the country.
Wired’s methodology was certainly interesting enough, and really focuses more on “geek chic” than wiredness. The magazine focused on each city’s proximity to top-ranked engineering schools, tech jobs per capita, personals on Geek2Geek.com (a dating service), per capita Craigslist postings, participation in meetings of a tech group called Dorkbot, the availability of free Wi-Fi service and the number of comic stores and Circuit City stores per capita.
The magazine didn’t rank its top 10, but predictable entries such as Seattle, San Francisco, Boston, New York and the Raleigh-Durham area appear. Also included are Los Angeles, Pittsburgh and Orlando.
Raleigh-Durham got the nod for its top-notch educational and research facilities and being home to Red Hat, home of geek favorite Linux. Orlando? Well, Disney figures in somehow, as does a very active Craigslist community.
Forbes, in an August analysis, used the percentage of Internet users with high-speed access, choice of service providers and availability of public Wi-Fi.
The magazine said of the 30 cities it measured, Atlanta ranked first in choice of access providers, third in Wi-Fi access and ninth in the number of residents using broadband.
The magazine did make one important caveat: the ratings looked only at the core city of Atlanta itself, which bristles with wired and wireless Internet connections, and not the suburbs —- where Internet access rarely travels outside the home or business.
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