IT Buoy

Finally, after much advance leakage, the Federal Communications Commission will unveil its National Broadband Plan on Tuesday, March 16. The two key questions about the effort to get the United States up to speed, so to speak, with decent digital access: Will it be toothless or not and will there be any money to pay for it, given the cash-strapped federal government? A possible highlight of the plan concerns whether spectrum should be allocated for a free or inexpensive high-speed wireless service. It was a notion mentioned by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski at a meeting in Washington, D.C., earlier this week. This is not an idea that telecom providers have warmed to in the past, of course, since they so enjoy sticking it to consumers with spotty service and high prices. And if the report proposes the restoration of some regulations lifted in the previous Republican administration, you can be sure the Prada-wearing political lobbyist brigade will be at the ready. What the FCC opus will surely point out is the obvious: The U.S. needs high-speed access to improve dramatically across the nation, especially for poorer citizens and in rural areas

The Federal Communications Commissions–which is the regulatory ruler of all kinds of waves, from air to digital–is now ferreting away on a plan to get Americans better hooked up to the Internet, part of a newish government push to digitize this country. It’s set to be released next month and is a long, long time coming, of course, as the U.S. badly lags the rest of the world in high-speed Web access at home. The plan will be the big first move by new FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski (pictured here), the longtime Internet exec who has also just accepted our invite to appear as a speaker at the eighth D: All Things Digital conference in June. There will be a lot to talk about with him, including the report the FCC is releasing today, titled “Broadband Adoption and Use in America” and penned by John Horrigan. The 52-page opus–which you can read in its entirety below–is the first working paper in a series of them, based on an FCC survey last fall. It outlines a mostly wired country–as you can see from the detailed chart below (click to make it larger)–with two-thirds having some sort of broadband connection.

From All Things Digital: Last week, someone who had been at MySpace for a while was telling me about what it was like working inside the social networking company, which had gone from supernova to also-ran in the course of a few years. Reflecting on the downward spiral that its owner News Corp. (NWS) had been trying to slow over the last year and how hard it was to do a turnaround of any kind, the exec also could not shake the idea that it could still be revived. Read the rest of this story

Today, BoomTown gassed up the Mini Cooper and motored down to the Sunnyvale HQ of Yahoo, this time with a tiny bit of trepidation. Ok, not that much, but some! Why? Because Yahoo (YHOO) CEO Carol Bartz had invited me to be the first in a new speaker series for employees at the Internet giant, called “Yahoo from the ‘Outside In,’” due to my intense–some might say obsessive–interest in the company. The twist: Bartz herself conducted the interview with me in front of about 600 Yahoos gathered in its URL’s Cafe, the main cafeteria at the company. As it turned out, she was pretty good at playing the journalist, asking about a range of things, including how I got the sources I did (I never kiss and tell), what I would do if I ran Yahoo (run it right into another wall, I am sure) and what Yahoo should focus on (content, content and more content). The Yahoos had some good and also tough questions for me too, including about my sometimes snarky tone in posts, my personal relationship with a Google exec (see my copious disclosure here ) and my thoughts on the future of content (bright for Yahoo, not so much for newspapers). We also talked about a variety of tech companies, such as Apple (AAPL), Microsoft (MSFT), Google (GOOG) and Amazon (AMZN). And, as Yahoos have tweeted, I did say I had a “man-crush” on Bartz (but only after she claimed I had a regular one) and described myself has a “sparkly vampire,” when asked about my late-night blogging habits

A video BoomTown posted earlier this week –following around my All Things Digital partner Walt Mossberg at the launch of the Apple iPad–has gotten an awful lot of attention, due to a little over two minutes of him kibitzing about the device with CEO Steve Jobs. I get the interest in the video, since it is not often you see the highly controlled Jobs just chit-chatting and even making the case about an Apple (AAPL) product, which he did in the video. Since the Jobs section of my longer video was in the middle, I decided to put all the Jobs clips I had together, all done in my usual shaky spycam style and which you can see below. In the video, Mossberg asked Jobs about the iBooks application and the price of e-books, with Jobs insisting the price would be the same on Apple as it was on Amazon. “The prices will be the same,” said Jobs, before getting in a little dig at the maker of the Kindle e-reader. “Publishers are actually withholding their books from Amazon, because they’re not happy with it.” Jobs also told Mossberg that the iPad will have “140-something hours, I think, of continuous music playback” and that the 10 hours of battery life for the iPad was more than enough for anyone. “It’s all about the display…Our chips don’t use hardly any power,” said Jobs. He also said consumers don’t necessarily need even more battery time, “because you just end up pluggin’ it in.