While debate about the cost and appropriateness of the National Broadband Network is clogging city media, in regional Australia the main question is one of ‘when can we get it’. That has certainly been the case in Victoria’s second largest city, Geelong. So keen is Geelong and its surrounding councils to get in early on the NBN that its representatives have attended events such as the Intelligent Community Forum, and late last year Geelong was instrumental in bringing to Australia Mark Kiel, the CIO of one of the world’s first cities to adopt gigabit-speed Internet connections (pictured, standing to the right alongside City of Greater Geelong’s Rod Macdonald – pic courtesy of the Geelong Advertiser). Chattanooga in the US state of Tennessee has taken a leadership position on broadband in an attempt to build its economy, and its gamble appears to be paying off.

I had the chance to chat to Mark while he was in Australia, and the story appeared on the Sydney Morning Herald IT Pro site in November last year. High speed broadband has brought prosperity to Chattanooga in terms of helping secure business investment and is leading to a new wave of entrepreneurial activity in the city, as well as providing direct benefits in terms of improved services. You can read all about it by clicking here.

With BlogPulse now estimating that there are more than 170 million public blogs in existing around the world today, ranking any group as ‘best’ is always going to be fraught with danger. At least in limiting our scope to ‘business’ and ‘Australia’, we were able to narrow the field – somewhat. Selecting Australia’s 25 best business blogs for SmartCompany was no easy task. Blogs were selected on the basis of traffic, content (quality and frequency of posting), usefulness, accessibility, subject-matter competency and quality of audience. Take a look at the 2011 list and let me know what you think.

The July 22 editon of B&T is out now and carries my cover story on the rise of YouTube as a mainstream advertising medium. With one out of every three Australians using YouTube every month it has become embedded into many of our lives, and with all those eyeballs looking at it, it is not surprising that advertisers want to follow. This feature looks at the advertising options that YouTube offers and how major advertisers such as EA Games, Tourism NT, Qantas, and Lonely Planet, and smaller companies such as Shoes of Prey and ecruising.travel are using it.

The third edition of Telstra’s Smarter Business Ideas magazine was mailed out recently and contains an article by me looking into ways that small business owners can use technology to make their lives easier.

Over the past decade it’s been really pleasing to see many of the leading lights of Australia’s technology sector plough some of the money they’ve made back into assisting smaller businesses. With Australia’s VC industry having shrunk dramatically over the same period, angel investors and high net worth individuals have plugged some of the gap when it comes to providing cash to worth start-ups. My most recent article for SmartCompany revolved around conversations with four of them, Craig Winkler (former CEO of MYOB), Simon Baker (former REA Group CEO), Pollenizer co-founder Mick Liubinskas and entrepreneur and investor Adrian Vanzyl. Their insights make fascinating reading for anyone considering getting a tech-based venture off the group, and you can check them out by clicking here.

If you’ve heard me give a presentation on A Faster Future then you’ve also probably heard me talk about cloud computing and my belief that cloud computing is is the biggest fundamental shift in computing since client/server. While many of the traits of cloud computing are not so different to that of mainframe computing, it puts that same power into the hands of a much wider range of users. Much has been learned about the effectiveness of cloud computing in just a few short years, and you can read about the experiences of some Australian cloud users in this story for the IT section of The Australian newspaper.

Demand-Side Platforms (DSP) are one of the most confusing concepts yet to appear in online advertising. An DSP essentially enables a media buyer to operate its own virtual advertising network, acquiring inventory on a real-time basis to fulfill the needs of its clients.DSPs work symbiotically with another new phenomenon, ad exchanges, which enable the real-time buying and selling of the advertising inventory that is used by DSPs.

Confused yet? The March 4 edition of B&T carries my cover story on DSPs and tries to explain what they are all about. While the story is not yet online, it should still be in newsagents for a few more days.

While this may not seem like the most stunning topic, DSPs and ad exchanges are part of a broader movement that I’m referring to as the Era of Big Data. What makes DSPs effective is the consumer behaviural data that is fed into them from a myriad of sources such as BlueKai (whose chief executive Omar Tawakol is quoted in A Faster Future). Services such as BlueKai enable the buying and selling of anonymous browser data, helping advertisers know a little more about how to make the placements effective.

It is this kind of technology that drives the effectiveness of online advertising, and is helping planners make much more strategic decisions about where they spend their media budget. In some ways it brings elements of the one-to-one advertising model created by search advertising to the display market.

As Tawakol says in A Faster Future; “We believe that data is becoming more valuable than media”.

Tony Chen started by delivering a sobering assessment of the success (or failure, more aptly) of Western online companies in China. For instance, while yahoo! Started in China in 1999 it had less than 1 percent of market share in2010. ebay entered China in 2001 and acquired the number one competitor in 2006, but was sold to Tom.com in 2006. MSN is a distant number 2, while Amazon.com is unprofitable and losing share and MySpace is going nowhere.

“Stop sending executives to China and hiring McKinsey and BCG people – listen to the local people,” Chen said. “Hear their voices and react to the market in a local way.”

He also talked about the sensitivities of the media industry and dealing with the government. YouTube was blocked in 2008, along with Facebook, and Twitter was blocked in 2009 along with foursquare.

He also talked about the phenomenal success of many of the Chinese companies, which he attributes to their stronger understanding of local characteristics. Twitter alternative Wei bo now has 70 million users, and 227,232 messages sent in the first one second of the Chinese New Year. It had reached 3071 tweets per second in only 10 months – it took Twitter four years to reach that figure. The top three celebrities have more than 5 million followers each. There were also 1000 group buying sites launched in China in 2010.