The State newspaper has the story:
Greenville city officials and leaders of the effort to persuade Google to come to Greenville with a high-speed broadband Internet network have been encouraging people to keep voting at a Web poll called googlefiber.com, even though they know the site isn’t part of Google.
“With this kind of involvement and the community coming together, I can’t believe that people are not paying attention to what’s going on there,” said Lehsa Griebel, city of Greenville information technology manager.
Google has said it will build a 1 gigabit-per-second broadband network — more than 100 times faster than anything now available in the nation — in one or more cities. It plans to announce its decision later this year. How serious are folks around Greenville about convincing Google to choose the city as the site for its first super-high-speed fiber optic network?
Very, if the number of votes they’ve cast on a Web site where people can vote for what city is “most deserving” of the network is any indication.
Greenville was leaving all others in the dust and had garnered more than 339,000 votes.
Asheville was running second, with more than 249,000 votes. Duluth, Minn., was a distant third, with just over 12,000 votes among the more than 40 cities in the running.
All this on a site that is not even affiliated with Google, and a Google representative said will not sway the company’s decision.
“To be clear, our decisions will be based entirely on the responses and data we’ve gathered from our request for information,” Google Product Manager Minnie Ingersoll said in an email to The Greenville News . “This Web site is not authorized by Google.”
2 Comments
It’s interesting to get this official response. I’ve been encouraging voting even though I’ve known it’s unofficial just because it seems to me that part of their RFI has been to "generate buzz" about why your city is deserving. I bet you they still take it into consideration. How can they ignore it?
Of course the Googles are going to say that officially – we all know that.
That doesn’t mean that our citizen’s can’t make a point that WE WANT GOOGLE here. Maybe not everyone got in their applications – I mean I hope they did – but I know a lot of people are out there voting too, and that still makes a point as to how much our community wants to see Google invest in us as a landscape for their project.
I say keep voting!!
So what if a guy in India is making a few bucks on the ad-loads? Like they’ve got it so good in India that I want to begrudge this guy a few bucks. It ain’t costin’ me a cent personally.
Just as long as we are all clear here that this isn’t official and won’t be a tie breaker, what harm does it do?
Is taking up 3sec to click on "Asheville" every day really going to suck up your schedule? No – it’s harmless fun.
And if we can make it to Beer City USA through web polls, I’d be surely disappointed if we couldn’t proclaim the title Google City USA in the same manner. We took Portland, we can take Greensboro.
If we can show the world that we are that socially inter-webby savvy, maybe it does make that point even more so that we are indeed meant to be a Google CIty USA.