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WNET, the parent company of New York City-area public broadcasters WNET Channel 13 and WLIW Channel 21, is going into the local news business, starting on the Web around Memorial Day. The new venture, named “MetroFocus,” is envisioned as a half-hour television show and, eventually, a mobile application as well. The expansion to television specials or a monthly or weekly show, appearing on both television stations, could come as soon as the fall, and a daily version is expected to follow later.

[Commentary] Internet-service providers can't have it both ways. They can't delay bringing high-speed service to North Carolina communities but then turn around and lobby the legislature to deny local governments the authority to establish municipal service if their residents want it.

That's exactly what cable and phone companies are doing, however. Ever since a 2005 N.C. Court of Appeals ruling upheld the right of towns and cities to offer broadband, telephone and cable companies have been crying about government unfairness. The broadband battle is not being waged in the heavily populated portions of the state such as the Triad. Here, the for-profit companies moved in a long time ago. They can make a very nice profit here because the population density is adequate to provide a good return on the infrastructure needed for high-speed Internet service. Over the past decade, however, North Carolina's smaller municipalities, such as Wilson, Salisbury and Morganton, have built their own systems because their leaders recognized that broadband Internet is now an essential utility, just as electricity and natural gas are. The Internet-service providers did not step up to provide that essential service, so the municipalities did. In doing so, the cities followed a path they took nearly a century ago when the biggest electrical power companies did not provide service to these areas. Had the private companies tried to make their argument 15 years ago, they might have deserved some sympathy. But not in 2011. The Internet and high-speed access to it have now been available in North Carolina homes for well more than a decade. They ignored a market, and local governments stepped in to provide a critical service. The legislature should kill this bill.

Google DoubleClick plans to roll out the next version of its search platform later this year.

The company is testing it with select partners on Tuesday. The platform, now completely rebuilt on the Google technology stack, aims to improve workflow by simplifying navigation with an AdWords-like interface and refined reporting options. The technology stack supports mounds of data and quick processing power. Google built the front end on Gwt, which generates applications in minutes and looks and feels similar to those on a computer desktop, says Ariel Bardin, product manager and director at Google. "Data loads quickly into tables, so it's very fast," he says. The platform offers a more efficient workflow to easily raise bids, change budgets and monitor keywords to find the best and the worst-performing. And while the platform has been around since 2006, known originally as DART Search, it is the latest version in a long line of DoubleClick products Google will rebuild for advertisers and publishers. This version of DoubleClick Search also offers the ability to upload campaigns in spreadsheets with up to 1 million rows, and manage campaigns globally, supporting dozens of language and currency. New tools to view performance data across all major search engines and customize reporting look to improve optimization.

How fast is your broadband? M-Lab, a partnership between the New America Foundation and Google meant to measure Internet connections, has given Google two years worth of actual broadband connection data, as measured by users. That's more than 300TB of data, which Google has imported into its Public Data Explorer for easy viewing and analysis. The results are remarkable.

Measuring Internet access has been tricky for years. Sascha Meinrath of the New America Foundation told Ars back in 2009, when M-Lab got underway, that detailed network data about speeds, latency, jitter, and more used to be in the public domain until the government-run NSFnet was privatized in the earlier 1990s. Today, though, it's hard to know what speeds ISPs are actually offering (knowing what speeds they advertise, by contrast, is simple). M-Lab has distributed testing tools for two years now and its servers have recorded data on the results. One of the most basic measurements is pure speed, measured in megabits per second. When these real-world speeds are charted on a map, they make Internet speed differences obvious in a way often obscured by simple lists and numbers. For instance, the two images below compare Internet download speeds in US states to Internet download speeds in European countries (many of which are the same size as US states). Speeds are medians.