THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, May 14, 1995 TAG: 9505160487
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: D1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY THOMAS FARRAGHER, KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG, VA. LENGTH: Long : 147 lines
On the corner table of a rustic tavern here are chilly mugs of beer, plates of dictionary-thick sandwiches - and a gee-whiz surprise. The appetizer, served in bytes, is electronic.
A Pentium-chip computer at the Main Street ``cyberbar'' offers a free spin on the Internet or a shorter but more practical computer cruise around town.
Hit a button and scan real-time transcripts from Judge Lance Ito's courtroom in Los Angeles. Or check out the gossip from your favorite soap opera's home page on the World Wide Web. Or apply for a dog license at city hall. Or click on the latest sound clip from the town's hottest new rock group, the Visible Shivers.
``People from around here are really using it as a function of their daily lives now,'' said Bill Ellenbogen, the bar-and-grill's proprietor. ``It's not just a toy anymore.''
With nearly a third of its businesses and more than 13,000 of its 36,000 residents already on its computer network, Blacksburg, tucked into the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, is perhaps America's most wired municipality.
Surprisingly, the lesson being learned in this leafy, picture-postcard college town - a test bed for telecommunications experts nationwide studying practical applications of Internet technology - is as old as the signature line from L. Frank Baum's well-worn classic, ``The Wizard of Oz.''
There's no place like home.
``What we've found out is that nobody cares about the vast resources of the Internet,'' said Andrew M. Cohill, director of the system known as the Blacksburg Electronic Village and a professor at Virginia Tech, the town's dominant presence and home to 23,000 students. ``There's a certain novelty item when you first get connected, but if you think about it what people do in their daily lives, they tend to be focused on activities close to home.
``So here, they do Blacksburg stuff. They're shopping with local merchants, buying food or ordering flowers. They're sending e-mail to friends and family and acquaintances. They're finding out about how to get that permit from Town Hall.''
Within a year, town residents will be able to pay their taxes and their utility bills via the network.
While many cities and towns across the United States have established an on-line presence by posting municipal records and services electronically, Blacksburg's system stands out.
``On a per-capita basis, this is the most plugged-in community in the country - hands-down, absolutely,'' Cohill said.
A cooperative effort of the town, the university and the regional telephone company, the system is remarkable for its sheer reach, its subsidized service ($8.60 a month) that connects customers for about one-third of normal rates, and because of what it may mean for customers elsewhere.
``(Blacksburg's) electronic village has proven to be and will continue to be a test bed of services that will be demanded by customers in the future,'' said John Knapp Jr., a spokesman for Bell Atlantic, which has poured about $7 million into its premier ``infobahn'' test site.
``There's a high concentration of advanced users, and that makes it easy to get our arms around the impacts of some of these things. We're seeing how a community ties itself together and how it seeks to connect to the rest of the world.''
If the future is now in Blacksburg, here's what it looks like:
Students jockey for space in several apartment complexes where Bell Atlantic has installed high-density cable that essentially hot-wires more than 700 users to the Internet at speeds 100 times speedier than more conventional modems.
The regional hospital, whose home page - complete with doctor biographies, fitness tips and health-care seminar notices - has attracted 1,482 electronic visits since Feb. 1.
At the library, an electronic reference librarian is on duty to answer questions that range from how to call up reviews of movies available at a local video store to how to compile research on Greek mythology. More than 800 people have taken computer classes since the library joined the electronic village 15 months ago, though there is an irony to this pell-mell technology race.
``We can't tell you what's on the shelves in our other branch libraries because we're not yet automated,'' said Steve Helm, the library's computer specialist. ``But we can sure tell you about titles in Germany.''
On a recent evening, two of the library's four public terminals are in use. A high school senior sits cheerily at one, pecking out an e-mail chat with a boyfriend in New York.
Restaurants and taverns offer on-line coupons, which network users can download, print out and redeem. A charter pilot offers her services on a home page complete with a color photograph of her, her airplane and a clickable map that gives estimates for destinations from here to St. Louis.
The most frequently told anecdote about the wonders of the Blacksburg Electronic Village is an order collected by the local on-line grocery store chain, Wade's, which uses the system so far to sell only flowers. A customer in Kuwait, surfing the Internet from there, found the store's home page and used it to ship daisies to Pennsylvania.
David McIntyre, Wade's data processing manager, said the store's day-to-day experience is less flashy. ``I'd be lucky to get one order in a week,'' he said. ``This is a way to get your feet wet with a new technology. The capabilities are there. The willingness of the people to use it isn't.''
Still, McIntyre noted that when the store announced plans for on-line shopping, to be available this summer, the community response was overwhelming. ``Hey, we think this is a great idea,'' he said. ``Rip it off if you can.''
Richard Civille, executive director of the Washington-based Center for Civic Networking, an independent research group to promote public use of information technologies, called the Blacksburg Electronic Village, or BEV, a promising project that has yet to fully prove itself.
``Now they've got all this stuff out there,'' Civille said. ``But we don't know how people are using that stuff. We feel they have more work to do.''
But for Cohill, who is boyishly enthusiastic about the project, and other regular users, the success of their electronic village is told not in grandiose terms, but in the simplest of stories.
Jason Gibbs, an 18-year-old senior at Blacksburg High School, uses the network to put the school newspaper on-line and to maintain the school's home page, which lists information about clubs, sports schedules and background on different departments at the school.
For David Capwell, a 28-year-old bank branch manager, the system means keeping in regular touch with a buddy in Iran, reviewing local restaurant menus for the specials or reading the Pilot Online, an electronic version of The Virginian-Pilot, his former hometown newspaper. ``It's all at your fingertips, and the great thing is that everyone around here is tuned in,'' Capwell said.
Cohill's favorite story is ``what we've come to call the `Presby-net' lady,'' an elderly and active member of the Presbyterian Church who grew frantic until BEV fixed a software problem that prohibited her from contacting church members elsewhere.
``It was important for her to keep up,'' the BEV director said. ``To me that's the best success story. To me it's much more interesting than even groceries on-line or the Internet bar because it means that we have actually gotten into segments of the community that are outside the sort of `geeky teenager, technocrat' type of personality that always gets profiled.
``People are starting to take us for granted, and when they lose access it's a big deal. It's important to them.''
- ILLUSTRATION: Graphic
ON LINE
The Blacksburg Electronic Village e-mail address is
bev.office(at)bev.net. The village information servers may be
reached via gopher at gopher.bev.net and via the World Wide Web at
http://www.bev.net/)
Blacksburg Electronic Village's e-mail address is
bev.office(AT)bev.net. The village information servers may be
reached via gopher at gopher.bev.net and via the World Wide Web at
http://www.bev.net/ A link to BEV also is maintained on the Extra
page of Pilot Online (http://www.infi.net/pilot) under Virginia
Online.
by CNB