In Spokane it seems that finding information about what is going on in the business community, specifically in the entrepreneurial community. There are plenty of things happening around town, and a lot of frenetic energy being generated by the various agencies whose job it is to ratchet up the hype and enthusiasm about doing business in Spokane but finding reliable information about what is actually happening is pretty tough. The kind of information that might be useful for assessing the possible success or failure of a start-up or the prospects of getting a job is also difficult to ferret out.
I loaded a whole bunch of Spokane web sites to del.icio.us yesterday while watching football. They can be viewed using the Spokane tag ( http://del.icio.us/tag/spokane ) and from there you can see a number of additional tags that I added as well. (This list was built from the results of a Google search for “Spokane” and shouldn’t be considered as definitive of anything but my ability to type “Spokane” into Google.)
This highlights, I think, one of the unintended consequences of high-tech companies and the internet – none of the web sites that Google returned for the “Spokane” search was of technology company, one of the avant-garde urban-living development companies, or of a Information Age business. Obviously, Spokane has all of these and yet they are not necessarily dependent upon being identified with Spokane. It creates this paradox wherein Spokane is courting these kinds of enterprises as a large part of the strategy to improve it’s economy, but they, by their very nature, have no real need of Spokane, per se. I wonder at this, and further wonder about the prospects of lifting the city into the surviving tier of American metros in the Network Revolution.
By surviving tier, I refer to an idea I have that only a (relatively) few metros will be able to survive the transition from an industrial world to an informational world. There are several reasons for this, but, I believe, that it really comes down to this: the rich will get richer and they have a big head start. In essence, if you are starting out in the second tier, like a Spokane or a Boise, you not only have to beat out your peers, but you have to also gain on and pass some of the first tier because in the big game of musical chairs the metros are playing, someone has just taken away a bunch of chairs and being able to jump into a chair when the music stops is going to require a lot of dedication to being seated.
Something like 85% of the American population lives within 200 miles of the ocean, and the percentage of American’s moving between cities is shrinking – which means that in order to create a critical mass of knowledge workers, risk takers, and visionaries needed to ignite a big jump in the hierarchy of cities, there has to be something special to inspire trust in the future prospects of Spokane in those who Spokane needs to propel it into this new standing.