Topeka renames itself ... Google, Kansas?

Network World - All that what missing was a promotional video of Dorothy Gale clicking her ruby slippers and whispering, "There's no place like Google; there's no place like Google ..."

As you may recall, Google recently announced its intentions to test ultra high-speed broadband technology in a number of U.S. cities, the identities of which would be determined in part by which communities express the greatest interest. Officials in Topeka, Kansas have decided to express theirs by renaming their municipality ... Google, Kansas.

Keys to the city are so last century.

From a report on the Topeka Capital-Journal Web site: "Topeka Mayor Bill Bunten signed a proclamation Monday calling for Topeka to be known for the month of March as 'Google, Kansas — the capital city of fiber optics.' Bunten told city council members about the proclamation prior to a special meeting of the council held at noon at City Hall to hear the first reading of a proposal that wasn't linked to local efforts to convince Google to make Topeka a test site for an ultrafast Internet connection.Bunten asked the seven council members on hand if they had a problem with his issuing the proclamation, which also encourages Topekans to recognize and support continuing efforts to bring Google's fiber optics experiment here. None objected."

No surprise there, although Bunten's secondary motion asking Topekans to rename their children Larry, Sergey or Eric was defeated by a narrow 4-3 vote after several councilors noted that they have girls. (OK, I made that up.)

Read more about lans and wans in Network World's LANs & WANs section.