THUNDER BAY – We live in a world which is powered by knowledge. Knowledge is powered by information. The speed that information travels has a direct impact on the speed that knowledge moves. Think of it, when Fort William was established by the Northwest Company, information could take years to travel from Fort William to the company headquarters and back. Today, across our region, information travels in micro-seconds.
Across the North, the Internet as a means of communication has become a vital means of sharing news, information, and of course social networking.
Just how fast does information travel? As an example, earlier this week a piece on NNL was published on a missing youth. An hour after the story was put online there had been 779 individuals who read the post. As the map shows, those are from people all over Northwestern Ontario. By the end of the day, there had been 175,579 hits on the site.
If you look at the visitor map, it shows that interest in our city is strong. It also, I suspect, demonstrates the growing importance of our Aboriginal population in Northern Ontario. It also demonstrates clearly the speed that information travels in our region.
It is a trend that continues to expand. Over the past month, the average visitor on NetNewsledger.com has invested 29.49 minutes on the site, and is viewing 12 pages. The other local news sites in our community have readers onboard for 3.03 minutes and 5.02 minutes, reading 2.80 and 2.7 pages. Increasingly, our readership is expanding across the region. NetNewsledger.com is also widely read in southern Ontario, in Toronto, and Ottawa.
Our political coverage offers new ways of doing things, and it is noticed. People from around the world, via Google News, the powerful Google search engine, along with Facebook and Twitter find stories about our city and region.
Interest in issues about our community continue to grow. We are at the centre of an information revolution that is every bit as powerful as any revolution in history.
Thunder Bay has many of the attributes that the world is looking for. There is affordable housing, easy access to amazing recreation, a growing cultural and arts community, a skilled workforce. That is one of the reasons it is so important that our community and region should be increasing our online footprint.
It is happening, communications from almost every sector of the City of Thunder Bay have stepped up greatly over the past several years. Efforts to reach out from the City using Live-Stream video have become increasingly frequent. Thunder Bay is now also streaming City Council Meetings online. The City is taking what happens in our city, in so many cases, to a level not seen in many cities.
Those departments who seem stuck in the past are likely under future leadership to join the 21st Century sooner, rather than later.
For residents who care about our community, the changes are refreshing. We are witnessing both the start, and the continuation of change.
The key for our community is to be innovative. Positive change must become something that each of us, and our community leaders continue to embrace.
A favourite saying of mine is; “All of my hopes and dreams are of the future, I plan on spending the rest of my life living there”.
For Thunder Bay, our future must be one of change, innovation, experimentation, and acceptance of new ideas.
The more our region is a leader in innovation, the brighter our future will be.
James Murray
On the visitor map, each red marker represents a community from which there has been a visitor to NetNewsledger.com. Often in the cases of Ottawa, Toronto, Thunder Bay, and Sioux Lookout they represent multiple visitors.