City of Philadelphia Coming Into High-Speed Internet Age At Last, Official Promises [KYW] — City Council President Anna Verna questioned interim CTO Tommy Jones about slow City Hall internet speed. As VisitPhilly & Mayor Nutter Want YOU to be Mayor [Geekadelphia] — GPTMC on FourSquare

Bluecadet Interactive is again up for Webby Awards; Vote to support them [Bluecadet blog]

Facebook faceoff: Artist embarks on ‘social networking stress test’ [Newsworks]

Hacking Education: A Contest for Developers and Data Crunchers [DonorsChoose.org] — “We’ve opened up that data, and invite you to make discoveries and build apps that improve education in America. Help to shape your school system’s budget by revealing what teachers really need. Build the first mobile app for hyper-local education philanthropy. We’ve got a list of suggestions to help get you thinking.”

5th graders suspended for Facebook pics in school [NBC 10] — H/T NewsWorks

View more videos at: http://nbcphiladelphia.com.

Read about what's going on here after the jump.

In which we link out to the tech news from Philly and elsewhere (when it matters) that slips through the cracks and make it way fun. See others here.

Philadelphians are the highest taxed people in the United States. So says eminent Philadelphia Daily News legacy columnist John Baer.

That’s enough to crack any red-blooded American’s Liberty Bell.

In a column, Baer was railing against Mayor Nutter’s calls to Harrisburg for legislative authority to hike the city’s sales tax from seven to eight percent. The story actually has a good dialogue in the comments section, too — a rarity for Philly.com.

The topic came up elsewhere this week.

Joe Distefano, the Inquirer’s top bearded business columnist, wrote an absolute must read on Nutter’s stalling of and his administration’s subsequent rethinking of continuing the move to “eradicating”the city’s two-pronged business privilege tax.

By no account should you think this is strictly a Philly problem these days.

Fast Eddie Rendell said this past week that if he was forced to push for a hike in the state’s income tax, he would vie for it to return to its normal state three years later, according to reporting from foxy Inquirer state capital correspondent Angela “It’s Greek” Couloumbis.

After the jump, why ET is with a Philly cop above, why 600 people paid $500 to be in Delaware and more than five other itches you need scratched, including our best read story of the week.

In order of importance for your ease.

• Our friends at Keystone Edge report on the honoree distinction two Pennsylvania tourism sites won at last week’s Webby Awards. Don’t forget bluecadet, which one a people’s award.
• Philly Tech News reports that three regional firms were named to CIO.com’s recent CIO 100, which honors companies that are creating business through technology innovation. Not one of the three are based within Philly’s 135 square miles. PTN keeps the good times rolling by reporting that the Milken Institute, which recently called Philadelphia the second best life sciences region in the country, ranked the Illadelph 11th in its High Tech Rankings, though there’s some question to that meaning.
• The Inquirer had a front page story on First Tuesday in November, a small Galloway, N.J.-based voter-tracking company that offers real-time Election Day updates. Dude in their photo is wearing a Yankees hat, though.
• You may have heard a collective yelp of excitement from their readers when Geekadelphia reported that Kevin Werbach, an assistant professor over at the University of Pennsylvania, will be giving a talk entitled All I Really Need to Know I Learned in World of Warcraft at tomorrow’s Philly Pecha Kucha event Geekadelphia also reports this week on a young woman who, well, they interview a young woman who goes around Philadelphia and takes photos of herself wearing an ET mask. That’s her standing with some confident Philadelphia police officer in the above photo. And, really, these are the stories that would be lost if newspapers went bankrupt and we didn’t have the Geekadelphia crew.
• Inqy columnist Distefano also reports that 600 hundred guests are said to have paid nearly $500 to attend Early Stage East 2009, a venture capital conference this week. It happened in Wilmington, Del. where happiness is made. [Full Disclosure: Sean Blanda loves Delaware.] That ain’t the only exclusive tech event afoot. The Business Journal reports that NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell will be the keynote speaker at the “client summit” to be held in King of Prussia later this month by e-commerce and interactive marketing services provider GSI Commerce.
• Contentinople reports on Philly.com’s move to use Brightcove to manage its video produced for the site. The move could come with an increase in video content, which reportedly could be a move toward the site’s still publicly undetailed plan for an online content model, which — though Contentinople didn’t make note — we first reported.

• Our Most Trafficked Story of the Week: Shop Talk: Obama Girl’s Leah Kauffman on Phrequency.com redesign

Every Friday morning we make sure you didn’t miss anything with Friday Tech Links.

Annesha Taylor has short hair and is seated with a bright floral dress.

She’s speaking into a camera about her first reaction to finding she had become one of the 28,000 HIV-positive people living in tropical Jamaica.

“How was I going to tell my mother? The best way,” she pauses there, “is if I killed myself.”

It’s unsettling in all the worst ways. But it’s also a way to personalize the AIDS struggle on the Caribbean island, which now has one of the highest rates in the world outside the African continent.

Partnering with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and D.C.-based Joshua Cogan, design firm bluecadet interactive, newly based in the loathsomely-named Art Museum area, helped tell the stories of Taylor and others and package them on Live Hope Love.

They hope to have helped bring attention to the ongoing battle, led by South Carolina poet, activist and Jamaican native Kwame Dawes. While surely not they’re only end goal, bluecadet has won praise and honors.

Add another: bluecadet interactive was nominated for two Webby Awards, winning a People’s Voice nod in one, the company announced late last month.

See what got them the win, how bluecadet got the work and what’s up next, after the jump.

Founder and principal Josh Goldblum hasn’t bought his tickets just yet for the 13th annual event to be held June 8 in New York City, but he’ll be able to collect the People’s Voice Winner in the Web site Art category and hear his firm’s nomination for Best Use of Photography on a Web site.

Both nominations came for Live Hope Love.

“I think it’s important that we got the people’s choice award,” Goldblum says. “The type of site we do, there’s not that many examples. This is real interactive journalism at a time when people are looking for what’s next in news coverage. The people’s choice award shows there’s a demand for it.”

See other examples of their interactive Web news work here. Earlier this year they won the Best Music Site award at South by Southwest, among others honors.

The Live Hope Love project was a collection of minds. In 2007, the Virginia Quarterly was partnering with the Pulitzer Center to work with poet Dawes. They wanted a way to create a significant Web presence to capture the gripping account of HIV/AIDS in Jamaica, using Dawes’s poetry all to be couched with an essay Dawes wrote for the quarterly’s spring 2008 issue.

Goldblum, who still had bluecadet based in D.C. and was well connected there, was a natural fit. At the end of 2007, Goldblum and friend and photographer Grogan trailed Davis to Jamaica, beginning with Kingston.

“We were gaining the trust of these people, finding what poems really illustrated these stories,” he says.

They collected video interviews, narration from Dawes — recorded at a South Carolina radio station — and graphic photographs. It launched and not much happened at first.

“There wasn’t a real big corporation supporting this, so there wasn’t a lot of immediate traffic,” Golblum says. “But then we got attention from the Huffington Post and Andrew Sullivan at the Atlantic, and then the awards came.”

Like being the only Philadelphia-based firm nominated at this year’s Webby’s.

Last year, Goldblum moved bluecadet to Philadelphia, nearer to friends, family and his native Willow Grove. His firm is already working with the American Revolution Center at Valley Forge and the University of Pennsylvania.

Other clients, from Philadelphia and nationally, are sure to follow.

But Live Hope Love and the attention it brought to the plight of people like Annesha Taylor isn’t something to forget.

“I’m proud of that. It’s growth was organic.” Goldblum says. “It’s that power of the Web.”