Imagine downloading the entire printed collection of the Library of Congress in just over one second! Imagine every motion picture ever created to be streamed in less than four minutes! Then imagine every man, woman and child in China making a video call simultaneously! That’s how Cisco says its next generation router will revolutionize the internet. The opening claims about the power of device were made in a Cisco press release by Pankaj Patel, SVP and GM for the service provider business.

A tech-ticker report tells us how weeks ago Cisco had said that it was going to make “a significant announcement that will forever change the Internet and its impact on consumers, businesses and governments.” Today they’ve finally made that anticipated announcement about the next-gen CRS-3 router. “CRS-3 Carrier Routing System is aimed at the huge growth in video on the Internet, a trend that has also caused slowdowns,” said Cisco’s CEO John Chambers. The unheard-of speeds delivered by CRS-3 will be a monumental help for the online video consumption that is “growing like crazy.” “Video brings the Internet to life,” said Chambers. “You are moving from a messaging platform to a video platform.” It seems Cisco has been obsessed with the video business lately by not only pushing its networking gear, but also by acquiring Pure Digital, the maker of popular Flip video device.

The CRS-3 router “will be available within the calendar year,” said Cisco execs on a press and analyst call this morning. But the question that when consumers will be able to take advantage of this new high speed internet failed to get a clear answer, most likely because it depends on when our own internet service providers upgrade.

Cisco is not the first and only one getting into the high-speed act on the web. Google recently announced that it was planning to build a superfast broadband service. The Federal Communications Commission is also about to disclose a plan to improve high-speed Internet access across the United States.

The fact that the internet has transformed news into a social experience - with users actively contributing to the news itself, commenting on it and disseminating it through various online means - has made internet surpass newspapers as a primary way for Americans to get news. The findings of a recent Pew Internet & American Life Project report reveal that American news consumption landscape has undergone a sea change with newspaper and radio, once the greatest news sources, having been overtaken by today’s most formidable information medium: the internet.

“In the digital era, news has become omnipresent. Americans access it in multiple formats on multiple platforms on myriad devices,” says the report. As opposed to the traditional news media like newspaper and radio, internet not only offers readers hundreds of online news sources to choose from, it also makes the stories highly engaging by means of interactivity features and sharing options. Readers instantly post their comments on news stories and easily disseminate them by sharing links to news stories by e-mail, posting articles on Facebook and other networking feeds and tweeting them on Twitter etc – those “e-mail a friend" or "post to Facebook" links apparently work well. Thanks to a range of nontraditional consumption methods available online, such as social media postings, personalized news feeds, and news on-the-go, the popularity of the internet as a highly effective news medium is continuously on the rise.

Although national and local TV stations still dominate the news cycle for most Americans according to the report’s findings, the Internet now stands third in the list, ahead of national and local newspapers. But unlike the newspaper readers, a majority of online news consumers use two to five websites per day to get their fix. “The days of loyalty to a particular news organization on a particular piece of technology in a particular form are gone,” says the report. Still, 21% of online news consumers rely on just one website to get everything they want.

The report also reveals that most of the online news consumers also use traditional (offline) sources simultaneously, meaning a combination of both online and offline sources.

Americans today routinely get their news from multiple sources and a mix of platforms. On a typical day:

• 46% of Americans say they get news from four to six media platforms
• Just 7% get their news from a single media platform
• 78% of Americans say they get news from a local TV station
• 73% say they get news from a national network such as CBS or cable TV station such as CNN or FoxNews
• 61% say they get some kind of news online
• 54% say they listen to a radio news program at home or in the car
• 50% say they read news in a local newspaper
• 17% say they read news in a national newspaper such as the New York Times or USA Today.

“In this new multi-platform media environment, people’s relationship to news is becoming portable, personalized, and participatory,” says the report. These new metrics stand out:

• Portable : 33% of cell phone owners now access news on their cell phones.
• Personalized : 28% of internet users have customized their home page to include news from sources and on topics that particularly interest them.
• Participatory : 37% of internet users have contributed to the creation of news, commented about it, or disseminated it via postings on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter.

The report’s findings show that the internet has clearly surpassed newspapers and radio in popularity as a news platform on a typical day and now ranks just behind TV. Now that news consumption has become a socially-engaging and socially-driven activity online, the decline of newspapers and radio is expected to continue because it’s clearly implausible for the latter to make news as interesting and engaging as does the internet.

The capital city of Kansas, Topeka, has been renamed ‘Google, Kansas’ for the current month. The name change was announced Monday in a formal proclamation by the city’s mayor But Bunten. But the name change is unofficial and just for the month of March. A CNNTech report about the unusual move quoted Bunten as saying, "It's just fun. We're having a good time of it. There's a lot of good things that are going on in our city.”

What actually drove the mayor into taking this bizarre step was Google’s new “Fiber for Communities” program in which the web giant plans to install new internet connections at surprise locations. These connections will offer the chosen few communities over 1 gigabit per second of data transfer speeds that’s over 100 times faster than usual. Bunten, who himself is an internet novice keeping assistants for taking care of his emails, web search and other online communications, firmly believes that Google’s program will greatly benefit the younger residents of Kansas’ capital city.

Other U.S. cities are also elbowing for a spot in Google’s new “Fiber for Communities” program but none so far has gone such far as Topeka in this effort. According to the CNN report, cities have until March 26 to tell Google they're interested in the venture. Google says it will pick one or more cities for the pilot project. "We'll offer service at a competitive price to at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people," Google says in an online post. According to the web giant, the internet speeds are not on par with global standard and apparently Google is stepping up to fix things itself by means of the new broadband cable.

Bunten hopes that renaming Topeka to Google for a month will increase its chances to getting picked by Google for the program. While Bunten has kept his hopes high, Google declined to comment on whether it's taking the whole "Google, Kansas" thing seriously.