Lying beneath the escalating noise about what steps the government needs to take to ensure that all Americans have access to a decent, affordable broadband is a debate about just how bad the problem is.

Congress took a step in that direction with the House passage yesterday of the Broadband Data Improvement Act, a bill which directs numerous federal and state agencies, including the Federal Communications Commission, to improve the data they collect about broadband penetration.

The Senate had passed the bill on Friday, so it now heads to the White House where it will await the president's signature.

"If the United States is to remain a world leader in technology, we need a national broadband network that is second-to-none," Sen. Daniel Inouye, the Hawaii Democrat who sponsored the bill, said in a statement. "The federal government has a responsibility to ensure the continued rollout of broadband access, as well as the successful deployment of the next generation of broadband technology. But as I have said before, we cannot manage what we do not measure. This bill will give us the baseline statistics we need in order to eventually achieve the successful deployment of broadband access and services to all Americans."

By directing groups like the FCC and the Census Bureau to get more precise data from Americans about broadband services, Congress could be taking an important step toward settling the debate over the digital divide. If the resulting efforts prove studies like this one from the Pew Internet Project right, it could go a long way toward building a consensus among policy makers that could nudge along some of the various initiatives kicking around aiming to promote universal Internet (white spaces, AWS-3 auction).

It also comes as welcome news to groups that have been agitating for a unified push for nationwide broadband, such as Free Press, the organizer of the Internet for Everyone coalition.

"With this legislation, the Senate has taken a crucial step toward a national broadband policy," Free Press Policy Director Ben Scott said in a statement. "The data collected would lay the foundation for policies in the next Congress to promote universal, affordable high-speed Internet access for all Americans."

Let it never be said that Web 2.0 doesn't draw a partisan crowd. Yesterday we had Tim O'Reilly professing his support for Barack Obama to hearty applause from the audience. Today we have Arianna Huffington riffing on Fox News to their reprised delight.

The forum, appropriately enough, was an on-stage interview with O'Reilly, whose eponymous media firm is organizing the first Web 2.0 Expo to hit New York (the first of many, we were assured).

But strip away Huffington's ideological exuberance and she's well worth a listen. And if you share her disdain for the degenerate course that the Sarah Palin news cycle has taken (lipstick, pigs, moose stew, will daughter Bristol be happy with her new husband?, and on, and on, and on ...) then it's definitely worth the price of admission, wherever your political sympathies lie.

Say what you will about the woman, her passion for her medium is real.

"I fell in love with the Web when I was writing books and having a syndicated column," Huffington said, recalling her wonder at "how amazing it was that people without a platform could have a platform."

Today, the Huffington Post, which began as a simple news aggregator, is the biggest blog site on the Web, providing a platform for more than 2,000 bloggers.

With the presidential campaign in full swing, the site has seen its traffic spike more than 200 percent in recent months.

Partisanship aside, the Huffington Post has become an influencer for its sheer popularity. It may be a fringe, but it's an important fringe in the same way Rush Limbaugh's audience is important.

In an age when media outlets (this one included) see a rapidly diminishing portion of their traffic coming from direct navigation to their home page, Huffington Post still derives about one third of its page views in that old-fashioned manner. Another third comes from referring links, and still another from search.

"One of the things that helps in terms influencing the debate is that we are bookmarked by all the major media outlets," she said.

And, unlike those media outlets, Huffington does not pretend to give equal time to both sides of an issue. She would no more provide a forum for those who argue against global warming than, say, the Flat Earth Society.

And, finally, in response to O'Reilly's provocation that the Huffington Post is very similar to Fox News in its editorial approach of striving to shape the debate, Arianna was politely indignant.

"There's a huge difference," she said. "We want to shape the debate based on facts," she added, to thunderous applause.

It's been a tumultuous decade and a half for the tech industry here in New York City. Fred Wilson, one of the founders of the NYC VC firm Union Square Ventures, gave attendees here at the Web 2.0 Expo a breezy history of the boom, bust and rebirth of Silicon Alley.

And with that, in keeping with Fred's wishes, we'll now strike that term from the lexicon of this blog.

"We're not an alley," Wilson appealed. "Let's bury 'Silicon Alley.'"

What we are, according to a man who sits in the catbird's seat when it comes to NYC tech startups, is a reemerging market center with a tech industry whose growth rate is outpacing the Bay Area.

Wilson offered these figures for comparison: In 1995, there were 230 tech startups born from seed money in the Bay Area, compared to 30 in New York City. This year, if the current rate holds, there will be 360 in the Bay Area and 116 in New York.

Wilson hopes that someday New York might be home to something like 70 percent or 80 percent of the number of companies that reside in the Valley's. But in the two coasts, he finds an important contrast.

"There's something different about New York from Silicon Valley," Wilson said. "It's more about media, it's about advertising. It's business."

This is the first Web 2.0 expo to grace New York. While that has made people like Anil Dash very happy, the organizers were planning for a more hopeful linkage between the tech industry and Wall Street than the recent unpleasantness has afforded them.

Nevertheless, looking back at some of the video clips Wilson showed us from yesteryear, it's impossible not to feel as if the tech industry has turned a corner, that the pie-eyed frenzy of the late 1990s has given way to a more sober, mature economy. Thanks to the mortgage and credit collapse, the tech bubble isn't even the grand economic hubris of most recent memory.

So it's easy now to look back and laugh at clips of Josh Harris' weird (if prescient) experiments. And of Jason Calacanis telling 60 Minutes that he'd just given a guest lecture at Harvard Business School and advised the students to drop out immediately, and take whatever money they had available and start an Internet company.

Ah, weren't those the days?

Remember a couple weeks ago when sports fans and patriots were up in arms over NBC's refusal to stream live coverage of events that it was televising?

The fear was that online viewers would cannibalize the television ratings.

Fast forward to the next great sporting event (opening weekend of the NFL doesn't as "event," for our purposes): the U.S. Open Final. Normally played on Sunday, the men's final got bumped to Monday because Tropical Storm Hannah rained out the Saturday afternoon proceedings.

As a result, the match between Roger Federer and Andy Murray began at 5 pm ET, when many of us couldn't be in front of a television. But credit CBS with streaming the thing live;), so we're not completely shut off from what's might end up a historic win for Federer. (It's early yet, but he's looking sharp.)

So why the different strategies? For one, NBC was playing for much bigger stakes with the Olympics than CBS with the Open.

But CBS' move to live-stream the Open is also an encouraging sign that a network not widely known as the most cutting edge when it comes to digital strategy, might be warming up to the idea that content can live in multiple places at once without torpedoing the revenue proposition.

The CBS live stream is accompanied by the same trio of commentators you find on TV, and a sampling of the commercials has the familiar brands: IBM, Lipitor, etc. It's just on the Web. And the video quality is pretty poor. No one who has access to a television would watch this match online -- but for those of us who don't, it's nice to have it there.

Jerry Seinfeld has a long and storied history as a shill, and an unapologetic one at that. Think back to the 1990's: care for a Snapple? Then there are the HP commercials, which he used as a promotional vehicle for his own Bee Movie. He's a proven quantity, for certain.

But for Microsoft to tap into the Seinfeld sparkle to rehabilitate its public image in the face of the relentless onslaught of the "I'm a Mac" commercials? Seems an odd choice.

Granted, we've only seen one so far, and we're assuming they'll get a little more product-y as the campaign develops. After all, Seinfeld's inked to a $10 million deal, so we know Microsoft's in it for the long haul.

For those who haven't yet seen the spot, I'm not going to rehash its contents, but you can find it here.

So what insight do we gain into the Microsoft marketing strategy from this spot? For starters, it seems clear that Microsoft isn't trying to beat Apple at its own game, namely appealing to the techno-chic, laid-back hipsters so memorably exemplified by the delightfully smarmy Justin Long. To be fair, on that last descriptive, the humor of the "I'm a Mac" ads goes a long way toward defraying the natural repulsion of Long as a pitchman -- not so for Chad from the Alltel ads or Matt Walton, who shills for Optimum's triple play in the New York market. Apple's ads are clever, and often very funny.

Right -- it seems fair to say that by pairing Seinfeld with Gates Microsoft went a different way. Maybe it's less about youth than wisdom.

If the first is any indicator, it seems clear that the ads will be intended to play up Gates the icon. Last year Forbes ranked Jerry Seinfeld as the second-highest paid television star behind only Oprah, and his show had been off the air for nearly a decade. Yet in the Microsoft ad we have him on his knees fitting Bill Gates for shoes.

But let's also remember that Seinfeld is a comedian, albeit one whose humor isn't very close to what you'd call youthful or edgy. But that's not Microsoft's image. There's nothing in the first Seinfeld spot that's laugh-out-loud funny. But there are hints, attempts at humor -- the Shoe Circus club card is kind of cute, showering in your shoes is typical Seinfeld-wacky, and Microsoft making computers that you can eat like cake is a nice thought. The point I see in this is that Microsoft isn't trying to cast off its button-down image with a single video spot, but it would like you to understand that it, too, can take it light.

It's also trying to keep above the fray. It's hard to imagine taking a more direct shot at the competition than what you find in the "I'm a Mac" ads. You don't get that from the Seinfeld spot -- instead, we see the legendary comedian walking reverently beside the man who seems content to trade on his legacy as the father of the modern software industry.

Then there is the curious mention of the "conquistador." Is Microsoft suggesting that Bill Gates is buying eponymous shoes? Are we to imagine Bill as the conquistador? Microsoft? The Spanish family noting that, "They run tight" seems like a playful bit of self-deprecation to me. Microsoft's reputation isn't that of a loose company.

There's also a well-worn adage about Microsoft that when it can't build market share, it tries to buy it. Yahoo comes to mind. So the conquistador bit can't help but conjure the image of Microsoft as a company whose success is owed to the sword.

More likely it's a joshing reference to Gates as a world-beater.

But the fact that it can't be said with certainty is what makes it fun. While many of the "I'm a Mac" ads flirt with brilliance, they've got about as much subtlety as a Claymore mine. What a great spectator sport we'll have if the rest of the spots in the campaign are as oblique as this one.

Updated to add NebuAd's response.

Scott McNealy famously quipped, "Privacy is dead. Get over it."

Perhaps, then, what we're seeing in the case of NebuAd is privacy taking vengeance from beyond the grave.

The company that tracks people's Web surfing habits from Internet service providers to serve targeted ads has lost its CEO, Bob Dykes, who stepped down today in favor of a position as CFO with payment-services provider Verifone.

NebuAd, which declined to comment on Dykes' departure, has taken a beating this summer, beginning with the announcement by Charter Communications that it was shelving plans to trial NebuAd's service in response to privacy concerns raised by lawmakers.

In congressional hearings, Dykes repeatedly testified that his company's system didn't collect any personal information and that no one, "not even the government," could discern an individual's identity from the data that NebuAd collected.

Alas, those assurances might not be enough to save the company. In the midst of a PR crisis, NebuAd's clients have been dropping trials of the company's service. Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., plans to introduce legislation next year that would require NebuAd to retool its tracking mechanism to only collect data about people who have expressly opted in to the system.

In painting NebuAd as a pariah, it's beginning to look like Markey might have accomplished some of his mission before he even got his legislation introduced.

UPDATED:

NebuAd's statement:

"NebuAd's multi-channel advertising platform was designed to increase the value exchange between marketers and media companies through precise audience segmentation. With an initial go-to-market approach focused on the Internet service provider channel, our CEO Bob Dykes helped accelerate NebuAd into that market leveraging our multi-channel platform along with unique technology built specifically for the service provider channel. Servicing Internet service providers remains a priority of NebuAd, and we are enhancing our technologies in that area.

"In addition, however, NebuAd is also broadening its market via more conventional media channels and means. Accordingly, NebuAd's current President, Kira Makagon who has been responsible for NebuAd's advertising systems and media revenue, will assume the role of CEO to drive adoption of the platform across more traditional channels.

"Bob Dykes will continue to hold the position of Chairman of the Board."