Well, kinda sorta. But at least we made the list. And notice OKC did not [:P] Perhaps some of that is due to the fact that we still have a decent sized manufacturing base, the largest commercial aircraft maintenance base in the world, the port, etc. which connect us to other global cities.
What the list is about. "Basically, economic connectivity."
".... the world city network is identified as an unusual form of network with three levels of structure: cities as the nodes, the world economy as the supra-nodal network level, and advanced producer firms forming a critical sub-nodal level. The latter create an interlocking network through their global location strategies for placing offices. Hence it is the advanced producer service firms operating through cities who are the prime actors in world city network formation...."
The different city classifications in a nutshell...
http://www.lboro.ac.uk/gawc/gawcworlds.html
This years list and rankings.
(http://img25.imageshack.us/img25/9724/world2008t.jpg)
Amazing how many world class cities the USA has for being a fairly non-dense country. Looking over their criteria, it seems "world city" is all about connectivity but standing on your own (technically we are not a world city but are not "overly dependent" on world cities). Both in our cultural identity as well as travel and economic factors. Kind of a measure of global potential I suppose.
We are in the same category as Las Vegas, Nashville, Honolulu, Austin, SLC, and New Orleans - which I would consider American cities that are known by large numbers of people world wide. Internationally the same list as Liverpool, Jerusalem, Nanjing, Birmingham, Abu Dhabi, Hannover, and Winnipeg - certainly well known cities. Vaarry, interesting.