Internet

One of the promises of the internet has always been the collapsing of the pipeline between content creators and content consumers. We have already witnessed this phenomonen in the newspaper industry as the cost of distributing news fell from over $100 per subscriber per year to fractions of a penny.

As internet technology improves the same will happen to movies and television. Vuze, formerly Azureus, is a Silicon Valley startup that is at the forefront of this trend. By utilitizing peer-to-peer Bittorrent technology, Vuze has inverted the usual relationship in video streaming between scale and performance. Most internet streaming video degrades less than gracefully as more users watch a given stream. With peer-to-peer technology, the more people who watch the same show as you, the better your quality will be. Not only that, as more viewers join the network, the cost of delivering a high definition video stream to your TV, iPod or laptop declines to zero. With millions of concurrent users at any one time on the Vuze HD network (as of July 2009), you can be sure that someone will be watching what you are.

Just as the newspaper empires took over a decade to crumble, it’s likely that the large production studios will defend their fortresses for as long as possible. But in the long run, creative producers and quality content will gravitate to the cheapest distribution network. Consumers will pay less for their television shows, and the people who create the shows we watch will keep more of the profit.

If you’ve always found using floats in CSS to be mostly trial and error then this Floatorial might clear up matters a little.

There is a fairly lengthy list of tasks when first starting a website. This is a compilation for my future sanity:

1. Choose a website name (do this first because you need it for all subsequent steps. Don’t continue until you’ve done this because it’s almost impossible to change later.
2. Register the URL. I recommend hosting with Dreamhost. They’re great value for money and the support is excellent. In general, it’s easier to register your URL through your hosting provider.
3. Submit the URL to all the search engines as soon as possible. The crawlers will take a while to getting around to your site.
4. Download the Aptana IDE. It’s a great, free editor.
5. Download and install Firefox. Install the Firebug plugin.
6. Make sure you have 301 redirects to ensure that Google sees your website as a single URL and not two different websites (one for www.domain.com and another for domain.com). If you’re using Dreamhost this is easily achieved by selecting your preferred URL format under the ‘Manage Domains’ section of the Dreamhost panel. There is no need for a .htaccess file if you’re using Phusion Passenger.
7. Sign up for Google Analytics, Google Webmaster and (if you plan on advertising) Google Adwords
8. When designing your initial web layout, leave space for ads if you plan to add them later.
9. Good link for embedding video
10. After a month or so, use Hubspot to check your search engine hygiene.

I’ll add more to this list over time.

It’s a pity that Yahoo is still maintaining the 5000 query limit per IP address. 5000 stock quotes is the equivalent of 10 years of daily data for two companies only.

jQuery Tools is a great UI javascript library for web designers

Twubs is a great website for tracking a specific Twitter hashtag. For instance, you can follow the post-election chaos in Iran in real time. The window below shows the current activity surrounding the election in Iran. It was getting over 1000 messages per minute on June 16, 2009.

If you use Google Analytics’ Site Overlay functionality, it occasionally results in a white or gray haze over your website which prevents you from clicking on any of the links.

The good news is that your browser is the only one affected (none of your customers will see the same effect). All you have to do to fix the problem on your end is clear your cookies (specifically a cookie called GASO).

I’ve been playing around with Wolfram Alpha’s new computational knowledge engine and it seems to need a lot of work before it becomes more than an exotic curiosity. I entered the following query:

US Debt / US GDP

and it returns the following answer:

0.585 years (2007 estimate)

I’m not sure how to interpret that but it seems ominous!

The thought of managing accounts with 450 different ad networks made my head hurt so I signed up with Rubicon Project .  They claim to optimize the ads on your blog and show better performing ads more frequently. It’s been running for over a week on my blog and (as you can probably see on the sidebar to the right), I’m still running public service ads for the Red Cross. The dashboard on Rubicon Project’s website says that it’s still activating, though.

Update: The reason no ads were running is that I had forgotten to add baseline ad tags from Google and Rubicon Project has limited inventory in the 200×200 size that I had chosen (since it fits nicely in my sidebar). Their customer service is very helpful, though, and they were excellent at clarifying what I’d done wrong.

If you want to share video and visual information from your desktop you should check out Dyyno. They have combined some pretty cool video compression technology with a peer-to-peer networking layer and the result is very slick.

Their technology provides the plumbing for Xfire’s live video service. It’s still in beta but if you need a WoW fix, that’s the site to visit.