Friday, January 10, 2003

A Consumer Brand for Wi-Fi HotSpots US Wi-Fi hot spots to get seal of approval ZDNet Jan 10 2003 7:42AM ET The programme requires, among other things, that a minimum connection speed of 128Kbps be available to users, along with a Virtual Private Network, so people can send and receive data securely. Hot spots that meet the requirements will win the right to display a Wi-Fi Zone logo. [via Moreover - ZDNet] This is great news for the Wi-Fi industry.  While Wi-Fi has become a 'brand' that tech-savvy consumers are familiar with, it's mostly been in their home or workplace rather than in the public commons.  One of the interesting things about the T-Mobile/Starbucks deal (which I am now a user of) was the notion that T-Mobile primarily did this as a way to establish a HotSpot brand by having Starbucks put branded stickers on the doors of every participating retail outlet.  It's effective.  "Wi-Fi Zones" has a good ring and with the right kind if visible branding will help to transform a grassroots, industry-centric technology into a mainstream consumer solution. 10:28:29 AM    comment []

Media Objects in Weblogs There has been an active discussion recently amongst blog software vendors about a proposed extension to the MetaWeblog API for handling binary media.  It appears to be getting traction and perhaps we'll see it soon in MoveableType and Radio, if not others.   It raises an interesting issue especially as it relates to long-form streaming audio and video, where the user isn't really uploading a binary image or document, as is typically the case with binary data in web pages.   I've been experimenting quite a bit with Flash as a container for multimedia messages and content, with user recorded audio and video as the primary data types.  But the architecture is very different than a document-based HTML page.  The audio and video data is captured and recorded to a streaming server (Flash Communication Server) in real-time from the client, and then a Flash application loads and streams it in real-time from within an HTML page.   The challanges here for an open API are a plenty: With long-form video, especially, we can't assume (yet) that the weblog system is the primary storage and delivery vehicle for the streaming asset.  Each streaming architecture for rich media is different, and weblog systems don't have a standard API to be aware of that data. How can weblogs account for content and data external to their system? The solution we've come up with is very simple --- don't use the weblog to store or deliver any of the binary data, just use it to encapsulate HTML fragments that do live in pages and therefore can apply category meta-data and participate in RSS feeds.  But this just doesn't feel right, it's sort of hacking around a system that hasn't yet been designed to handle multimedia conversations.       10:11:28 AM    comment []