Donnerstag, 13. Januar 2005

Wifi technology is shifting power away from traditional carriers. For wireless coverage across the entire city Philadelphia chose a wireless "mesh" system, which allows the Wi-Fi cells to provide continuous coverage by sending data to each other. The usual architecture has each hot spot connecting back to a central switch or router. The mesh concept is a popular way of delivering affordable broadband to urban communities. Ultimately, you don't pay companies for phone lines when you can do it yourself. More than 100 communities worldwide are using mesh technology in some way. Mesh can cover a whole town for just $16 per user, half the price of the local digital subscriber line broadband technology provided by many phone companies. Municipal mesh networks could prove a real threat to the regional companies that dominate local phone service in the United States because the mesh networks can carry low-price voice calls using VOIP, or voice over Internet protocol. The telecom industry "lobbied aggressively" to prevent cities from offering noncommercial broadband services. Philadelphia's $10 million project clashed with a plan by the governor of Pennsylvania, to speed the adoption of broadband Internet access across the state by providing financial incentives for telecommunications companies. read original article by Robert Clark in the Herald Tribune International of Monday January 10 [Smart Mobs] 1:14:08 PM    comment []

The Centralization of BitTorrent Networks. Andrew Chen writes: "A couple friends and I did some analysis on the degree of centralization between BitTorrent sites, and put it up on the web. Interestingly, the distribution has a very obvious Long Tail pattern: Key conclusions: * Torrent files are extremely centralized, and do follow a Zipf Law-like distribution * However, instead of 20/80, the distribution is more like 4/80. * The long tail is very, very long - The number of sites with under 100 torrents numbers close to 87%. However, on the plus side, BitTorrent has lowered the barrier to creating new P2P networks down to zero..." Thank you Andrew ! [Smart Mobs] 1:12:19 PM    comment []

Amazon, Web Services, Sharing Economy. Harry Chen blogs for eBiquity Research Group about an article in Technology Review (subscription required) that describes the way Amazon has prospered by opening its API to more than 65,000 developers. A great example of a "sharing economy" -- Amazon prospers by making it easy to partner with them and prosper yourself. For example, Alan Taylor (a former Amazon programmer) has developed Amazon Light, a less cluttered Amazon web store that also offers product links to external web sites. For example, if the item you are viewing is a DVD, there will be a button that let's you see in a single click whether the same disc is for rent at Netflix. If it's a CD, you can check whether Apple's iTune music store has a downloadable version. [Smart Mobs] 1:11:28 PM    comment []

Technical standards for mobile presence. This article gets into SIP, the technical standards that enable mobile presence -- a key smartmob technology. (Via Mobitopia) A traveling worker hears a unique ringtone on his cell phone, checks the screen and finds a presence notification that a colleague is awaiting a plane in the same airport. A 'soccer parents' presence channel' on a dadâo[dot accent]s SIP softphone shows all the teamâo[dot accent]s parents are available to share a group voice or IM session right now. A teenager who just wrecked his momâo[dot accent]s car checks the family presence channel on his mobile phone to find out his motherâo[dot accent]s current mood. These examples only hint at how presence technologies will enable a large class of services not achievable on existing mobile networks. [Smart Mobs] 12:57:12 PM    comment []

More Thoughts on RSS Aggregator Market Share. Internertnews.com quoted me in their article entitled Benchmark For RSS Client Market Share?, a news story covering Feedburner's RSS Aggregator stats. It's the first time I've been used in the media as a source, so I'm quite chuffed. They didn't contact me, just quoted from my blog - which is fine by me. It's a good write-up and it summarizes some of the caveats involved in trying to measure RSS share. I've been surprised there hasn't been more comment in the blogosphere about Feedburner's stats, but I think that's mainly because people don't know what to make of it. So in this post I'll review a few of the caveats and in future posts I'll address some of the others. Default Subscriptions One of the more controversial caveats from the Feedburner post was that some of the Aggregators "ship with one or more of our top 10 feeds as a default" and that this may be skewing the data. Bloglines CEO Mark Fletcher emphasizes this issue in the Internetnews.com piece. He is quoted as saying "...there's a red herring created by default subscriptions (built into desktop software) that can skew results in ways that don't reflect the real user base." Now, I'm not so sure that default subs is as big an issue as the some of the browser-based aggregator caveats (more on that in a minute). Brent Simmons of NetNewsWire, which was second in Feedburner's list, left this comment on my blog yesterday about the default subs query: "In the current release version, NetNewsWire 1.0.8, there are 15 default feeds. Of those 15, there are just two FeedBurner feeds -- MacMerc and MacMegasite, same as in 2.0 beta." He also notes that users can of course unsubscribe from the default feeds at any time. We don't know how many people do unsubscribe, but given that NetNewsWire is an aggregator exclusively for the Apple Mac OS X then I'd say a lot of users would not unsubscribe from those two Mac feeds. But the real question, perhaps, is how many of Feedburner's big customers are Mac publications? Brent's mentioned two that may be, but how many others are signed up to feedburner's service? Mac publications are known to have large and devoted readerships, so it's quite possible Feedburner's data is skewed to a degree towards the most popular Mac aggregators - if there are a number of popular Mac feeds in their data. Mac users big RSS users? Another thing. If Mac publications are over-represented in Feedburner's data, then this would account for the interesting fact that the second-place getter in Feedburner's stats is an aggregator that is exclusively for people on the Mac OS platform. The vast majority of computer users are Windows users and NetNewsWire is, as far as I know, not an option for them. So it's quite amazing that an aggregator that only a relatively small percentage of people can use, turns out to be the number 2 aggregator for the whole market - and by a healthy margin too! I suspect it's got something to do with Macs being very popular amongst the sort of geek likely to read RSS feeds. Is NetNewsWire the iPod of RSS Aggregators? :-) Yahoo and the mainstream users Quick note on MyYahoo, which may be best positioned among the current crop of aggregators to get mainstream users to subscribe to RSS feeds (simply because that's their user base). It's interesting that Firefox Live Bookmarks places third in the Feedburner stats - and my stats for that matter. Firefox users are generally of the geek persuasion. Yahoo is a fair way back in 9th place, which seems to me another indication that geeks dominate these stats - i.e. Mac users come second, Firefox third! I mean come on, Macs and Firefox are minority products still and it's mostly geeks who use them. I use them (I rest my case). Bloglines Caveats Lest I be seen as picking on the desktop aggregators, I should point out what I think are two pretty big caveats for browser-based aggregators (and let's face it, we're mostly talking about Bloglines!). One caveat is that Bloglines subscribers don't take into account abandoned accounts, another is that a lot of desktop aggregator users do not poll for feeds every 24 hours (the timespan of Feedburner's study). In the first case, Bloglines stats are probably being overstated. In the second case, desktop stats (like NetNewsWire's) are likely being understated. Those are two pretty big caveats in my opinion. Measuring Value We've opened up a whole can of worms in this business of analyzing RSS Aggregator market share. But that's a good thing! The RSS world has long needed a way to measure hits and readers. If blogging is to be monetized with advertising and getting paid for niche content, then we need ways to measure the stats. How else will advertisers and media companies, and investors for that matter (IPO anyone?) know how to value RSS-based companies and RSS producers? So that's why I'm so enamoured of Feedburner - I think they've opened up the market for RSS-based measurement and are leading the way for us all. Interestingly, Feedburner threw out a broad hint that they're about to release a service that will solve some of these stats caveats: "Clearly, there's a need to dive deeper on stats tracking to start to get a better sense for how widely viewed an item is, how many registered subscribers are actually viewing the content as opposed to just retrieving it, etc. Since we wouldn't mention this unless we were doing something about it, look for a premium offering on this front in the near future." Summary I've only scratched the surface of the many caveats and issues surrounding the RSS aggregator market share data that has been released by Feedburner. But that's good, because it means I get to keep digging into and analyzing the data! Now, Feedburner: about those stats minus the top 10 feeds... how about giving those to us? ;-) [Read/Write Web] 12:45:26 PM    comment []

This Old T-Shirt: Fading. I'll probably catch a bunch of shit for this, but the instructions for this week's This Old T-Shirt are from YM. Yeah, the teen girl's magazine. Quit laughing. It's not like I read it or anything, honest. Seriously, shut up. I would have reprinted them as they appeared in the magazine, but I decided to see how the instructions stacked up in the real world. After checking over some forums, I found plenty of people who messed up their tees by following the instructions to the letter. A lot of folks turned their shirts white after soaking them in regular bleach for two days. Others crowed over how using coarse grit sandpaper chewed screenprinting and iron-ons off. So by taking the best bits out of all the suggested modifications to the instructions, I feel that we've cooked up a more comprehensive How To. The only problem is, we haven't had any time to test the instructions. Since I only added suggestions from forums that garnered positive results, you should be okay. We advise that you try these instructions on a shirt from the thrift store before you try to rough up the Ramones tee you just spent $20 on. Standard Fade Soak shirt in a solution of 8 cups of water and 1 1/2 cups of salt for 3 days. To make a solution, bring the water to a boil and stir in the salt. Let the solution cool before soaking your shirt, or your shirt may shrink. After 3 days, wring your shirt out and give it a quick interior and exterior rubdown with extra or super fine grit sandpaper. Tread lighly over any silkscreening or iron-ons, unless you're going for that look. Hang your shirt to dry in sun. If you live in a place where there is no sun, consider moving. Give the shirt a quick rinse and wring in your sink. Salt's really not that good for your washing machine. Wash and dry your shirt as you normally do. We suggest you don't throw any additional clothes in the load unless you're adventurous. Heaven forbid there's any collateral damage. Industral Strength Fade* Soak shirt in a mixture of 6 cups water, 2 cups color safe bleach and 1/2 cup salt for 2 days. To make this particular mixture, heat the water and stir in the salt until it has disolved. Let the water return to room temperature and mix in the color safe bleach. After 2 days, pull your shirt out of the mixture and immedeatley throw it into your washer. Wash and dry your shirt as you normally would. As we suggested for the Standard Fade, it may be a good idea to let your shirt fly solo on this load. * Please note that the industrial strength fade is only suggested on a 50/50 cotton/poly blend. Bleach will weaken the cellulosic fibers on your shirt, so please don't leave the shirt in too long. As with any bleach, it is advised that you check for color fastness as per the instructions on the container before using the above method. Keep in mind that Preshrunk is not responsible for any shirts that you happen to hose beyond all belief. If they turn out awesome, we'd appreciate any props that you send our way. Reguardless of how it went, we need some feedback to dial the instructions in even further. Cheers! [Eyebeam reBlog] 12:30:15 AM    comment []