On The Margins

Friday September 01, 2006

[ Web ] Hours of Internet Video Watched

Financial Times reports that there are not enough ways and experts to dispatch and attach ads on video service web sites, and a Wall Street Journal columnist and others scrub YouTube for data that can help size the viewers and hours of use.

Last May, FT published a story on the three largest video distribution services on the web. The story reminds readers of Yahoo's acquisition of "Web 2.0" services such as Flickr, del.icio.us and upcoming.org. (The latter is posting an upcoming "web 2.0 conference" also sponsored by Sun Microsystems Inc.) These are simple services that do something specific very well. 

An earlier FT report published in April explores YouTube's early growth and a later report on branded channels, while noting the challenges with advertising:

Lee Gomes, WSJ Internet columnist, has scrubbed YouTube and produced an interesting report this Wednesday drawing on his own data as well as those of others including academicians' and industry watchers'. Gomes reports that the number of videos has grown by 20% in the last month alone, from 5 to 6 million pieces. Gomes quotes Johan Pouwelse, a Delft University professor, saying that 70% of YouTube's registered users are American and roughly half are under 20 years of age.

The oldest active viewer apparently is geriatric1927, a 79-year old U.K. resident who sits at his PC in his study with headphones on and narrates memories of World War II. Ernie Rogers, a 23-year old from Colton, Calif., whose handle is "lamo1234," has watched more YouTube videos than anyone. Mr. Rogers claims he is on the site 24/7. And as "the YouTube rockstar," he has shared his original songs, including one called "Waste of Time."

"The total time the people of the world spent watching YouTube since it started last year. The figure is -- drum roll, please -- 9,305 years!" writes Gomes in his column.

In the meantime, here's a couple of strange videos one could probably only watch on YouTube from here in the U.S.:

1. Sham-e Aroosi ("Wedding Dinner"). This Persian one uses a Michael Jackson tune as the background music for an Iranian movie commercial about that repeating movie story about the father of the bride.
2. Revayat ("Story"). This is an Azeri song which seems to have been produced in Azerbijan Republic. It should have been song in the background of Azeri instruments that the famous Ashig musicians play, i.e. the tar string instrument held horizontally at the chest level, and played with intensity and a beat identical to the beat of this particular song. Instead we here some strange electronic instrument repeating a very boring tune in the background of this classically styled song.

2006-09-01 10:43:36.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Wednesday August 30, 2006

[ Web ] I'm feeling lucky

Charles Arthur of The Guardian has written an interesting analysis of search engine optimizers (SEOs), "Im' feeling lucky," and the appearance of Wikipedia on the top of the search pile.

2006-08-30 19:09:55.0 -- Comments [3] ; Permalink ; Trackback.

[ Web ] Blogging for Big Bucks

Check it out here. And, Richard Waters of Financial Times, reports it from San Francisco.

2006-08-30 18:42:36.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Sunday August 13, 2006

[ Web ] Posting to del.icio.us

You may wonder what the little blue and black square next to the title of this entry means.

Well, think of it as a slight modification in the user interface of this weblog. I've put it there so you can use it to post this entry onto your del.icio.us. (Credit should go where it is due. I first saw this feature used by Rich Sharples on his blogs.sun.com weblog.)

It is easy to include this  on your own weblog, too. Here is how you do it on Roller.

For those familiar with URLs used for posting, the break-down should be obvious.

<a href="http://del.icio.us/post?url=blogs.sun.com$baseURL/page/$userName/?anchor=$entry.anchor;title=$entry.title"><img src="........." title="Post to deli.cio.us"></a>

2006-08-13 00:09:55.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Friday August 11, 2006

[ Web ] Finally Using del.icio.us

I'm finally using del.icio.us but don't expect anything work-related in my del.icio.us.

There's enough geeky stuff on del.icio.us. I've posted my tag roll below and I may also post my link roll later.

I will also keep it near the end of the series of entries here.

2006-08-11 22:35:59.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Thursday August 10, 2006

[ Web ] Political Mash-Up

The Washington Post has started a video mash-up contest in this political and election season.

Here's the starting material thanks to Post's political reporter, Dana Milbank. (Should he have pursued a career in acting, one may ask.)

If this is not sufficient to convince you that The Posts has something going, you may want to also take a look at their Sudoku page. Try to play it.

Web, Politics, Art, Mathematics

2006-08-10 00:28:59.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Monday August 07, 2006

[ Web ] Does File Sharing Reduce Record Sales?

A recent study from Denmark considered the question of whether file sharing shrinks record sales. Lawrence Lessig notes that actual record sales, rather than estimates, form the basis of this Danish study.

Technology, Society, Web

2006-08-07 14:20:53.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Monday July 31, 2006

[ Web ] Cost-per-Click Advertising

Richard Waters, Financial Times technology correspondent, writes about cost-per-click advertising model. Here is how he summarizes the traditional view of the "click" on the web:

2006-07-31 09:07:17.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Monday May 29, 2006

[ Web ] Weblogging Ecosystem

Thanks to my colleague and friend Sivakumar Thyagarajan for pointing me to the 3rd Annual Workshop on the Weblogging Ecosystem (hosted by blogpulse) and to the paper by Kyumars Sheykh Esmaili, Mohsen Jamali, Mahmood Neshati, Hassan Abolhassani and Yasaman Soltan-Zadeh, "Experiments on Persian Weblogs."

This paper, authored by researchers at the Semantic Web Reserach Laboratory at Sharif University of Technology focuses on an analysis of the blogs created in the "persianblog.com" domain.

What I found interesting in the paper may perhaps be mundane to many of you. The authors suggest that if the ratio of internal links of a group of blogs to external links grows beyond a certain threshold (2? 2.5?), the group of blogs can be considered to form a separate social network.

The authors suggest that the slow rate of convergence for the Page-Brin "page-rank" equation could be due to internal, small-sized communities within a larger social network.

In comparison, they note the rapid convergence of the Kleinberg "authority-hub" equation (when it is calculated devoid of a query, which is not the common way of doing it) to a result that has little similarity to "page-rank".

2006-05-29 23:06:21.0 -- Comments [4] ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Wednesday May 24, 2006

[ Web ] Comparing Google and Amazon Web Services

In the May 2006 edition of Linux Journal, which I picked at the JavaOne 2006 conference (San Francisco), Reuven Lerner has a pretty good review and comparison of Google web services vs. Amazon web services, the conditions for their use and methods to program them (in Perl, using SOAP::Lite).

2006-05-24 23:07:13.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Thursday May 11, 2006

[ Web ] Google News Gets It

While Yahoo News seems to depend on inter-corporate agreements it has with AP, Reuters and others, Google News has upped the ante by including a much wider array of sources for news items, relying not only on the usual sources for English news but also on international sources.

Take for example the case of searching for new on Iran which I just did a moment ago:

It comes back with this Guardian commentary by Simon Tisdal on "the Bush administration's rejection" of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's letter, an AP report published by Seattle Intelligencer on a similar topic, a report on the politicization of The World Cup from South Africa, a report from Russia's RIA Novosti on finding a common language, a Xinhua report from Moscow, and another regarding military issues from RIA Novosti, and finally, a report from IRNA published in Tehran Times.

Now, that's some diversity on which Google News can capitalize on.

2006-05-11 22:59:13.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Wednesday May 10, 2006

[ Web ] New Statistics About WWW Usage

International Herald Tribune's technology writer, Victoria Shannon, summarizes some significant statistics about global Web usage, which are now "giving the 'world' in World Wide Web new legitimacy." ("More World on the Web," IHT, Wednesday, May 10, 2006.) The statistics comes from ComScore, a market researcher based in Chicago.

Some surprising results:

[By measure of]...how much time surfers spend online in each nation...calculated by average hours spent online per visitor, the United States is not even in the top 15.

[Among the]...most visited sites (or what comScore calls "the top media properties worldwide")...the biggest surprise was No. 7, Wikipedia, the user-created Internet encyclopedia, which maintains many foreign-language sites in addition to the main English one.

[The best thing about Wikipedia is the fact that it is user-created. I've contributed extensively to this English entry on Sabalan although I wish my typing was just as fast in Persian.]

Of the 22 billion messages Postini processed in April, unwanted e-mail accounted for 18.5 billion - a staggering 84 percent of the total and about the same as the previous month.

By the way, Shannon ends her weekly take with a blurb on a local Italian: "Federico Faggin, a native of Italy, was honored with the lifetime achievement award for his contributions to the invention of the microprocessor in 1970 at Intel. His most recent research has been with Foveon, a California company of which he is chief executive, working on image sensors for digital photography."

2006-05-10 23:25:43.0 -- Comments [1] ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Saturday April 29, 2006

[ Web ] The Space of MySpace

In his Wall Street Journal column, "Portals," Lee Gomes reviews the space of MySpace. (Paid subscription may be required to veiw the full article.)

VarsityWorld now has 250,000 users; the head counts at the others range from 50,000 for Imeem to three million for Tagged. MySpace has 70 million, and the kicker is that there is no universal agreement on how it got to be that big, a fact that weighs heavily on its challengers. Many people believe it simply had the good fortune of being in the right place when the youth Zeitgeist zigged in its direction instead of zagging in another.

To this, we can add information regarding other "social" networks on the web, e.g. eBay and Skype. I'm not quite sure how large eBay's social network is. This weekend's Financial Times marks Skype's social network at 100 million. Similar networks exist for instant messsaging, mobile communications (voice and messaging) and traditional telecommunications.

Of course, the mystery of how networks grow has puzzled many but, intuitively, it should be easy to see that once a network proves (or is perceived) to be large, it attracts all kinds of additional members who want to benefit from its size. The value of a network increases as more end points join the network.

In a social network, there is another twist. Not only the number of end points but also the quality and diversity of the end points produce a multiplicative effect in the value of the network.

Once a network reaches a critical size and grows large, it will keep growing.

In social networks, what adds value to a network is its social cohesion, diversity and adaptability.

The whim of youthful tastes actually will play an enormous role in deciding the fate of MySpace and its next challenger. But no one can admit "Let's hope we get lucky" is the company business plan. All of the MySpace challengers, then, have a Plan B: a strategy.

In the full article Gomes reports on his interviews with VarsityWorld, Tagged, Imeem and Tagworld representatives about how they plan to break the spell of MySpace. (He also mentions Facebook. Apparently, Imeem requires some locally installed software.)

A couple of people have pointed me to their MySpace sites, and I have found most of them quite wanting. However, in a time when teenagers and the young spend hours and hours in front of their computer screens, this sort of cyber-space "community" brings a kind of playful ease to identity and persence.

Strikingly, in majority of cases people still rely on their physical experience in the real-world to fill their personal cyber-spaces. Without the physical experience, little meaning will be left to share.

To all Cyber-Spacy spacers (I'm coining new phrases here), if they can find the time away from their "space" building activities to read 100 pages of rather easy material on the limits of their efforts, I would recommend Dreyfus' On the Internet, or some of his articles, like the one on how Kierkegaard would have seen the Internet.

In the long run, it seems there will be some room, even in this space, to come up with some really cool applications, i.e. the "next thing" after blogging, which makes space building easier.

By the way, browsing through some of these "social" cyber-spaces, I ran into an interesting VarsityWorld video called "Driven". You should be able to find it through a search on VarsityWorld's user-careated videos. Artists will be a direct beneficiary of these "social" networks, which provide another way to distribute creative work.

2006-04-29 17:33:39.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Monday March 27, 2006

[ Web ] Blogging Bureaucrats

James Connell of IHT reports Doreen Carvajal's story about Europe's blogging bureaucrats.

May be not to bureaucrats, but to politicians, it should be clear that nothing can replace real presence, certainly not electronic touch.

The last few paragraphs in Carvajal's story confirm this maxim.

2006-03-27 00:24:21.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Thursday March 16, 2006

[ Web ] Legal Weblogs in Persian

There are some interesting Weblogs by Iranian law students, for example, one by Mr. Hamid Barghbani, hosted on the hoqoogdan ("lawyer") web site. For example, in a recent entry, Barghbani analyzes the issue of responsibility and intentionality in crimes and torts, making references to items 229 and 230 of the Hammurabi's Code. I have also given another analysis regarding what might be counted as intentional vs. unintentional crimes.

Intentionality is also of great significance to children. I still remember my 11-year-old daughter's first legal question to a mojtahed, posed at 6, regarding the significance of intentionality in misdeeds. Her's was a bit more complicated than a "simple" issue of intention. ("What if you want to do something wrong, and then you end up doing it accidentally?")

2006-03-16 07:42:24.0 -- Comments [2] ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Monday March 13, 2006

[ Web ] How to Evolve a Web Service

The online edition of The Wall Street Journal has a new layout.

The Journal has in the past evolved its interface and its web service composition very gradually but also very prudently.

It is very clear that as users interact with the interface, their behavior provides really valuable statistics on how they prefer, in practice, to navigate the site.

Every design change has been an improvement towards something better, and the Journal's online design has gradually evolved to become an ever happier amalgam of its print edition and its online self. In fact, in an earlier design improvement to its online edition, the Journal offered an online rendition of its daily print content within the exact categories found in its paper edition.

2006-03-13 23:40:45.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Monday March 06, 2006

[ Web ] Blogs in China

Blogs are becoming popular in China, reports David Barboza of The New York Times. (IHT has republished Barboza's article.)

Of the current count of 30 million blogs in the world, 2 million come to us from China. Sina.com, a portal, hosts some of the most popular blogs, including the one by Xu Jinglei, which has received more than 11 million visitors. ("The only thing I'm concerned is to be a good writer. How to develop an economic model for the blog? I will leave such a confusing question to my colleagues and the I.T. elite," writes Jinglei.)

The issue of profiting from one's blog is coming up fast, Barboza reports.

2006-03-06 16:43:17.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Saturday March 04, 2006

[ Web ] Making Money With Someone Else's Writing?

Over the weekend, as you can see, I'm spending a bit of time fixing some things up with this weblog.

In the meantime, I discovered a "Read A Blog" web site which has a direct copy of my writing on this weblog combined with Google ads.

I do not believe the license I'm using to publish this Weblog (Creative Commons) allows for such complete copying for commercial use if the commercial use is the only creative "mixing" of my work but I guess I should still refer this to Dr. Lessig.

2006-03-04 22:19:02.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.

[ Web ] Javascript Guru

At Quirksmode, I found some nice Javascripts.

2006-03-04 09:53:06.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.

Tuesday February 28, 2006

[ Web ] Mobile Blogging

Among blogging modes, I like mobile blogging best. It forces you to be short and focused on capturing a particular instance. It becomes more like photography, even if it is about text or short pieces of video or sound.

I've used my Sidekick II for this over the last couple of years.

Now, Sony Ericsson and Google have announced an attractive integration between Sony Ericsson devices and Google Search and Google-owned Blogger.

2006-02-28 15:02:55.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.