Technology: October 2007 Archives
Today we're hosting folks from Apple giving one of their iPhone Tech Talks at the UW in conjunction with the Educause 07 conference here in town. The content that's being covered is available at the Apple iPhone Developers' web site, but it's nice to spend a day getting it all in a bundle with other folks who are interested in these topics.
Technorati Tags: apple, iphone, development, web
I was particularly struck by these facts from the first presentation, which came from the Forrester Consumer Conference:
- 44 million active users, projections for 60 million by the end of 2007
- More than half the users are female
- More than half the users return daily
- 34% work as professionals
The second presentation, from French consulting firm Faber Novel, has a slide with some interesting ideas about metrics in measuring success of social media, on slide 28, which has some ideas for how to measure user engagement (e.g. ratio of visits to number of content pieces posted, or % of active users to the total), virality (if that's a word), and influence.
Technorati Tags: facebook, social-software
I just started using the MoFuse beta to generate a version of this blog that's tailored for use on mobile devices. MoFuse takes the RSS feed from the blog and creates a nice version of the site which loads up easily on cell phones and other hand-held devices. You can check it out by clicking on the MoFuse icon in the sidebar or at:
Technorati Tags: blogging, mobile-devices, mofuse
James reports the statistics for UW email in September:
Sadly, 90.6% of the 137,001,383 messages we processed last month were classified as spam.
Another interesting item: sometime during the afternoon of the 10/7 we processed our billionth (yes, with a B) message for the year. That's more than we processed through all of 2003, 2004, and 2005 combined.
...we're now routinely seeing over 6 million messages a day and set a new percentage record on 10/14 with 96.8% of 5.8M processed that day being spam.
One has to wonder how we can (or why we should) continue to invest in providing robust technology infrastructure to provide a service that overwhelmingly serves to transport messages we don't (or would prefer not to) deliver.
While the recently released ECAR Research Study on Undergraduate Students and Information Technology holds that an overwhelming percentage of undergraduate students prefer to receive communication from their college or university via a university provided email account, a 2005 Pew study on Teens and Technology found that
The presence of email in teens’ lives has persisted, and the number that uses email
continues to surpass those who use IM. However, when asked about which modes of
communication they use most often when communicating with friends, online teens
consistently choose IM over email in a wide array of contexts.
and the ECAR study also found that 69.3% of 18-19 year-olds surveyed use social networking sites like Facebook daily.
Of course the Pew study also found that Teens who participated in focus groups for this study said that they view email as something you use to talk to “old people,” institutions, or to send complex instructions to
large groups., and ECAR found that 85.1% of students had email as the first choice for campus communication.
My guess is that may change over time as people get more and more used to communicating via methods other than email. I know that in my life I find that what was once exclusively communication via email is now shared more and more with IM and Facebook and Twitter and the like.
Technorati Tags: email, spam, social-software
As I blogged over at the eTech blog, our iTunes U site for the UW is now up and running. This lets people get at UW video and audio content from within Apple's iTunes software. Check it out!
UPDATE - There have been some comments that have come in with some additions to this list, and some folks who've said it's useful to have a list like this, so I'll try and add examples of legitimate p2p applications as they come in, and gather them all in this post so they're at a predictable permanent URL.
Sandy pointed out this weekend that as we have long been excoriating the entertainment industry for painting all use of peer to peer technologies as illegitimate, and for claiming that there are lots of legitimate uses for these technologies, that it might be useful to be able to provide examples of that kind of legitimate use that we can share with people who are part of these discussions with legislators.
I came up with this list and would be happy to have more examples to add to it:
Additions 10 October:
Jim Gaynor points out that Trent Reznor and his popular band Nine Inch Nails post multitrack audio files of their raw tracks in Apple's Garage Band format that they distribute via bittorrent.
It's also very interesting to see Reznor's post of 08 October that says:
I've waited a LONG time to be able to make the
following announcement: as of right now Nine Inch Nails is a totally
free agent, free of any recording contract with any label. I have
been under recording contracts for 18 years and have watched the
business radically mutate from one thing to something inherently very
different and it gives me great pleasure to be able to finally have a
direct relationship with the audience as I see fit and appropriate.
Additions 09 October:
Thom Deardorff sent in a couple of very cool bioinformatics efforts:
Chinook, which is a Canadian project that aims to "facilitate exchange of analysis techniques within a local community and/or worldwide." and
Tranche, which says "In a nutshell, we're using peer-to-peer (P2P) concepts mixed with modern encryption to make a secure distributed file system that is well-suited for proteomics research data and independent of any particular centralized authority."
Jim Gaynor notes in a comment:
VMWare offers a catalog of "virtual appliances" - pre-built VMs that can be freely shared, made by members of the VM community. Most VMs have a torrent download.
Blizzard's World of Warcraft game (an immense commercial enterprise with over 9 million subscribers) distributes game updates via bittorrent. Sometimes major content patches exceed a quarter gigabyte.
Terry points out that Joost and Skype use their own p2p protocols for video and VOIP.
Oren's Original List (07 October 2007)
Red Hat and other linux distros rely on bittorrent to distribute the operating systems and updates. There's a site that tries to keep track of them at:
http://linuxtracker.org/
There are lots of folks who use various p2p filesharing services to share files wit friends and family. One thing I saw notes that p2p offers better error correction in file transfer than most other methods.
http://bt.etree.org/ is a bittorrent network used to distribute recordings of musicians who are "trade-friendly" (authorize fans to trade recordings of their performances).
The Democracy video distribution service uses bittorrent: http://www.technologyevangelist.com/2006/03/democracy_player_rev.html
There's a bittorrent interface to Amazon's s3 storage service.
Bibster is a project that aims to assist researchers in managing, searching, and sharing bibliographic metadata (e.g. from BibTeX files) in a peer-to-peer network. - http://bibster.semanticweb.org/
Project Gutenberg uses bittorrent to distribute CD and DVD images: http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:The_CD_and_DVD_Project
iBiblio, which calls itself "the public's library and digital archive" uses bittorrent: http://torrent.ibiblio.org/
Librivox distributes audio recordings of books that are in the public domain via bittorrent. They have a page that explains why p2p distribution is important to them at http://tinyurl.com/2gw3by
The makers of the award-winning documentary film "The Corporation" are distributing a version of the film via p2p (bittorrent). The director says:
I think most people downloading the film understand what an enormous effort it is to make a film like this and will support it, if there’s a reasonably easy way to. So, I decided to release my own “shareware” version of the film, but with a short message at the beginning, asking viewers for a little financial consideration to help offset the costs of production and keep our outreach efforts going.
Technorati Tags: copyfight
My colleagues at the ResearchChannel have just announced a new partnership with the National Science Foundation to develop programs about scientific research.
Under the partnership agreement, NSF will transmit to ResearchChannel up to 150 program hours a year in formats that include a series of lectures from distinguished scientists, including Nobel Prize winners; a series of panel discussions with scientists and journalists about ongoing NSF-funded research and current scientific issues; and an institutional research series that will feature new and archived video from different scientific research and educational communities.
Is that cool or what?
The partnership’s first co-production is “Frontier,” a weekly, hour-long show with researchers discussing discoveries made possible through NSF support and key issues at the research frontier. The first episode of “Frontier” will premiere on Wednesday, Nov. 7, 2007, and will air on Wednesdays and Saturdays. “Frontier” will air Wednesdays at 2 a.m., 8 a.m., 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. (all Pacific time). It will air Saturdays at 1 a.m., 7 a.m., 1 p.m. and 7 p.m. (all Pacific time).
Some upcoming topics on “Frontier” include marine biologist Donal Manahan looking at three centuries of exploration and research at the north and south poles and why they matter today; and engineering professor Richard Murray describing the world’s most grueling competition for self-driving robotic cars.
I know I'll be watching.
Congrats to Amy and the whole ResearchChannel crew!
Technorati Tags: nsf, science, research, researchchannel, video
I recently got a lovely new Toshiba Portege R500 laptop (can you say "under 2 lbs, including optical drive?"), and was surprised to see that it came with XP - I sort of figured new Windows machines would be shipping with Vista. But at least so far, I haven't seen any compelling reason to install Vista on it (I am running Office 2007, which I like better than the previous Office version).
And then yesterday I happened upon this opinion piece in eWeek by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols titled Night of the Living Vista which says:
Today, I think of Vista as the zombie operating system. It stumbles around, and from a distance you might think it's alive, but close up it's the walking dead.
The first sign that Vista was in real trouble was when major vendors started to offer XP again on new machines.,
and goes on to say:
Now you might think some of this is legacy backlash. People don't like change. They'd rather use Windows 2000 than XP, Windows 98 SE than 2000,and Windows ME more than...well, OK, no one liked ME. But I've been through these cycles many times before. This is different.
XP SP2, with XP SP3 finally due to show up soon, is not only the best Windows to date, I can't think of a single reason to switch from XP to Vista. I'm not talking a good reason, I really mean any reason.
Interesting, to say the least. Is this a serious issue, or just the inevitable major upgrade backlash/lag? (Just think about how many people took their sweet time upgrading their Macs to OS X, for instance).
The folks over in UWTV's production side have encoded a brief snippet of their HD video into H.264 video that looks great on an iPhone. To view the clip, download it here, drag it into iTunes, and then sync it to your iPhone. There's no sound, so don't worry if you don't hear anything.
I think you'll agree that it looks great. For those who are interested, Mike Wellings says it "was shot with a SONY HDW-700A and recorded to HDCAM tape."
