Fairfax becoming more social
Jul 22, 2009 Media & Advertising
In the morning I like to read The Age website rather than purchasing the dead tree edition. The paper has far more articles than the website but it is in an incredibly inconvenient format, especially for someone like myself who travels a lot but still wants to know what is going on at home. I also find with the paper edition that almost all of the interesting international news I have already picked up via the internet, often several days before it appears in the paper.
The point of this post however is the interesting social sidebar (pictured left) which now appears on some of the articles on the fairfax newspaper articles, such as this one. It tells you how many people are currently viewing the article, which other articles these people have read, and allows you to post a comment about the page on twitter. It’s creating a unique ascii string for people to include in their twitter post which ties it back to the relevant article. For the travel article I linked above the string is #fd-drcd, where I presume the fd is for fairfax digital.
I’m curious to know whether they are getting any feedback on the articles via this system (although the posts I checked didn’t have any), and also why it only appears on some articles and not all of them. If anybody has any additional info I’d be keen to hear it.
Cleaning up the link rot
Apr 26, 2009 Internet, Media & Advertising
In this blog I often make reference to current events in the news and include a link to the source of the story. Sadly it seems that many of these news stories have a very short shelf life on the publisher’s website and have vanished leaving nothing but a 404 error in their place. I found a useful plugin to help with the link rot problem which has revealed around 80% of my broken links point to newspaper publisher’s websites.
Recently the print media have been complaining that Google is stealing their content (one example if many such articles), however they are never able to cite any specific examples of this behavior by Google. Personally I think they are just scared and confused about new technologies like RSS and Google News. It seems to me the print media are missing a huge opportunity to place their archives online and collect advertising revenue. Some of these newspapers have archives that go back hundreds of years. Imagine how much of a valuable resources these would be to people conducting research of our recent history? This open approach to use of the newspaper archives would certainly earn the publishers more revenue than they get from serving up 404 errors.
IPTV on the way
Jun 3, 2006 IPTV, Internet, Media & Advertising, Telco
IPTV is here … but don’t hold your breath ( The Age / Louisa Hearn )
From the article: “While telecommunication companies in many other developed countries have been investing heavily in improving broadband services, Telstra has been accused within the industry of lagging behind – something that Optus and other smaller telcos and ISPs say they are working hard to reverse by building up their own broadband infrastructures.”
With residential VoIP slowly making its way into households providers are starting to look towards the next step in the so called ‘triple play’ – IPTV. IPTV is simply the delivery of TV programming over the internet, although more specifically realtime or on-demand programming. This is in contrast to existing video distribution over the internet which requires the user to wait while the video file downloads before they are able to start watching it.
There is nothing magic or mystical about IPTV, but it does require a lot of bandwidth between the provider and the subscriber. ADSL2+ is going a long way towards solving this problem, but many households are not close enough to their exchange to be able to get a reliable high-speed connection. With Telstra’s FTTN rollout in doubt consumers may have to wait a little longer before IPTV becomes a reality.
DVD sales slowing down
Jul 6, 2005 Media & Advertising
End of the DVD Party? ( Business Week / Ronald Grover )
From the article: “Now small but troubling signs are emerging that the DVD market’s growth could be trailing off faster than Hollywood expected. On June 30, Pixar Animation Studios cut its earnings-per-share estimate for the second quarter to 10 cents from 15 cents, due to slower-than-expected DVD sales of its blockbuster The Incredibles. The stock of Dreamworks Animation dropped sharply in mid-May, after the studio reported that returns of its own blockbuster Shrek 2 left sales 5 million short of its forecasts.”
Although the article is from the US, I noticed a lot of unsold Shrek 2 and Incredibles DVD when strolling through shops in Melbourne as well. With the number of cinema goers declining it will be interesting to see how the movie execs will react to this. No doubt they will want to blame piracy, and this would certainly be a factor, but probably not as big as the studios would have you believe.
Net TV on the way
Jul 5, 2005 Internet, Media & Advertising
Net TV poised to make the switch ( The Age / Graeme Philipson)
From the article: “When TV stations start to broadcast over the internet there will be no need for pay TV. Pay TV succeeds because it uses a proprietary broadcast network, based on satellite or cable, as its transmission medium. It controls who can receive the signal by controlling the technology.
When any TV station can broadcast over the internet and anybody with a high enough bandwidth Internet connection can receive it, pay TV will cease to exist. Like the BBC black box, it is an interim technology. I give it 10 years, which means Foxtel might become profitable at about the same time its technology becomes redundant.”
There are some limited forms of internet tv around currently but the quality is too low for regular consumers to bother with. The rollout of ADSL2+ and other high bandwidth tail connections will encourage people to experiment more with streaming video, which should in turn drive further developments in that area. As the article hints at, pay tv only works because the provider has exclusive access to the delivery medium. Once high quality content is available over the internet the pay tv operator’s current infrastructure advantage will turn into a liability.
Worst review ever
Oct 4, 2004 Media & Advertising
Backing
up is easy to do. (The Age / Sam Varghese)
Is this a review or an advertisement? I really can’t tell. As a bonus it also
includes the incredibly stupid advice:
“Given the gargantuan size of today’s Windows environment, it
is advisable to store these backups on a hard drive; removable media would
require user intervention to change media.“
Yes, lets all back up from a hard drive in our computer, to another hard
drive in the same computer. Don’t worry about fire, theft, etc. As long
as your data is on two hard drives it will be perfectly safe.
“Earlier versions of Ghost could be used off a floppy; this version is understandably much bigger and hence the use of the CD for the recovery process.“
All hail the bloatware! Nobody would want to boot of a floppy these days anyway. Right? Of course, it is also perfectly understandable that the loss of an important feature wouldn’t draw a negative comment from the ‘reviewer’, since this isn’t really a review anyway.
Microsoft told to ‘get the facts’
Aug 26, 2004 Media & Advertising
Linux 10 times more expensive? Get the facts, watchdog tells Microsoft. (ZDNet Australia)
Back in June I commented on the (at the time) new series of Microsoft ads inviting people to ‘get the facts’. It was pretty clear from the start that the ‘facts’ Microsoft were offering were somewhat one sided. It seems that the Advertising Standards Authority in the UK agrees. From the article:
“A print ad from Microsoft which bore the headline “Weighing the cost of Linux vs.Windows? Let’s review the facts” offered a comparison between a Windows and a Linux machine which, according to Redmond, demonstrated that “Linux was found to be over 10 times more expensive than Windows Server? for Windows-comparable functions of file serving and Web serving. The results showed that IBM z900 mainframe running Linux is much less capable and vastly more expensive than Windows Server 2003 as a platform for server consolidation.”"
I think everyone was already aware of the fact that a mainframe costs more than a desktop PC, but Microsoft seems to think that proves Windows is cheaper than Linux. Go figure.
DoubleClick DDoS’d
Jul 30, 2004 Current Events, Media & Advertising
Hackers go after DoubleClick (United Press International)
I guess they got tired of all the advertising..
ABC to peer with PIPE
Jul 7, 2004 Internet, Media & Advertising
ABC to peer with PIPE (Whirlpool)
This is a fairly major event in Australian Internet history. The ABC is arguably the biggest content provider in Australia, and this marks the first time their content will be available over a peering link to medium sized ISPs. I won’t go so far as to say it marks the beginning of the end for the ‘Gang of four’, but it is a step in the right direction.
Advertising – read between the lines
Jun 22, 2004 Media & Advertising
I just viewed a flash advertisement for Microsoft Windows Server System. I won’t reproduce the whole thing here, but the animation finishes with the quote:
“Windows Server offers a saving of 11%-22% over Linux in 4 out of 5 workload scenarios.“
It attributes the source of this data as being an IDC study of the North American market, and offers a link to “Get the facts”.
Let’s assume this data is correct and in 4 out of 5 workplaces Windows Server is the most cost effective IT platform. What this data would also saying is that in 20% of cases Window Server is not more cost effective than using Linux. If your business were to go out and install Windows Server without thoroughly evaluating the Linux platform there is a 20% chance you would be wasting money, and that is a pretty big risk to take.
So as they say, Get the facts, evaluate all options before making a decision.