April 23, 2010 at 3:10 pm · Filed under internet, tech life
From the New York Times:
“Ten years ago, people were afraid to buy stuff online. Now they’re sharing everything they buy,” said Barry Borsboom, a student at Leiden University in the Netherlands, who this year created an intentionally provocative site called Please Rob Me. The site collected and published Foursquare updates that indicated when people were out socializing — and therefore away from their homes.
In this day and age of Too Much Information (TMI), the only real security, it would seem, would be the “security through obscurity” variety. If everyone flooded the web about the minutiae of their day to day lives, chances are it’s going to be tough to single out anyone in particular. That approach, however, puts early adopters at risk. No longer would they be just a face in the crowd. Comes with the territory, I guess.
That being said, websites making said TMI possible should probably realize there are still some boundaries best left uncrossed.
September 4, 2009 at 4:32 pm · Filed under delve, internet, video
In a NYT article, Rise of Web Video, Beyond 2-Minute Clips, Brian Stelter writes:
Video creators, by and large, thought their audiences were impatient. A three-minute-long comedy skit? Shrink it to 90 seconds. Slow Internet connections made for tedious viewing, and there were few ads to cover high delivery costs. And so it became the first commandment of online video: Keep it short.
I recall coming across this phenomenon in 1997 and 1998 while doing research work into characteristics of web video stored on the web at that point in time. Here’s an interesting graph from the paper I wrote on the subject:
Web Video Lengths (1997)
The number of videos on the web were relatively small and their sizes could be measured in seconds. 90% were 45 seconds or less. The graph is capped at around 2 minutes for maximum length although I did find outliers that were longer.
What I found interesting, however, in a followup study was that if you took away the bandwidth chokepoints, video lengths ballooned. I was studying the video access patterns of a Video On Demand experiment at the Lulea University in Sweden – the setup here was over a dedicated high speed network, effectively removing slow access as a determinant of behavior. Specifically:
Since 1995, the Centre for Distance-spanning Technology at Luleå University (CDT) has been researching distance education and collaboration on the Internet [17]. Specifically, it has developed a hardware/software infrastructure for giving WWW-based courses and creating a virtual student community. The hardware aspects include the deployment of a high speed network (2-34 Mbps backbone links) to attach the local communities to the actual University campus. The campus is also connected to the national academic backbone by a high speed 34 Mbps link [13] with student apartments being wired together with the rest of campus via 10 or 100 Mbps ethernet.
The following graph shows the distribution of video lengths for the files used in the system:
The mean duration of these files were around 75 minutes or so. This finding hinted that as videos grew in popularity and infrastucture hurdles fell away, video durations would increase. From the original NYT article:
New Web habits, aided by the screen-filling video that faster Internet access allows, are now debunking the rule. As the Internet becomes a jukebox for every imaginable type of video — from baby videos to “Masterpiece Theater” — producers and advertisers are discovering that users will watch for more than two minutes at a time.
:
:
“People are getting more comfortable, for better or for worse, bringing a computer to bed with them,” said Dina Kaplan, the co-founder of Blip.tv.
Ms. Kaplan’s firm distributes dozens of Web series. A year ago all but one of the top 25 shows on her Web servers clocked in at under five minutes. Now, the average video hosted by Blip is 14 minutes long — “surprising even to us,” she said. The longest video uploaded in May was 133 minutes long, equivalent to a feature-length film.
Interested by this, I took a look at the duration of the videos hosted by Delve. This is based on data a couple of weeks old, so this is not representative of the latest trends. However, I found the average video duration to be a little under 6 minutes. However, within this I found definite disparities between publishers. Our top 25 publishers (by video duration) had videos that were a little under 25 minutes on average. This indicates mixed video use by our publishers. While some are still sticking to shorter videos, a significant number are definitely taking full advantage of long form clips – one of the largest videos is around 12 hours in length!
It’ll be interesting to see how these trends hold over the next year or so.
July 8, 2009 at 12:00 pm · Filed under internet
In an article arguing the transformative nature of bloggers, Scott Rosenberg writes on how mainstream publishers are missing the point:
Diller and his species of executive have always excelled at finding rare talents that can, at their best, enchant a mass market. But this very success has blinded them to the different, more diffuse sort of talent present among the Web’s millions of contributors. Of course talent isn’t universal, nor is it evenly distributed. But there is far more of it in the world than Diller’s blinkered vision allows. On the Web it can reveal itself in a far wider range of ways, and far more people will have a chance to cultivate it. It will never be perceived in a uniform way; you and I will recognize it in very different places and judge it in very different ways. But it is surely there — and, fortunately, denigrating it will not make it go away.
Scott is pointing out about how the web makes it easy for bloggers (or any other self started media publisher for that matter) to find and cultivate smaller audiences. And if you expand that line of thought further, you’ll come to the Long Tail phenomenon and how the best way to succeed these days is to find new and innovative ways of content aggregation that span the spectrum from publishing to five people vs millions.
Thus far, I really haven’t said anything new. What does occur to me however is that the very underlying technical structure of the web (HTTP and TCP/IP) makes it far more convenient to set up point to point communication structures versus one to many. The Internet just isn’t that well structured for broadcasting – one of the reasons for the rise of Content Delivery Networks. The server client approach actually serves niche markets better than mass ones. In short – if you want to broadcast your programs to an audience of millions, transmission over cable or air is still the optimum way to go. If you want to reach small, specialized, targeted audience – the web would almost seem jury rigged to fit that need. The medium is the message indeed!
