Posts tagged Just
Cable TV’s Erosion is Real, It’s Just Very Slow
Feb 9th
The disruption of cable television at the hands of the Internet and its premium video streaming services has been predicted for some time now. Perhaps there’s something about the size and demeanor of the cable industry that makes some people long for it to be conquered by the free and open Web. Maybe that skews the imminence of the predictions. Either way, to many, cable’s disruption just feels inevitable.
Cable is indeed losing subscribers, but it’s happening very slowly. According to the latest data from Nielsen, the number of U.S. homes with cable subscriptions has declined 4.1% in the last year. Meanwhile, TV service provided by telephone companies like Verizon increased 21.1%.
Sponsor
So, it’s not that traditional, non-Web television service in general is going down. Cable subscription rates are dropping slowly, while satellite and other pay TV services are on the rise. Web TV may not be exploding in the way that many might have expected, but it is on the rise.
Nielsen reports considerable growth in the sector of consumers who watch a combination of Web-based and non-cable broadcast television. This is the crowd that Boxee hopes to target with its live TV antennae dongle. They watch half as much TV and stream twice as much online video as the general population.
It’s a group that has grown quickly, but still makes up only 5% of consumers. By comparison, nearly 71% of households subscribe to both broadband and cable television. Cable’s penetration rate alone is more than 90%. In short, it’s not going away anytime soon.
The cable industry faces real, longer-term threats from the likes of Netflix, Hulu and increasingly, Amazon Prime, as well as from set-top boxes and connected TVs. Trends in technology, coupled with the high prices of cable subscriptions, are slowly making cable less attractive to consumers Realizing this, the cable companies have put a renewed focused on innovating for a hyper-connected, multi-screened future.
TV content – wherever it may originate – still takes up an extraordinary amount of our lives. On average, Americans watch 33 hours of television per week. Television has long dominated the media diets of consumers, but what’s changing is when and how they access it.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
For Many Artists, Spotify and Rdio Just Aren’t Cutting It
Feb 9th
For music fans, all-you-can-stream music services like Spotify, Rhapsody, MOG and Rdio are kind of dream come true. Signing up gives you instant access to a library of millions of songs from major label and indie acts from around the world. Most services are now free, with some limitations on usage. For paying users, as long as you keep your subscription, there’s really no need to pay for most individual tracks or albums (unless you’re an audiophile). In the case of Spotify, you can even merge your local music collection with the service’s cloud-based selection of music. Awesome.
For artists, it’s another story. The dirty little secret of services like Spotify and others is that they are not particularly lucrative for artists. At all. Each of them has managed to court record labels with attractive enough licensing deals, but that doesn’t necessarily trickle down to the artists themselves. As a result, many artists have held back new releases from streaming services, or jumped ship all together.
Sponsor
Paul McCartney became the latest artist to step back from the all-you-can-stream subscription model when he pulled his entire catalog from Rhapsody. Material by the former Beatle and accomplished solo artist was removed from Spotify in 2010.
Initially, independent artists such as bands on small metal labels started to question the value of Spotify and pulled their catalogs. Then bigger artists like The Black Keys and Coldplay followed suit.
Exact figures range (and are seldom made public), but it’s clear that streaming services simply do not pay out much money compared to physical album sales or paid downloads. According to CDBaby, iTunes accounts for 77.4% of digital revenue for indie artists, while sources like Spotify and Rhapsoy bring in about 2% apiece. Now, with iTunes Match, artists get an additional stream of revenue on top of their initial digital album sales.
In theory, the streaming services will grow their user bases and refine their monetization strategies to a point at which things are fair for labels, fans and artists alike. In the meantime, not everybody is willing to stick around and wait for their business model to mature.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
User-Centric Design is Great, Just as Long as You Find the Right User
Feb 8th
My friend and colleague Esther Schindler has written a wonderful post over on SoftwareQuality Connection about encouraging user-centric design. The only trouble is figuring out the right set of users that your software is designed for. Put another way, this is the classic programming problem: the person who hires you (or who sets up the job) isn’t the ultimate end-user audience for the actual program.
Sponsor
Schindler mentions the Abomination That Is Taleo as Exhibit A. For those of you that haven’t been in the job market lately, this is one of the go-to apps that employers use to collect resumes and screen applicants. The only trouble is that its UI is bad, really bad. As she says, “Features and functionality that would give joy to the most common hands-on-the-keyboard user (the hundreds of job applicants applying for a given position) may not even appear on the list of application requirements.”
And having agile programming practices can actually remove programmers from the ultimate consumers of the app, because you write so quickly and get close enough in your first build that you stop doing anything further. Or don’t get to have any further discussions beyond the initial meetings, if you even meet with your programming team at all, because the budget for the project gets cut.
Some of the problem is the Dilbert-ization of corporate life, where a boss gets the overview and the devil is in the details. Part of it is the level of communication in modern companies can be frighteningly bad, as work teams are more distributed and we all have more work to do as layoffs have decimated most IT departments.
It is a great article, and one that you should email to your boss when it comes time to put together your next project. Along with the appropriate Dilbert cartoon, of course.
N.B.: The agile turtle is from Sarah Maddox’ FFeathers blog.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
New SEO Directory SEO-Ontario.com Just Launched – PR Web (press release)
Jan 31st
|
New SEO Directory SEO-Ontario.com Just Launched
PR Web (press release) SEO-Ontario.com, an Ontario SEO directory website that lists top ranking Ontario Search Engine Optimization companies in Ontario and provides information and advice on selecting a SEO company to website owners, has just been launched. Brick Marketing Hosts February Boston SEO Workshop |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Obama’s Google+ Hangout Didn’t Change the Game, It Just Changed the Channel
Jan 30th
The President of the United States held a Google+ Hangout today. He fielded questions selected from over 130,000 submissions as well as from five lucky Americans selected to hang out with him live. For the rest of us, it was a streaming video experience. It began with a swooping, dramatic intro, and then Google MC Steve Grove took control of the proceedings.
This is the most user-friendly White House in history. It was a nice experiment in Web-enabled democracy. But despite the great camera angles and the believable-but-composed real-world folks, it stretched the definition of “social media” pretty thin. User-submitted content is good, and the hand-picked live participants get to be involved, but for most of us, it’s no different from television.
Sponsor
The Hangout dynamics did offer some back-and-forth between participants and the president. The action didn’t feel scripted. On the contrary, it felt like people talking over each other, just like a video chat usually does, except there was a moderator to occasionally interrupt and move things along.
But for most of the audience, it was a YouTube stream. The link was posted all over Google+ by various accounts, including the White House, YouTube and Google Politics & Elections, but the comments there were spammed-up and useless. It wasn’t a social event except for the selected participants.
In that sense, it wasn’t much different from the president’s live event at Facebook last April. It was good publicity for a social Web platform, pro-Web PR for the White House, and a TV-like experience for the rest of America.
This was certainly a game-changing event. It was a demonstration of YouTube’s looming succession to television as the most influential video platform. This was a triumph of a tech company over media companies. The production values were high, the program was engaging, and the content was timely. But for the public, it was no more of a paradigm shift than changing the TV channel.
Did you watch the White House Google+ Hangout? What did you think? Share your reactions in the comments.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Browsing, Editing, & Managing YouTube Videos Just Got A Little Easier – ReelSEO Online Video News
Jan 26th
 ReelSEO Online Video News |
Browsing, Editing, & Managing YouTube Videos Just Got A Little Easier
ReelSEO Online Video News He is also founder of The Viral Orchard (http://www.viralorchard.com), an Internet marketing firm offering content writing and development services, viral marketing consulting, and SEO services. Jeremy writes constantly, loves online video, … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
iTunes U 2.0: Not Perfect, Just Awesome
Jan 23rd
iTunes U has been around for a long time, but its expansion last week onto iPhones and iPads, as well as into new content like K-12 curriculum, has truly made this a 2.0 release. And it’s very, very good.
The iTunes U website carries the bold title “Learn anything, anywhere, anytime.” That’s an overstatement for sure, with 500,000 assets it’s more like learn something about many things. But it’s great either way. I spent the weekend neglecting other duties to play with iTunes U and below are some thoughts, positive and negative. It’s not perfect, but I am really excited about it and I know I’m not alone in that. I’d love to know your thoughts about it too.
Sponsor
“Algorithms are at the cutting edge of innovation, because they help move the line between the feasible & infeasible,” says the Prof on the first day’s lecture in MIT’s Introduction to Algorithms. That’s a tasty nugget to ponder, served up in the middle of a lecture which started with 15 minutes of “no cheating on tests” and other administrative advice. Most of the lecture was over my head, but I do spend a lot of time thinking about algorithms so I was very thankful for the opportunity to hear it. Thankful enough that I listened to it once on my phone while walking my dogs and once again on the iPad with the whiteboard visible, propped up in my cupboard while I put away the dishes in my kitchen.
Learn anything, anywhere, anytime? It was certainly feeling that way in the first few hours I was glued to iTunes U.
Awesome, With Limits
“At first, I was excited by this, because it appeared that this was iVLE, aka VLE (Virtual Learning Environment) in the cloud. And the iPad app is very nice. But sadly, the app functionality is not replicated well in iTunes, thus cutting out students who do not own iPads, and all Windows users. iPhones/Pods are OK for listening to a couple of podcasts, but no-one in their right minds is going to attempt a full-blown statistics course on an iPhone. And the content on iTunesU is still as variable in quality as it ever was.
“Presumably Apple could not see a revenue angle in iVLE. Oh, what might have been.”
- Dr Alan Cann, Science of the Invisible
I found that in the business management section, much of the content isn’t classroom lectures. Much of it is short-form video content made by non-traditional educational institutions. I listened to all of Jill Geisler’s What Great Bosses Know segments, each about 5 minutes long, some I listened to twice. I’ll probably go back and listen again. It’s really just a podcast though, from Geisler who is associated with the Poynter Institute.
Geisler’s content is heavily book-ended by promotions for her forthcoming book with the same title. I hope to buy the book. That experience was not like transporting into a college classroom though.
The Cranfield University collection on Leadership is similar, but in video with black backdrop and awesome, knowledgable, 50-year olds with British accents. It’s great, but it’s more like curated video podcasting than traditional educational content.
There are full, traditional classroom courses available though and I’ve subscribed to a few. I haven’t worked through a full one yet and I haven’t tried interacting with any of the worksheets or PDFs. I did jailbreak my iPad this weekend and turn the bottom right of my screen into a hot corner I can swipe from and pop up iTunes U immediately whenever I want. (Top right is Al Jazeera, if you were wondering, bottom left Twitter, swype the title bar launches the Sonos controller. It’s a lot of fun.)
There’s a lot of science and a good amount of humanities on iTunes U. Can you learn about anything? I watched an interesting video about a pizza place and there’s plenty of content about beans, but search for Oregon and it’s a real stretch. Transgender history (something my University in Oregon was great at teaching) – is not a search query that brings much in the way of results.
Existentialism looks ok, psychedelics are a wasteland, rodentia is touched upon but birthday parties as a query is a bust. So it’s a mixed bag! That was my whirlwind tour through brick and mortar University and I don’t know that iTunes U can compete, but now that I’m a boring old 35 year old with a job, I love what Apple’s put together so far.
Former RWW writer and leading education technology blogger Audrey Watters has criticized iTunes U for lacking in the social interactivity that so characterizes the rest of the web today and that delivers so much value elsewhere. At first I thought she was looking a gift horse in the mouth, but in time I’ve grown annoyed by that as well. Please, Apple, would you at least let people post comments on the videos, let other people vote comments up and down, and let us view either all comments or just those from our friends on Facebook, Twitter or…Ping? Ok, so maybe it’s not so hard to imagine why Apple skipped the social this time around. It sure would be nice if I could post a link to iTunes U content out to the web, though.
It is a walled garden, it’s part of the iTunes Empire of Blah and there are other problems with it – but great content overcomes many things.
Witness the story of Jeremy Gleick (via), for example, a young man who has spent one hour per day learning something new, over nearly 1,000 hours now, often from iTunes U.
“Maybe you don’t become an expert,” Mr. Gleick says, “but you can get really good at something.”
Maybe.
“What iTunes U is missing,” argues web commenter Brian Crumley, “is a way to show you the steps needed to master a subject. We can all learn physics 101 but without a simple and easy way to find 102 and beyond it can get frustrating. Also the quality of many of the recorded lectures is not all that good.”
Indeed, some of the lecture series aren’t even in the right order in the app.
“Even though I am complaining here I still think it’s an awesome service and hope it expands to anyone, not just schools,” says Crumley. “If I have knowledge let me teach it to anyone in the world.”
That sounds great, and it is in fact the world that is consuming the content that’s here already. Estimates before the release of iTunes U on mobile were that 60% of the service’s traffic comes from outside the United States.
The courses and content available on iTunes U are expanding the minds and lives of people all over the world, for only the price of an expensive machine to consume the free content. It’s the only thing I’ve been interested in listening to when taking my dogs out lately (sorry HuffDuffer) and I’ll be interested to see if I can take the time to work through some of the full courses it makes available.
Anybody that even claims to help me learn anything, any time, anywhere starts out in my good favor.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Just in Time for “Anonymous” Attacks, U.S. NIST Drafts a New Readiness Plan
Jan 23rd
Two years ago, the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security firmly decided (again) that a policy of responding to vulnerabilities in the nation’s cybersecurity when they happen, is insufficient. The National Institute of Standards and Technology set about on a plan to model a 21st century perpetual vulnerability mitigation scheme – a continuous monitoring (CM) framework that attempts to model security procedures not in terms of crisis and response, but instead as a perpetual cycle of monitoring and engagement that stays basically the same whether or not there’s a crisis.
In other words, if you “keep doing this all the time,” then whatever happens won’t destroy the network. Late last week, NIST produced its first series of drafts for how government information services could look, perhaps later this decade. It’s so radically different from anything seen thus far, that NIST acknowledges that no one in the commercial sector has even come up with the language to describe it.
Sponsor
The January draft of NIST’s interface specifications (PDF available here) shows five layers of what are periodically described as subsystems. Think of these functional components as comprised of devices, software, and people. Acknowledging that not every CM process can or should be automated, NIST’s architects have created these five classes of subsystem to represent the divisions of workflow for both people and technology who work with any data domain. In other words, regardless of what data you’re working with, as a government IT worker, you and your programs will fall someplace within this model.
So do software vendors start digesting this system now and try to build products based on it? Right now, NIST acknowledges that might not be possible.
“Each subsystem specification provides product development requirements applicable to specific product types. It is not expected, or desired, that any specific product adopt all of the subsystem specifications. Some of the subsystem specifications describe requirements that already exist within many Information Technology (IT) products. Thus, incorporation of these specifications should require only gentle instrumentation for those existing products. In other cases, the subsystems represent new functionality and product types (e.g., multi-product sensor orchestration and tasking and policy content repositories) that do not currently exist on the market. If vendors choose to adopt these specifications, they will likely need to develop new products. To catalyze vendor involvement we are looking into providing functioning prototypes of these capabilities.”
In a situation that will remind some folks of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, NIST comes clean in saying that in order to understand how this solution may eventually work, everyone needs to learn along the way just how the problem works. One of the elements absent from the NIST drafts so far is remediation, for instance. Right now, it’s worked out a structural framework for a query system that triggers workflow between the elements of the subsystems shown in the diagram. But the query language itself has not been invented yet.
So are we years away from a working implementation? Perhaps not very many. The CM concept has only been devised in the past few years, and one of the documents that led to the forging of these latest drafts was only produced last September. At that time, the CM concept was being referred to by its broader abbreviation, Information Systems Continuous Monitoring (ISCM).
“The output of a strategically designed and well-managed organization-wide ISCM program can be used to maintain a system’s authorization to operate and keep required system information and data… up to date on an ongoing basis,” the September document explains. “Security management and reporting tools may provide functionality to automate updates to key evidence needed for ongoing authorization decisions. ISCM also facilitates risk-based decision making regarding the ongoing authorization to operate information systems and security authorization for common controls by providing evolving threat activity or vulnerability information on demand. A security control assessment and risk determination process, otherwise static between authorizations, is thus transformed into a dynamic process that supports timely risk response actions and cost-effective, ongoing authorizations. Continuous monitoring of threats, vulnerabilities, and security control effectiveness provides situational awareness for risk-based support of ongoing authorization decisions. An appropriately designed ISCM strategy and program supports ongoing authorization of type authorizations, as well as single, joint, and leveraged authorizations.”
The hope is that, once security vulnerabilities are identified by researchers, either in the public or private sectors, the standardization of their reporting will enable them to be entered into the system like marbles in a pachinko machine. The system will essentially digest them, feeding on them and integrating their lessons into everyday processes. It is a completely different way to think about work and workflow, but desperate times demand it.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
PentOS “Just Add Water” Private Cloud Released, Dell Signs On as Partner
Jan 19th
The creator of the Piston Enterprise Operating System, or PentOS, was lauded for his contributions in helping to create cloud computing itself, through the pioneering NASA Nebula project. There, NASA first demonstrated how to fit a data center cluster in an ordinary shipping container, proving the space program can still produce benefits today.
But last year, Joshua McKenty one-upped himself. He fit an almost entirely self-provisioning cloud operating system for a common rack of servers, onto a USB thumb drive. You plug the thumb device into a PC, edit maybe three lines of a text configuration file, save it, unplug it, plug it into the main server in the rack, and turn it on.
Sponsor
In a very clever demonstration video (above), McKenty demonstrates what I call the “Just Add Water” nature of the configuration process. On Wednesday, Piston Cloud’s PentOS – the first commercial implementation of OpenStack, born from NASA Nebula – emerged from public beta into general availability. In addition came news that Dell has signed on as a provider of Piston Cloud-certified hardware. (I remember the hoops Dell’s predecessor, PCs Limited, had to jump through to become DOS-certified.)
On the first birthday of Piston Cloud’s existence, in an effort to share news as to the progress of its efforts toward the goal of world domination, company officials have provided via Twitter this detailed glimpse of its own progress chart, shown here as originally depicted through the medium of frosting.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Search Engines & Opinions: Just How Trustworthy Are Search Results?
Jan 19th
Whether it’s on Google or Bing, websites want to rank in the top positions on search engine result pages (SERPs) and watch the free traffic roll in. However, the traffic isn’t nearly as powerful as the effect search results h…
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
