Bit Revolver

The race to unify all of your media and devices is obviously well underway, as seen by the recent release of products like the Apple TV. In “YouTube coming to your TV (in several ways)“, Ars Technica explores several of the ideas floating around for bringing YouTube content to your living room. Ars covers the two core options: creating a YouTube television channel that highlights the most interesting flicks, and creating an on-demand television interface to the library of YouTube videos.

A YouTube channel may be interesting, but this concept is not exactly new. First of all, various celebrities like Jim Breuer already count down the “funniest” and “most viral” videos on VH1’s Web Junk 20. I don’t know many people who watch Web Junk 20. Secondly, America’s Funniest Home Videos did this model in ‘89 (albeit via VHS and snail mail). As ABC’s third-longest-running primetime series [source], AFV has been extremely successful. The problem is that the “AFV model” doesn’t jive with the inherent on-demand nature of YouTube and the Internet in general. Massive numbers of people flock to YouTube because the site offers something different for each of them.

YouTube is not a one-way road either. Another reason the site is successful because it has bred a massive community of devoted followers who interact with each other and the YouTube service daily. On America’s Funniest Home Video’s, Bob Sagat does funny voices over videos of people getting hit in the crotch. On YouTube, community members post replies, blog entries and response videos in reaction to clips of people getting hit in the crotch.

The floundering Recording Industry and Motion Picture Association have certainly taught us plenty about the difficulties of an arranged marriage between traditional distribution methods and the next generation of media consumption. Not even Bob Sagat, given his own dedicated cable channel, could count down enough top videos to pique the interest of that many people in the same way that an on-demand service can. Perhaps a YouTube channel will make its way into our homes, and perhaps it will be successful. It’s not a bad idea. I just don’t think it will be as successful as a service that brings YouTube, in all of its on-demand, web 2.0 social networking glory to our big screens.

Of all the factors that can affect the load time of a web page, fetching handfuls of stylesheets and javascript files is certainly high on the list. Many would approach a solution to this at the server level, however Niels Leenheer has an interesting solution that takes place at the script level, instead.

Leenheer describes his solution in “Make Your Pages Load Faster by Combining and Compressing Javascript and CSS Files“. The step-by-step goes like this:

1. Organize CSS and JavaScript files into directories dedicated to those types of files.
2. Mod_rewrite the URLs of those directories to a PHP script, passing along the paths to the original css or javascript files in the query string.
3. Use the PHP script to concatenate the stylesheets/scripts, gzip the output and send it to the client.

I have not tested this scheme, but Leenheer reports that a test page’s load time was drastically reduced from 1095 ms to 400 ms.

Hot off the presses at A List Apart is “Whitespace“, perhaps one of the most interesting web design articles that I’ve read in a while. The article thoroughly covers the subject of nothing, inside and out. Designer Marc Boulton covers every aspect of nil, and covers it quite well.

Seriously though, the effect of negative space on design is quite fascinating. Boulton discusses:

• The feeling of elegance and sophistication that’s communicated by whitespace.
• The ability of whitespace to maintain balance and produce harmony among the elements of a design.
• Drawing the reader’s attention to specific elements using whitespace.

For the full story, read “Whitespace” at A List Apart.

Music publisher EMI has announced that it will no longer be manufacturing audio CDs with DRM software, reports Boing Boing. According to BB, a translation of this Dutch article asserts both EMI and Macrovision have ceased coupling audio CDs with DRM.

DRM-free CDs are a giant step in the right direction for consumer rights with regards to copyrighted content. Content producers and distributors certainly have a right to guard their property, but at some point there is a line that cannot and should not be crossed. As far as this author is concerned, that line is quite clear: it’s not justifiable for a company to violate my rights, simply because I might violate theirs.

What rights am I referring to? A few very basic ones:

• Provided the situation falls under the umbrella of personal use, I have the right to play back content that I purchase, wherever, whenever, and however I wish, no questions asked.
• I also have the right to make backup copies for archival purposes.

Read that last paragraph over again. Take note that I wrote “… play back content that I purchase“. Not rent, not subscribe to. Purchase. “Purchase” implies ownership.

These basic rights are the reason why I have never purchased music from an online digital music retailer. Despite the fact that I own and prize an iPod, the fact that purchases from the iTunes Music Store are deliberately inoperable on other digital music players is absurd. Didn’t Maxell cassettes work with the Sony Walkman? Could you imagine if TDK DVDs were only compatible with Panasonic DVD players and Toshiba televisions?

Perhaps the return to DRM-free CDs means that record labels are coming back around to the lessons they learned about fair use from the Betamax case decades ago. The industry demanded exorbadent prices for moves on VHS, and so their customers hit up the video store, then hit up the record button on their VCRs. The industry tried and failed to stop the VCR. Eventually realized that they could compete if they just lowered the damn price of a tape. With tapes available at a reasonable price, it was no longer worth it to spend the time required to pirate one.

Tech author/evangelist Guy Kawasaki recently wrote “A Review of My First Year of Blogging“, a post to his personal blog which, among other things, disclosed his 2006 advertising revenue. Kawasaki’s blog served up over 2.4 million page views in ‘06, but only grossed $3,350.

The Kawasaki story was picked up by a number of news sources and blogs, then quickly spread through the SEO, marketing and professional blogging world. Most webmasters speculated as to the various reasons for Kawasaki’s abismal advertising revenue, and some even went so far as to claim the Google AdSense system (Kawasaki’s source of ad revenue) is worthless for bloggers. Such claims couldn’t be further from the truth.

• Kawasaki’s website featured a single, poorly positioned Google ad unit.
• Kawasaki’s readership is a sophisticated one — one that’s less likely to click on ads.
• Kawasaki writes on a broad range of topics, making it more of a challenge for a contextual advertising system like AdSense to serve up highly targeted ads.

Guy Kawasaki’s 2006 Google AdSense revenue says nothing about the potential of the AdSense system as a source of income for bloggers. The conversation around Kawasaki reveals many, many webmasters who claim to make much more money from significantly less traffic. For sites with a specific subject matter and a targeted audience, AdSense pays out very, very well. Meanwhile, Kawasaki’s own CPM comes out to a pitiful $1.39.

Kawasaki’s ‘06 numbers more likely mean that (a) casual ad placement is detrimental to a blog’s ad revenue, and (b) AdSense and Guy Kawasaki probably weren’t meant to be together in the first place. Since the arrival of the new year, Kawasaki has switched from AdSense to Federated Media.

Finally, it’s likely that a blog called “How to Change the World”, written by an already wildly successful author, speaker and evangelist, is meant for a greater purpose than advertising revenue. After all, he admits that he uses the money to fuel his hockey addiction.

Welcome to Bit Revolver, a brand-new technology & Internet blog. Self described as “Commentary on Technology”, Bit Revolver will aim to discuss the factors that affect our tech world, as well as technological and computer-related topics in general.

While building the foundations of Bit Revolver, devising a catchy name presented somewhat of a challenge. Thoughts of bits and bytes flew around to the tune of The Beatles’ Revolver. Lo and behold, a name was born.

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