Now, as much as I despise the guy, he does have a point that advertising alone just won’t cut it. It’s an uncomfortable point I’ve tried to address more than a few times and, if we want all this cool stuff to hang around for any length of time, there needs to be a more direct route for making money off of editorial content/media on the net than relying on the mcguffin we know as advertising.
With video and audio media, I certainly see the cable subscription and pay-per-view systems being introduced for the likes of Hulu, with user generated content sites remaining ad driven or cheaper ways of proving show concepts/pilots and of harvesting talent, with the media firms paying some form of agent’s fee to the open video sites for their use. It’ll end up as “same as it ever was” for this industry, hell the video-on-demand service of Channel Five here in the UK is already going down this route. It’s just the way for indie content producers to get into the “big time” could be made easier - and the cost of making that content for the big media firms could have a little downward pressure on it for a change.
However, print media is a trickier thing entirely.
The ease of crafting/delivery compared to audio/video media means, for them to stand a chance of survival; they’ll have to become “bundled services” you get for free with other media subscriptions. Kinda like the way you get free wifi for a year when you sign up to a contract with your iphone on O2.
Though, I’d always leave it open for buying a “single day pass” to the site for content published that day and older info should drop into a “free access” status with ads slapped on them, that way you can still keep residual linked traffic as well as making a little money off of those who still want yesterdays news for as cheap as possible.
Effectively turning a newspapers site into a hybrid model – a walled garden for breaking news, with diminishing costs after that when you drop into the archives.
I figure they’d make more money that way than simply walling it all off until you pony up for the keys. But then, the net would prolly be a nicer place without general access to anything spouted by Mr Murdoch’s insipid mouthpieces.
Work on Vertical Slice continues. I have an interview with The CodeMonkeys that is in editing right now.
There is now a domain for the place, sitting on it’s own at www.verticalslice.tv. It’s still powered by tumblr until I can afford hosting of my own and figure out how to power it. In addition to the new domain, I’ve begun uploading non-coolshite branded episodes to a blip.tv account in order to take advantage of their itunes distribution, which now means the show is in the podcast directory - linkie.
This takes the strain off of my home net connection and makes it far simpler to publish the episodes, especially since the RSS feed generating app I was using has decided to randomly no longer output anything when I export to xml :S
In a little extra thing from today, Louis Gray posted something he does in response to people reposting and/or blogging about the items he posts to his sites. It’s a good idea and one that I have also decided to do as well. So, whenever someone blogs about or links to Vertical Slice I’ll pop a link to it in the bookmarks and tag it with “verticalslice”.
Of course, in setting this up it made me realise that one of the reasons why I’m not getting many viewers of the show is because no-one is telling anyone about it! Well, apart from one.. cheers Keith
This isn’t for lack of asking either, I’ve mentioned it to so many sites I’ve lost count yet the result is always the same - I’m ignored. No-one wants to pay any attention, which makes me wonder why.
The one thought I keep returning to is that the show is crap and not worth anyones time, yet this is incongruous to the general reception it gets from those that see it (unless they’re lying to me in order to protect my feelings). Maybe it’s just I’m an odious person that no-one likes… a certain possibility.
Whatever the reason is, lemmie know. It’ll make things easier for me to either determine whether I should keep doing the show or just give up and do something else.
And if you do like the show - tell people about it! Spreading it to others is the only way I’ll be able to keep making them.
Just to let the visitors of any domain I own and operate know that I have submitted a request to BT that they hold no permission to intercept traffic to or from my sites and should remove my sites from their profiling system.
If you own any websites, I fully recommend you do the same by following this link - you’ll be joining many people including Amazon.com in standing up for our rights.
The message sent to them is included below.
Hi,
I wish to have the following domains and any subdomains within to be excluded from your illegal wiretapping service known as “webwise”.
alphaxion.com
verticalslice.tv
pissheadnerds.com
Phorm DO NOT have any permission to intercept or disseminate the information contained on these sites, it is a gross abuse of privacy and of data neither you nor phorm own.
Regards,
Chris Johnson
Please join this stand as well as inform as many people as you can about the sleeze, collusion and abuse perpetrated by BT, Phorm and the UK Government when it comes to the logging of everything you do on the internet.
And for those who think “well, I’m not bothered about them seeing that I visit pets.com every month” you need to wake up, your privacy is one of the most important things in your possession. Just because you see no value in it, doesn’t mean there isn’t any.
It is a cornerstone, a pillar (and any other metaphor) of democracy. With it, a government cannot control its population. Without it, we are naked and open to abuse - just look at the use of employee blacklists for examples of how your privacy can be abused and the absence of it used to deny you access to essential things even when you have done nothing other than voice an opinion.
Just remember that Phorm used to be known as 121media, a known spyware/malware company, and that their technology matches up perfectly to the aims of the telecommunications bill that proposes all internet traffic be monitored.
Now do you understand why the UK Government has been turning a blind eye to the crimes committed by BT and Phorm? Do you realise why, when asked by the people they are supposed to work for (that’d be us), the UK government simply use excuses that do not stand up in a court of law (no bad intent, it’s too complicated to explain to you).
Please, spread the truth about Phorm and educate as many people as possible about why it’s wrong. And hit them in the pocket too by opting your websites out of their abusive system.
Well, I’ve been playing around with Garageband - side note: now I know where some of the music in my fav podcasts come from! Was flicking thru the sample loops and going “OMG, that’s blahblahblah show!” every so often >.<
Anyway, main reason for this is to solve the problem of there being very little music in my show. Though, I do have a friend of my GF making some 8bit music for me, I thought I’d fill the gap until then and give Garageband a try.
First, a little disclosure: I’m shit with music. I enjoy listening to it, but I’m totally buggered when it comes to making it - not a damn clue. Which means whatever I make out of this app will likely be pure dross.
After about a couple of hours I finally end up with a 3min track that I will be using in the “Gadget Show Live” footage episode that I’ll be uploading a little bit later today.
If you want a little sneak peek or if you even want to use it in your own shows, just grab a copy here as you’re free to use this in whatever way you want, just as long as you slip a credit to me and/or a link to this site.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Not so long ago families only had the one computer and housed little in the way of our lives outside of each other’s work.
The only real pressure on the storage of this humble home PC was exerted by video games, the family copy of Encarta (oh how the internet usurped thee) and any musical projects by aspiring artists.
But with the stellar rise of digital cameras, camcorders, DVR’s and mp3 players all plugging into multiple computers and devices around the home, the need for more space has developed into the requirement for shared storage.
This is where Network Attached Storage (NAS) is finally making some serious headway in the consumer market.
While many early adopters had been playing around creating their own using old computers stuffed to the brim with hard drives and packing an install of something like FreeNAS, the consumer products have been doing a little more evolving from these Frankenstein creations.
Slimming down from a PC crammed with hard drives; consumer NAS devices such as the Thecus N2100, Buffalo Terastation and Drobo with the network addition are embedded systems with a RAID array of hard drives connected to them, reducing energy consumption and granting smaller physical sizes. Some are merely small form factor PC’s such as HP’s MediaSmart server based on Windows Home Server, though WHS goes well beyond the features of most NAS boxes by providing extensive backup of windows PC’s, synchronisation of passwords etc.
Getting back to the point of shared storage, reducing their size isn’t the only improvement since many come packed with extras focused on media sharing.
A common feature is the web based gallery for sharing your photos across HTTP rather than browsing the folder, although I’ve never found myself using this functionality over simple folder browsing. This could change though, with the rise of RSS reading wifi picture frames, the family portrait wall could become extremely dynamic with something fresh to look at every day.
One feature that shows more usefulness would be music on the NAS appearing as a shared library in any computer running itunes. Where photos tend to be a once in a while viewing, a music collection will be hammered with use and it makes sense to keep it all in one place rather than fragmented across multiple computers.
The only downside is that Apple doesn’t support true network syncing of ipods from a central store, so it rapidly gets quite messy and is hardly suitable for the average home, definitely needs more work – hint, hint apple.
Then we have the truly killer feature, the ability to stream your music and video files to any device or application that supports the Universal Plug n Play or newer DLNA protocols. This allows the pickup and streaming of content from your NAS box onto any supporting device such as your PVR set top box, games console or HTPC.
Imagine having your entire DVD collection in a central library, accessible through a few clicks in a menu system on any device in the house.
No more hunting round for misplaced discs and get to claw back the self space you sacrificed to the almighty collection. It also means format wars like the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray one of the past couple of years can pass you by as a blip on the radar. Why bother with a physical disc when you have the digital file?
So far I have only mentioned use on a home network, the rise of the laptop means we might not even be in the house anymore.
Well, that hasn’t been ignored, much to the ire of ISP’s, since devices such as the MVixBox from MVi and LaCie’s Internet Space NAS box will make use of the much ignored upstream portion of your net connection by providing a web portal for remote users to log into.
Not only can they stream your media and access documents from anyone’s net connection but it even allows them to upload files. Because this is happening across the net, friends and family can be given logon accounts so they can check out your home movies and pictures too, maybe even let them upload their media to you - sharing memories and creations between each other.
With all of our memories becoming digitised, the safety of this data becomes paramount too. Most home PC’s and laptops tend to have a single hard drive, which means if it were to die so will those pictures and videos of Timmy giving Muffy the cat a shave. NAS boxes tend to be set up in what is called a RAID 1 or a RAID 5 configuration depending on the number of hard drives it can take. This means should one of the drives fail, your data is still there.
It doesn’t secure against data corruption and deletion though, but not to worry as this too has been licked by allowing the backup of data to an external USB hard drive connected directly to the NAS device. Which means if something were to become corrupt or deleted it can be restored from the backup. It also allows you to get into the habit of making regular backups and storing them off site should the worst happen to your home.
In the space of 10 short years, the home has exploded from our media sitting in a largely physical analogue world, excluded from our computers, to being connected with everyone we love whenever we want it regardless of where we are.
Home storage has taken a massive leap towards a converged central point. It’s not there yet in terms of syncing that data to portable devices, but once it has that cracked the days of worrying about a single computer failure taking your library with it will be a thing of the past. This leaves us to get on with making, sharing (within legal allowances, of course!) and using without the pain of figuring out the how.
Thursdays episode of vertical slice sees my exploration of how Adobe Premiere works and an attempt to streamline integration of my sources.
Previously, I used SnagIT to record a section of my screen as I scrolled down the page. This took a silly amount of time, was quite fiddly and is far from a smooth movement.
Instead, I simply grabbed the webpage as a jpeg and cropped it down to a reasonable size for dumping into my sources.
Once in there, I turned to the effects panels and began playing around with the settings and figured out how keyframing works.
I was quite surprised at how such a simple thing can really improve not only the production quality of the project; but also made my life so much easier - not only can I do this with webpages, but it allows me to bring in various images and give them a bit of life too.
This has also had the knock on effect of making the timeline somewhat more complex than the simple overlays it had previously.
However, in the mini-euphoria of figuring out these effects, I had to remain mindful of not going “star-wipe” crazy and sprinkle them all over the damn thing. I’m hoping that the end result is much improved… I still need to tackle the issue of lighting tho, something that is going to require a bit of smart investment unfortunately.
Every so often you’ll see the question “How will [insert current web 2.0 darling here] make money?” and almost always people will resort to “by placing adverts!”.
Lets get this out into the open now, advertising is not and never will be a realistic business model on the internet - For a laundry list of reasons such as:
you horribly restrict your earning potential
you piss off your visitors/users
you open your site/visitors up to potential security vulnerabilities
you subject your visitors/users to privacy busting tracking
Now, to the real meat of this article. Current interwebnet 2.0-ified favourites du jour are the micro blogging sites like twitter, friendfeed, pownce (RIP) et al. They’ve grabbed our attention, got us hooked and now people are starting to ask just how they intend on financing such a lovely system so we can continue our crack like addictions.
I know many of you out there still follow the decades old belief that we shall all migrate to network resident apps and anything not in the cloud will fall away like the death of VHS when DVD came along and gave it a bloody nose and bruised it’s ego.
If you believe this then you’re missing out on a tried and tested means of making money - the inhouse solution and the juicey support contracts that go with them. Real revenue that isn’t reliant upon flakey ad providers that can change your income at a whim. If you have made a product you don’t put it into a public place and slap adverts all over it, you sell the damn product.
In order to explain this, let me pick on my favourite micro-blogging sensation - Friendfeed.
I love the ability for this system to pull in RSS feeds, mainly because this one feature alone can transform friendfeed from a public social time sink into a powerfull private system monitoring tool (among many possible uses).
It can’t really be plumbed into the public friendfeed ’cause the data is of no interest to anyone unless you were seeking vectors of attack or trying to dent the company value. Inhouse is the only place for this and it means deploying the system outside of the cloud and in the murky backwaters of the server room.
Sorry cloud utopians.
But how would it make for a great monitoring tool? Surely there’s no space for yet another competitor when you have systems like Solarwind’s NCM that trawl SNMP and WMI?
Well, pretty much all monitoring tools will fire off alerts via email and as any network admin will tell you this can get pretty annoying if it is a little too eager to inform and is quite difficult to derive any meaningful “big picture” stats from since most will either have their own (non-sharing) reporting module or don’t have one and rely on emails only.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you had a way of picking up alerts (either from RSS or redirecting the email alerts to the inhouse solution instead of you) from various systems that ordinarily can’t talk to each other. You could even create RSS feeds out of your server event logs using Greg Reinackers little applet and watch failures in real time.
Now imagine this info accessible from a desktop widget or via an API so you can integrate it with the corporate intranet instead of cluttering up your inbox every time a grunt trips over something?
Combine this with analysis modules that do things similar to ffholic and friendfeeds power to entertain morphs into the power to knit all of your monitoring systems together and open up avenues for datamining them.
A system that compliments and sits on top of your more expensive or built-in monitoring apps rather than replacing them and provides an interface for a plethora of plugins and ways to share the data across the business.
Surely that would be a far better thing to sell than pithy advertising space?
With the amount of scam emails that pepper our inboxes every so often, you’d have thought most people would be able to identify them. Sadly, they are getting harder to pick out with a casual glance and there are quite a few people - judging by the users I support - that still can’t identify them.
In order to help remedy this, I decided to give a quick dissection of an email I got today.
Exhibit A
At first glance, it might seem legit - it is in the style of some older emails - but a quick look at the first port of call brings up the first doubts. Who is it from?
Would they use an obscure address like that? If an email is coming from a company they’re unlikely to use addresses like "squiffymonkey269" or, in this case "edr_nick". It’s just unprofessional.
*bzzzt* Strike one.
Bad grammar tends to be the hallmark of scam emails, look out for Over Capitalising Words They Want To Emphasise and missed capital letters not to mention sentences that make zero sense! If it reads like a perfect example of Engrish then chances are it’s fake.
If they show a grasp of the English language then read what it is telling you.
Here it’s informing us that they have too many accounts and need to clear them away, but hang on a second the first line states "we’re sending it to everyone" then the end of the sentence claims to be singling out me.. So they’re deleting every account then? Are they trying to drive up Gmail users?
*bzzzzt* Strike two!
And on it continues…
Stunted English and a sudden call for personal details, why not throw in a request for your mothers maiden name (I still can’t believe some web services continue to ask for this!) and your inside leg measurement while you’re at it?!
So you can detect unused accounts? Why the general mailshot then? Also, why isn’t this an automated webpage on the net instead of using an unreliable system like SMTP?
If the scammer is a little smarter than this turd and supplies a web link to enter your details, hover over the link for a few seconds and check out the address it is really sending you to. If it’s an obscure address or ends with an obscure domain tag (.ir instead of .com for example) you can bet it’s either going to be a fake site that will post your details to the scammer or infested with spyware that will attempt to spunk itself all over your system.
If it doesn’t provide a little popup telling you the address, check out the bottom of your browser window as it should tell you I’m really sending you to http://all.your.bank.details.are.all.ours .
*bzzzzzzzzzzt* Strike 3, you’re out!
Just remember the following steps:
Be skeptical of these emails
Check out who it’s from
What do they want
Does any of it makes logical and grammatical sense.
Flipping through the Metro newspaper on Friday and the most rediculous of page space allocations became immediately obvious.
On page 3 we have an almost full page spread about the storyline in the comic Batman R.I.P. - yes a fucking COMIC. A work of fiction.
Only the weather section stops it from taking up all of page three. Yet a glance at page 2 will make perfectly clear why our mainstream news is totally screwed up…
Encircled is the story of a Tory MP being busted by counter-terrorist police for allegedly handling leaked documents from the Home Office. (Times Online article, another Times Online article - I would use Daily Mail articles, since the Metro is their publication but they’re typical (hate) Mail items..)
Those documents contained no national secrets, nothing that could be determined to be a national security risk.. instead they were items that the UK government simply didn’t want publishing because they showed ineptitude of the UK politicians as well as just how bad they’re getting with regards our civil liberties.
A tiny item snuck away in the corner of a page designed to force the majority to pay attention to the bright yellow advert and not the abuse of terrorism laws and the attempts of the UK government to stifle any info it regards as damaging to its image.
You’re not a company attempting to use PR as damage limitation, you’re a government entrusted by us to ensure the country as a whole doesn’t descend into chaos and lawlessness.
ALL info regarding our government should be fully disclosed to we, the citizens, who placed you into your positions and pay for this machavalian nightmare.
It also doesn’t help when our population has been lulled into rejecting any talk of politics and instead spends it’s time obsessing over “celebs” and crap that just doesn’t matter.
I know that I shall be devoting as much time as possible to re-educating people around me and getting them to look at our government in a critical fashion once again. It’s no surprise that satire, once a great British staple, has been steadly declining across our media - replaced by shite such as the ceaseless tide of “reality” shows.
Wake the fuck up Britain, please.. we need to send a collective message to Downing Street that we know you are broken and require fixing.
