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Guess Which Social Network Led In ‘Downtime’ In 2008?

Feb 18th, 2009 | By | Category: General, New Media Organizations

Social Media Downtime 2008, from Pingdom.com

Uptime and performance monitoring service Pingdom has done a study of social network uptime in 2008. They looked at some of the more heavily-used sites – Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, Friendster, LiveJournal, Orkut, Bebo, Hi5, Windows Live Spaces, Last.fm, Classmates.com, Reunion.com, Xanga and Imeem.

Twitter and LinkedIn experienced the greatest amount of downtime in 2008, but the study reveals a lot more interesting detail.

Their key findings included these “standout facts” and trends for 2008 include:

  • Only 5 social networks managed an overall uptime of 99.9% or better: Facebook (99.92%), MySpace (99.94%), Classmates.com (99.95%), Xanga (99.95%) and Imeem (99.95%). Again, it should be pointed out that Imeem was only monitored from May 9 and onward while the other sites were monitored the entire year.
  • The single most massive social network incident in 2008 happened to Friendster. The service had a data center outage in November that caused more than 23 hours of downtime in a time span of less than 3 days. If it weren’t for that incident, Friendster would have placed much better in this survey.
  • 84% of Twitter’s downtime happened during the first half of 2008. July and onward has seen a big improvement in site availability for Twitter.
  • 77% of LiveJournal’s downtime happened in Q4 of 2008. It is too early to say if this is indicative of a trend or if it was a temporary lapse in uptime due to the service’s migration to a new hosting provider.
  • LinkedIn’s downtime has been increasing over the year. Each quarter has seen a larger amount of downtime than the one before it.”

The full report is free and its .pdf can be found here.

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Tumblr Adds Audioblogging Via Phone

Feb 18th, 2009 | By | Category: Audio Podcasting, Featured Story, Microblogging

Blogging platform Tumblr today disclosed on its staff blog that they’ve added a neat new feature that lets users create audio blog posts via telephone.

Users enter their phone number (illustrated, right), and messages called in to Tumblr’s toll-free number get posted to your Tumblr blog, a mishmash of your links, photos, text posts, videos and favorite links. Audioblog posts to Tumblr are bite-sized, limited to two minutes or less.

Other new features making their Tumblr debut today include the ability to create draft posts, and post-dated or scheduled posts. Users can find them on the “publishing options” menu.

Ars Technica has mentioned the possibility of Tumblr launching a premium version of the blogging platform coming soon.

Two other issues have put Tumblr in the news this past week. The company made the New York Times today, in an article about its decision to change its content policy. Users can no longer create tumbleblogs for the purpose of harrassing, defaming, or “repeatedly harassing or abusing specific members or groups within the Tumblr community.” Five Tumblr blogs were all reportedly devoted to snarking about self-made celebrity egoblogger Julia Alison.

And in one last piece of Tumblr news, the company is *not* being purchased by Yahoo, which had been rumored at Valleywag.

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100 Days, 100 Songs, 100 Locations, 100 Dances

Feb 18th, 2009 | By | Category: Internet TV, Video

http://vimeo.com/3237836

If you liked the viral video hit Where The Hell Is Matt?, here’s another dance music video that looks like it could go viral, Boombox, by Ely Kim, a graduate student at Yale studying graphic design.

“I LOVE to dance and I enjoy clouds, mangoes, smiling, and puppies,” explains Kim.

Echolot, via Synthtopia

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Producing Voiceovers with Logic 8

Feb 17th, 2009 | By | Category: Audio Podcasting, How to Podcast

Grooveboxmusic.com has introduced a video tutorial course, Producing Voiceovers with Logic 8, that could be useful for podcasters.

Here’s what they have to say about it:

Presented by Logic master Eli Krantzberg, this collection of Logic 8 video tutorials will show you how to make professional voiceover productions for commercials, advertisements and more. Starting with a blank session, Eli takes you step by step from the beginning and shows you how to prepare, record, edit, mix and master a quality voiceover spot for a radio advertisement.

Features:

  • 23 Tutorials / 3 hours total runtime
  • For all intermediate to advanced Logic 8 users
  • Tutorials written by Logic expert Eli Krantzberg
  • Simple to use video control interface for Mac & PC

Pricing:

You an view all the video tutorials in the Producing Voiceovers with Logic 8 collection online for 30 days for  $17.99 or download and own the full disc for only $49.99. The boxed disc version will ship in 2-3 weeks for $54.99 plus shipping.

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iPhone-Compatible Gloves For Chilly Hands

Feb 16th, 2009 | By | Category: iPod Accessories, iPods & Portable Media Players

One of the (few) things I dislike about my wonderful iPhone is trying to use it in Iowa in the wintertime. The cold temperatures here necessitate the wearing of gloves, but operating the phone’s handy touch screen is impossible without bare hands. And often, by the time I’ve peeled off my mittens and exposed my hands to the bitter cold, I’ve missed the phone call.

Enter Dots, the iPhone-compatible knit glove. These are plain, functional gloves (available in wool ($20) or in an acrylic ($15) ) that sport little nickel and brass dots on the ends of the thumb and index finger. Hence the name. The smooth, curved shape of the dots enables the wearer to operate the iPhone touch screen without scratching it.

Engadget says they think the Dots gloves ought to also work with non-Apple touch screen phones, like the Storm or the G1.

At the moment, the gloves only come in one color (black), two sizes (medium for women, large for men) and two fiber types (wool or wool blend). Dots’ website says that leather, color, and child-sized gloves are coming soon.

Find out more about the gloves here.

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FairShare Tool Tracks How Your Work Propagates Through The Web

Feb 16th, 2009 | By | Category: General

Web-wide business content tracking and programming platform company Attributor has announced the private beta version of FairShare. The program is a free service intended to help help bloggers track their content’s usage throughout the Web – and whether that usage complies with your copyright and licensing requirements.

Late last year, Attributor published a report about tracking the propagation of the content you create. According to the study, many, if not most, of the viewings of a website’s content does not happen on their own page or their RSS feed, but on other sites. They suggest that perhaps only half of the views of your content happen on your own site or via your RSS feed – the rest happen on other sites outside your purview or control.

Enter FairShare, which aims to help you “watch how your work spreads and understand how it is used.”

FairShare works with Creative Commons licenses. It tracks down where, outside your website, your content pops up, how much of your post is used, and whether the page is linked or attributed to you, as well as whether there are display ads there.

The FairShare program returns a list of matches that turn up. If the matched content is Creative Commons License, the feed will also check whether the re-published content complies with your CC license. FairShare is free, and works with over a dozen different languages.

Of course, the program only *finds* sites where your content is being used. If another site uses your content without permission or attribution or is otherwise not in compliance with your licensing, FairShare does not have any fancy filtering capabilities to sort egregious examples from the minor ones. Also, you’re on your own to pursue compliance issues with infringing sites.

Tip o’ the hat to the Blog Herald and Plagiarism Today

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New Half Life Series, Escape From City 17, Filmed For $500!

Feb 15th, 2009 | By | Category: Internet TV, Video

The Escape From City 17 short film series is based on the Half Life computer game saga by Valve Corporation.

Originally envisioned as a project to test out numerous post production techniques, as well as a spec commercial, it ballooned into a multi-part series. Filmed guerilla style with no money, no time, no crew, no script, the first two episodes were made from beginning to end on a budget of $500.

If the $500 figure is close to true, Escape From City 17 represents a big leap forward in guerilla filmmaking, and means that we’re going to see an explosion longer-form indie content.

Note: the embed above is NSFW and includes graphic violence.

Read more »

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Apple Says iPhone Jailbreaking is Illegal

Feb 13th, 2009 | By | Category: Citizen Media, iPhone, Podcasting Law

Digital civil liberties organization the Electronic Frontier Foundation is reporting that Apple is arguing that “jailbreaking an iPhone constitutes copyright infringement and a DMCA [digital millenium copyright act] violation.” These comments from Apple were filed with the U.S. Copyright Office in conjunction with the 2009 DMCA review, which happens every three years.

EFF says that this the first formal public statement by Apple about its legal stance on iPhone jailbreaking. For the uninitiated, jailbreaking is a practice in which iPhone owners break out of the built-in restrictions of the popular mobile phone in order to use applications from sources other than Apple’s own iPhone App Store.

The number of iPhone owners who have jailbroken their phones is estimated in the hundreds of thousands.

EFF has asked the Copyright Office, as part of its 2009 DMCA rulemaking, to recognize an exemption to the DMCA to permit jailbreaking in order to allow iPhone owners to use their phones with applications that are not available from Apple’s store.

Apple, for its part, argues that its copyright is infringed, in that jailbroken iPhones depend on modified versions of Apple’s bootloader and operating system software. Opening the jailbroken iPhone to applications not approved for distribution via the Apple iPhone App Store, they say, will compromise the safety and security of the iPhone, and, in EFF’s paraphrase of the argument, “swing the doors wide for those who want to run pirated software.”

EFF rebuts Apple’s argument, saying that “the courts have long recognized that copying software while reverse engineering is a fair use when done for purposes of fostering interoperability with independently created software, a body of law that Apple conveniently fails to mention.”

We’ll keep you posted on the story as it develops.

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One In Five Internet Users Watches TV Online; Doubled From 2007

Feb 13th, 2009 | By | Category: Internet TV, The New Media Update, Video

Consumer information company Knowledge Networks released a study this week that examines how the U.S. TV-viewing audience consumes and interacts with offerings on TV networks’ websites, such as blogs, games, voting, podcasts, and, of course, video.

“How People Use TV’s Web Connections 2009” found that one in five (21%) Internet users ages 13 to 54 now accesses streaming video to watch full episodes of TV programs – up from 10% in 2006. Two-thirds (65%) of these “streamers” say they expect to be able to watch their favorite shows on “the device of my choice” – an expectation that reaches across generations, from 66% of teen “streamers” (ages 13 to 17) to 57% of those 50 to 54.

The Knowledge Networks report shows that, among streamers of TV network content in that 13-to-54 age group, use of third-party hosting sites (such as Hulu) to access TV network video content has doubled since 2007, from 14% to 28%. However, the networks’ own websites are still their most common source for watching network content.

Making full TV episodes available online also appears to create good will – toward networks and sponsors alike. 86% of age 13-to-54 streamers said they are “more engaged” with programs that they can watch on the Internet – up from 78% in 2006. And 66% said that having access to complete episodes increases their consideration of sponsoring brands, compared to 58% in 2006.”

Knowledge Networks’ report, “How People Use TV’s Web Connections 2009,” is now in its third year, detailing consumers’ changing use of and attitudes toward television network content on the Internet. The study was conducted among Internet users age 13 to 54. Over 1,900 persons were interviewed, including 1,700 broadband users.

In a related note about another fairly new technology, (see post from earlier today), another study, this one by the Pew Internet Project, found that 11% of online American adults said they used a service like Twitter or another service that allowed them to share updates about themselves or to see the updates of others.

With net TV watching at 21% vs microblogging 11%, does that mean that Twitter is only half as popular as Internet TV? (We’re only half-joking, here).

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Has Real-Time Citizen News Arrived?

Feb 13th, 2009 | By | Category: Citizen Media, Commentary, Video

When tragedy strikes, the 24-hour news networks are there, to bring you the catastrophe in immediate, agonizing detail.

But Thursday night, when a Continental Airlines commuter plane crashed near Buffalo, NY, the major networks’ coverage didn’t come from a local affiliate camera crew dispatched to the scene. News networks, including Fox News, CNN, MSNBC and BBC all immediately and prominently covered the disaster with amateur video shot by individuals who arrived on the scene right after the crash.

One clip that was broadcast over and over on several channels was a 2-minute YouTube video by SpikeTheCowboy711 whose terse summary says, “Plane crashed a few blocks from my house. I filmed it.” Barely 12 hours after the plane crashed, this video clip had already racked up 196,887 views.

The amateur footage is, well, amateurish, shot with shaky mobile phones, blurry through chain-link fencing. But even so, the speed with which these “citizen journalists” were on the scene of the crash, and the fact that their video was picked up and passed along by so quickly by the major networks seems to mark a turning point in news coverage.

Has real-time citizen news arrived?

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