Campaigns in a Web 2.0 World [New York Times]
Here's a neat article that summarizes many of the changes that the web has made in the way presidential campaigns are run since the last presidential election. Candidates use social networking applications like Facebook to organize their supporters, and the explosion of web video sites like YouTube have allowed candidates to package video nearly instantaneously for connected voters.
The new media politics is also having an impact on how people consume traditional media. Cable news outlets have attracted audiences on par with broadcast throughout the major events of this political cycle. This article posits that will likely be true for election coverage tomorrow night - as news consumers check the latest results on the web, while watching their favorite cable news network.
Today, I'm speaking with students at the University of Kentucky School of Journalism and Telecommunications. One of the topics I'll be discussing is this article. I'll write more tomorrow about the discussion.
Malware has been around for a long time - almost as long as the Internet itself. This past weekend marked the 20th anniversary of the first "Internet worm." Back in 1988, prior to the world wide web, when the Internet was still mainly the domain of computer science professors, a man named Robert Morris released a set of code that was designed to take advantage of the Unix servers on the Internet and duplicated itself until the Internet slowed to a crawl. Morris was caught and prosecuted. The infected servers were fixed and the vulnerabilities plugged.
We've come a long way since 1988 in the sense that a single piece of malware hasn't been able to stop the whole Internet from functioning. However, the number of security threats to the average Internet user are as vast today as they have ever been.
Try Netflix Watch Instantly on your Mac right now [VentureBeat]
Reviews of Netflix's new "Watch Instantly" feature for Mac are starting to come in. The feature uses a Microsoft product called Silverlight to stream over 12,000 titles from Netflix directly to your Mac. Based on this review, picture quality is average, but improves the higher your broadband connection speed is. This particular reviewer was impressed enough to ditch Netflix's DVD delivery in favor of watching the broadband stream.
As broadband video services like Netflix and YouTube become more and more popular, they become a larger percentage of all broadband usage. These type of services are driving broadband speed innovations like DOCSIS 3.0.
A song about p2p files haring has had portions bleeped out when played on MTV. When MTV plays Weird Al Yankovic's "Don't Download This Song," the names of popular file sharing services are bleeped out so that viewers can hear the names. The song's lyrics mention Morpheus, Grokster, Limewire, KaZaA, which were popular p2p sites when the song was released in 2006. Instead of hearing those services names' on MTV, viewers hear bleeps instead. TechDirt speculates that MTV is attempting to protect artists and content producers against infringement. Yankovic's song is a parody of the recording industry's attempts to curb illegal file sharing.
Great to see a blog by you Michael, you seem like a generally likable individual and reading some of your 'insight' makes your company more approachable.
That being said, I have one question I'd like to see answered in some fashion, directly from your stance and on your companies. Hopefully they are the same.
Where does Insight stand on net neutrality? Furthermore, in regards to digressing to a 'tiered' internet service, what do you think about what AT&T is currently testing?
http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/gigaom/media/2008_11_04_will_att_put_the_squeeze_on_hd_streams.html
Posted by: Christopher Davidson | Wednesday, November 05, 2008 at 04:27 PM