28 Aug 2008
by ryanin Technology, Web Tags: bandwidth, business, caps, comast, ISP, throttling
Word on the street is that Comcast will be implementing a 250 GB/month usage cap on their internet service. This is, apparently, in response to the FCC smackdown they recently received for selectively blocking traffic on their network.
Comcast’s argument during that dispute was that blocking traffic (BitTorrent, to be specific) was necessary to maintain the integrity of their network. Their arguments touched on capacity and Comcast’s ability to maintain service levels. Essentially, they were saying that, if they couldn’t block BitTorrent traffic (and, by extension, any traffic they deemed necessary to block), their network wouldn’t be able to reliably support traffic.
And now, all the posturing has brought us back to the stupid days of the Internet; metered traffic. The industry that was supposed to deliver 45mbps to the home, upgrade their infrastructure, and develop better protocls (and failed) has fallen back to their old chestnut for management. Comcast has long had a mystery threshold for what constitutes “excessive usage”, but it appears they’re ready to codify it for all users.
On the one hand, this is a barbaric step in Internet service. Broadband in the US has long been advertised as unlimited, although the advertising rarely coincided with reality. On the other, it’s a hard number that Comcast hasn’t been willing to disclose before.
It also sets the precedent and an opportunity for Comcast’s competitors. If there’s a huge backlash against this move, other ISPs won’t be as eager to make the same move. The opportunity comes in not imposing their own caps, keeping the “unlimited” dream alive.
Personally, I have no idea how much bandwidth I use a month. But I do know this; if I get a overrage charge, I will leave Comcast as fast as I can.
31 Jul 2008
by ryanin Web Tags: delicious, Web
So, seems that, after using them as an example of a bad idea, Delicious went and fixed themselves up with a new website design. And it’s great! Very clean, very functional, and no more idiotic URL. Well done, Yahoo, well done.
30 Jul 2008
by ryanin Technology, Web Tags: chat, tech, toys, Web
Curmudgeon mode, Engage!
I’m a big gadget/Web/Internet/wasting time fan, but the latest waste of time just made me laugh today. It’s called firefly. Firefly (sorry, firef.ly; did no one learn from del.ici.ous, wait, deli.cio.us, damn it del.icio.us?) is a service that lets you add (sigh) live chat to your web site. Really. Live chat. You know, for all those deep, moderated discussions taking place on the Web.
Firefly runs on Flash and a Javascript library (as far as I can tell), that lets anyone on your site chat with the other people on your site. I don’t know if someone on the homepage is chatting with someone on a sub-page, but really, who cares? This only works when a couple of things are in alignment: you have sufficient traffic and people want to talk about what you’re writing about.
Those two things also basically guarentee that you will have a high Internet troll quotient. And now, he’s a real-time, unmoderated, permanently S3-stored troll. It’s also next to impossible reference another chatter to, yah know, have a conversation.
It’s a cute toy, but that’s all it will be. Om Malik is saying it’s in Alpha on HuffPo; I’d love to hear how they’re dealing with political Internet trolls over there.
14 Apr 2008
by ryanin Technology, Web Tags: LinkedIn, networking, quality, social, trust, Web
During a discussion over our first grilled meal of the year (brats), J– and I got into a discussion about LinkedIn. I asked J–, as a recruiter, what was she looking for in a recommendation? As we talked through the ins and outs of a telephone conversation with a listed reference, it become readily apparent that a certain quality in a recommendation was needed to lend credibility. For instance, there was a base assumption that the person to whom she would be talking was hand-picked to deliver the best possible recommendation for a candidate; that’s why the person made the candidate’s recommendations list. But it took a very special level of interaction to raise that recommendation to a level where it could push a candidate over the top, and much of that interaction started in the initial interview with the candidate.
On the Web, this scenario doesn’t play out much. Take LinkedIn for example. If you are hiring someone and find their LinkedIn profile during a Web search on the candidate, recommendations for that candidate really carry little weight with a recruiter unless there’s some previous value placed on the recommending person (say, the recruiter happens to know the person giving the recommendation). Otherwise, the recommendation carries varying levels of implied authority from Former Boss Who Really Liked Candidate to Random Co-Worker Who Got a Reciprocal Recommendation. There is no quality behind a recommendation.
Many recommendations succeed or fail on the ability of the person writing the recommendation; someone who is articulate and efficient in their writing can craft a recommendation that sounds fantastic. What it doesn’t do is provide what a recruiter should be looking for; corroboration and authority. J– and I joked that we should just recommend each other since our last names are different, but that raised the very real issue that that is likely happening in a dozen shades all across the LinkedIn network. A recommendation on anyone’s profile is without authority on it’s face, and the probability of talking to the recommender to put some authority to a recommendation approaches zero.
Now, I pick on LinkedIn, but this isn’t unique to that site. The LinkedIn model is ripe for exploitation just as the analog model of resumes and recommendations is. Most, if not all, interactive “Web 2.0″ sites have this same problem; Digg, StumbleUpon, and their ilk have been gamed forever. The challenge for these sites isn’t the content model, it’s the arms race of staying ahead of the spammers and exploiters. For LinkedIn, the challenge isn’t spammers, it’s trust, a battle they are winning. The anecdotal success stories of someone being found through LinkedIn are the equivalent of winning the lottery: it won’t happen to you.
As we chewed through brats and the issues around quality in the LinkedIn recommendations, pretty much every idea we had was open to gaming:
- Allow co-workers from the same company with overlapping employment periods to flag reviews: too easy to say you worked together when you didn’t, open to crowd-based reprisal attacks, liability laws.
- Certify recommendations through a third party: who would be trusted by both candidate and potential employer, who’ll pay for it.
- Highlight recommendations by ratio of recommenders to number of employees in the recommender’s company (10 of 20 is better than 3 of 10,000): could argue that the opposite is true just as well, no strong case that either is true.
- Build algorithms to look for suspicious activity (X or more recommendations from same employer in Y period of time from similar IPs): it’s implied suspiciousness, not proof of gaming.
And, the last nail in the coffin, not everyone will have a profile, so it’s not a reliable tool for a recruiter anyway. In the end, we didn’t come up with any way to provide a tool for a candidate to make a recommendation anything other than the digital equivalent to the analog list of references. In fact, it had a little less value because the candidate can control the recommendations whereas the current model produces some surprising conversations with listed references. (Yes, people list references that give bad references.)
I’m not saying “don’t have a LinkedIn profile”, I’m just saying that all those recommendations may not count for quite as much as you think. Or, if you have a way to solve the quality issue, drop me a line and we’ll be millionaires together.
18 Dec 2007
by ryanin Technology, Web
Today marked the end of my regular use of digg as I unsubscribed from their RSS feed. Between election spam, recycled links from dozens of sites I already read, or whatever insipid Top 10 list got spammed to the front page by people gaming the system, digg has become a torrent or useless information. Their RSS feed kicks out hundreds of posts every day; missing one or two days with Google Reader results in a level of flotsam management that makes my inbox look downright tidy.
I’d ditched the diggnation podcast a while ago, mostly because I never got around to actually watching the thing. I haven’t missed it at all and I doubt I’ll miss digg much either. Since signing up in mid-2005, I was an avid user of digg; I didn’t submit many stories (2, actually) mostly because I was reading such interesting stuff that other people put up. But, with digg’s more recent turns towards becoming a full-on social site (leaving “news” behind), it’s become a bastion for the worst of the web; spammers, trolls, and SEO “consultants”.
So, I’m done with digg. Any suggestions (and don’t say reddit) for other, early-days-digg sites?
11 Dec 2007
by ryanin Michigan, Technology, Web
Google’s Street View, famous for the tempest in a tea cup of daring to show photos of idiots you could see by driving the street yourself, has launched for, among others cities, Detroit. And the race is on to find a crime in progress on the streets of Detroit via Google Street View. (Just to get started: Comerica Park, Joe Louis Arena, Tiger’s Stadium, Detroit Opera House)
Street View Images for Dallas, Detroit and Other 6 Cities
28 Nov 2007
by ryanin Technology, Web
This is embarrassing.
46
18 Oct 2007
by ryanin Gaming, Uhm... yeah, Web
I un-sub’d from Kotaku today. Sometime (I don’t know exactly when), someone posted Tubgirl to the front page of Kotaku, which dutifully delivered it to Google Reader via my RSS subscription. (Note, if you don’t know what Tubgirl is, do not, I repeat, do NOT Google it. It is ridiculously Not Safe For Work and is likely one of the more disgusting things you could ever wish to see. I’m not kidding, you don’t want to know. There are things you can’t un-see.)
Despite the apology, Kotaku is off my subscription list. That leaves Lifehacker as the only Gawker property left in my RSS feeds. A quick note to any Gawker people trolling for posts about this; that was total and complete bullshit. When I think about how close I was to opening that folder (gaming) while bored in a meeting today, I can’t even begin to imagine the fallout if it had been seen.
I’m not trying to be a prude, but if I can’t be confident that reader a fucking website for games won’t land me in a world of hurt at work, using the Unsubscribe button is a fairly easy, preventative step.
19 Jun 2007
by ryanin Flickr, News, Web
Backstory: J– has decided to start a business. She’s not quitting her day job or anything, but tossing her spare time into a new venture; henna. For those not in the know, henna is the mostly-Indian (as in the sub-Saharan continent) practice of staining the skin with a natural paste. Some of the design are incredibly complicated and complex, but J– has picked it up in an incredibly short time. Despite my family’s, er, chilly reception to her skills, I and everyone else she’s worked on has been impressed and have encouraged her to keep going.
So, with the help of her friend, she’s started booking gigs. As with all entrepreneurial endeavors, J– has to have a web presence, which is about all I can contribute. So, fire up Dreamweaver, Firefox, and TopStyle and start hacking away at her site, Fat Cat Henna.
Three hours into it, and beating my head against my desk over rounded corners in CSS and it occurs to me I’m going at this all wrong. Other far smarter people have tread this ground already and publish a pretty kick-ass product. It’s called WordPress.
So, off to WordPress we go, download, unzip, upload, configure and whadda yah know, we got ourselves a Hello World website. In slightly under 20 minutes. J– digs around the following day and finds a few templates that she likes and brings them home via thumb drive. Download, unzip, upload, configure and whadda yah know, we got ourselves a solid framework, a template that’s 90% to where she wants it (although not enough green yet).
So, aside from this post and some chores, we’ve spent the last 2 hours or so tweaking the site. Change some CSS, alter a couple graphics, copy and paste some content, upload some photos and whadda yah know, we got ourselves an honest to gosh, fully functional website.
The To Do list is short: Need to build and publish a Flickr slideshow, tweak the template a bit more (no blogging going on), and maybe a hack to allow her to publish gig dates without a hassle, but not a heck of a lot.
Did we design the site; I guess not, but I do know this. For a small business (of 1) with a $0 design budget, a $0 web management budget, and 2 days until her first solo gig, WordPress got it done.
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