Author: Ianforrester

Senior firestarter at BBC R&D, emergent technology expert and serial social geek event organiser. Can be found at cubicgarden@mas.to, cubicgarden@twit.social and cubicgarden@blacktwitter.io

P2P users spend more on media

P2P File Stealers Spend A Ton On Media

Ok so I was a little harsh in the last blog post, it seems some people are still catching on. So here's another graph I found which sums up the opportunity I've been spelling out across my blog for years.

Internet file sharers swapping music, movies and TV shows over peer-to-peer networks are killing media and technology companies, right?

Wrong.

According to a study conducted by Frank N. Magid Associates published in AdAge, “the P2P user attends 34% more movies in theaters, purchases 34% more DVDs and rents 24% more movies than the average Internet user.”

In almost every single one of those categories, I personally spend more money that most of my friends who don't use P2P or even on-demand services. I have own a HDTV for 2 years now, yes my screen is well over 20inches (40inch) but I didn't pay anywhere near 2000 dollars for it. Yes I do own a next gen game console (xbox360, and I use to own a Wii). Had a home cinema system for 14+ years now, but just recently upgraded it to 7.1. Wouldn't even consider buying anything but a smartphone since about 2001. No Bluray player, but yes to the Media centre PC (XBMC). Plus I would add that I spend more time in the cinema and buy more films that my non P2P friends. The Ad people should be gunning for people like myself, but instead they lump us in with dvd/cd street/market copiers and demonize us all collectively at the start of films as mass pirates.

Of course it gets worst because now the UK Government wants to choke P2P file sharers (bearing in mind P2P isn't against the law, it just depends on what you share). As pointed out by the open rights group, the market is coming back in to balance (even I end up buying 10+ songs a month from Audiojelly) and the government have overstepped the mark with this latest proposal.

Fact is that you can never stop such things, and calling all out war on piracy is not even funny, its actually childish and headline grabbing. Even Obama has stopped using the word war on terror, because they know how stupid the whole notion of a war on anything is. Britain needs people like myself (early adopters) who do slide in the grey areas of media because we inform whats possible for the masses in the near future. We spend more money, time, attention on media that the average person and we even share our experiences openly for all to learn from. The positive up shot of all this will go away quickly if such regulations come into play.

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Hulu Has More Viewers Than Time Warner Cable, and what?

Graph showing Hulu with more users that Time warner cable

Is anyone really that surprised that Hulu has more viewers that some cable networks in America? Seriously? I mean come on its 2009, have people not been paying attention? Maybe I spent so much time off the broadcast schedule that when theres a line in the sand between the broadcast schedule and on demand viewing, I automatically assume the on demand position. But for good reason. I mean, I'm sure I could draw some graph/chart showing how YouTube has more viewers that almost every single broadcaster out there. How Bit Torrent download is still totally killing pay per downloads stores like itunes. etc, etc. This isn't news, its clarification of what most of already knew wrapped up in a poor infographic.

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My new enlightened screensaver

Flickr photostream GLscreensaver

I was thinking the other day how I enjoyed the Digital bits photostream by Will Lion. But its not exactly the kind of thing you look at all the time, even in my RSS reader it doesn't really work. So I found the perfect place for it, as a screensaver. I looked for a Linux Flickr based Screensaver but found very little. Most of the blog posts suggest downloading the photos then using a standard Linux screensaver to display a folder of the images. The blog I was looking at suggested using a podget and a cron to pull down the photos everyday at 5am. This was ok but I didn't want to install another app when I thought Conduit could do a even better job. And I was right.

I setup Conduit to read from the Flickr RSS feed and download the pictures to a set folder, I then just told the screensaver to look in the same folder to pull in the fresh photos. All straight forward really but so effective.

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Welcome to the BarCamp Season

BarCampManchester2

I have tweeted about BarCampManchester2 quite a few times and the wiki page is now up and running. But we're not the only ones to announce BarCamp, actually this half of the year there are a ton of BarCamps in the UK and even more exciting is that there will be quite a few overnight barcamps, including Manchester.

Here's a list of the ones to be aware of.

So lots of BarCamps right through till next year and that list doesn't even include the TEDxNorth's, Hack events and Over the Air. As you'd expect there are clashes but thankfully it all seems to come together now. Thanks to BarCampCornwall for changing the dates around.

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Free software campaigns

Windows 7 Sins

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) have launched an attack on Windows 7 by dropping 499 of the Fortune 500 companies a letter advising them to consider a switch to Free Software instead of Windows 7. Theres also been a protest and site setup for the whole thing.

I'm quite critical of the FSF's approach to these things but the only reason why is because I think there in the grand scheme of things actually right. But they seem to go about it in such a odd way. Yes writing letters to the CEOs sounds good but honestly, do they think this will make any difference let alone will anyone actually admit . to reading it? So the message is falling on deaf ears? Does it gather any additional publicity? Maybe. They could have done with something a lot more effective like the Freedom Fry thing, although I got to say it was odd having Stephen Fry giving a speech about software and hardware freedoms while being a big Apple consumer. By the way his latest podcast is well worth listening to. Actually it would be good to have a FSF podcast thinking about it, something like Linux Outlaws but less tech and more laws and infringements.

So my main gripe about the FSF is the scale and scope of some these things they do. I think they need to be more like Creative Commons in there tackfulness and campaigning but also consider much more smarter ways to raise awareness like how Firefox did. One of my worries is that unlike those other successful campaigns the FSF guys are not very good about being native to the web. Which is strangely ironic because with the work going into HTML5 and the mobile web, it seems like a really good time to be native to the web. So with a more refined look at the web the FSF could be pushing good system and practices. For example I've not seen any link to the Open Microblogging standard on the FSF site. In the darker corners of there site, there are some interesting things. The Play OGG one is a no brainer right? Even my Pacemaker editor exports OGG over MP3 for the exact reasons of cost There are some other campaigns which I think deserve as much attention like FreeBios, GNUPDF and a Free software replacement for Skype.

Actually the last one is very important, we're looking at alternatives in BBC R&D for cheap, effective P2P video conferencing. Skype does the job but its restricted in its quality and size which is a pain when your on a super thick pipe using a 2 megapix video camera. My real bets for a solution lie in the work Google has done recently in the video space.

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Exposing the myth of digital native generation

In the New York Times yesterday was a piece about how a certain teenager would text most of the day away but wouldn't use twitter, saying quote I just think it’s weird and I don’t feel like everyone needs to know what I’m doing every second of my life. The post goes on about how its not Teenagers driving the usage of Twitter and then starts to look at how the traditional view of early adopters being teenagers is no longer correct.

Twitter, however, has proved that “a site can take off in a different demographic than you expect and become very popular,” he said. “Twitter is defying the traditional model.”

In fact, though teenagers fueled the early growth of social networks, today they account for 14 percent of MySpace’s users and only 9 percent of Facebook’s. As the Web grows up, so do its users, and for many analysts, Twitter’s success represents a new model for Internet success. The notion that children are essential to a new technology’s success has proved to be largely a myth.

Adults have driven the growth of many perennially popular Web services. YouTube attracted young adults and then senior citizens before teenagers piled on. Blogger’s early user base was adults and LinkedIn has built a successful social network with professionals as its target.

The same goes for gadgets. Though video games were originally marketed for children, Nintendo Wiis quickly found their way into nursing homes. Kindle from Amazon caught on first with adults and many gadgets, like iPhones and GPS devices, are largely adult-only.

So finally will people stop thinking of early adopters as teenagers? Will the eternal myth that all teenagers are digital native finally go away? I'd certainly like to think so, but I sadly doubt it.

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RSS on the desktop with Conky

RSS Desktop Screenshot

I've recently been playing with Conky far too much. After a lot of playing around, I got it to this state. So now I have RSS directly on my desktop, I do however wish there was a marquee mode (found), so I could build something more like one of Particls outputs or Snackr. Conky does support Lua scripting, so it seems possible but way above my head at this moment.

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Time to change the record?

The timeline of music sales

Saw this graph of the music sales over various mediums over the last few decades. Looking at the graph its easy to see why the music industry are so pissed off with the radical changes. They have been so comfortable with seeing massive profits off the back of CDs sales that their expecting even bigger profits from the next format. However thats not going to happen. The article on evolver magazine goes into much more detail, although you can imagine what it says without reading it.

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The wrong ball park, Shareflow vs Google Wave

People have been sending me links to Shareflow and asking what I think of it. Well I did spot it a while ago when the whole thing kicked off about Shareflow ripping off Google Wave.

Let’s suppose that Zenbe HAD copied Google Wave. That would mean that Zenbe managed to design, build and deploy a real, complete, useable product, along with everything needed to actually support a public service, all in less than a month!  That would be phenomenal!   Miraculous! You should check out Shareflow just to see the magic!

If you search the Internet you will realize that Shareflow must be a separate, independent solution, perhaps to a similiar problem, and has nothing to do with Google Wave.

Shareflow grew out of our own efforts at solving our own communication and collaboration needs.  We wanted a something that would let us ditch IM, email, wikis, and other disconnected tools.  We have been working on Shareflow for more than a year, its been out in public since February 09, in private testing for a few  months before that.

You want proof?  How about  a Youtube video from March, or a  blog post from April?  Or this one.  Or just ask anyone who signed up for our subscription service Zenbe Mail earlier this year.

From my point of view I think its like Wave but theres 2 major differences. 1st one is Shareflow is very cloud web 2.0 like, so its a hosted service like 37 Signal's Basecamp. This, a year ago would have been cool and to be honest I'd be saying nicer things about it a year ago too. However Wave has changed things and moved things on for the better. Wave isn't just a application, nor is it just a platform nope its lower down than that. Its a protocal! And its a open protocal, which is a whole different ball park. Actually if I was Shareflow/Zenbe I'd personally put Wave protocal support in the roadmap very soon. They would be crazy not to.

The biggest complaint I have about Google Wave's HTML client is it looks like all other google apps, aka not exactly exciting just functional. While the shareflow client looks better designed. And thats where their business model could be. Leave the heavy lifting stuff to the Wave protocal and platform. Focus on the experience of the users. They need to be more like Mozilia (clever client apps which work on open protocals) that Microsoft (end to end solution).

By the way, did anyone notice Shareflow also has no API and no details of the actual protocal being used? It might have the jump on Wave now, but its won't be long before its bypassed and I just can't see how Zeebe will compete unless they jump on the wave platform too.

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Look out for District 9

One of the best short films I've seen (Alive in Joburg) is being made into a film called District 9. I had no idea till recently.

If you've never seen or heard of either, the basic premise is that Aliens have come to South Africa and decided to stay. Unlike most other scifi movies, these aliens are not exactly the top of food chain. They do have advanced weapons but are also vulnerable to human weapons. So after being classified as refugees all type of scenarios playout. One example is the start of a blackmarket between the human slumlords and the aliens. The alive in Joburg has a theme of xenophobia running throughout it, which looks to be the same in District 9 too.

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