PC World
The 100 Best Products of 2005
1. Mozilla Firefox Web Browser
2. Google Gmail Web Mail
3. Apple Mac OS X Version 10.4 (Tiger) Operating System
4. Belkin Wireless Pre-N Router and Notebook Network Card Wireless Networking
5. Dell Ultrasharp 2405FPW 24-Inch Wide-Screen LCD
6. Alienware Aurora 5500 Performance PC
7. Seagate USB 2.0 Pocket Drive Portable Hard Drive
8. Skype VoIP Service
9. Canon EOS Digital Rebel XT Digital SLR Camera
10. PalmOne Treo 650 PDA Phone
11. Zone Labs ZoneAlarm Antivirus Antivirus and Firewall Software
12. Mysoft Technology Maxthon Browser Plug-In
13. Rio Carbon Midcapacity MP3 Player
14. Webroot Window Washer 5.5 Utility
15. Maxtor H01R300 Shared Storage Drive Network Hard Drive
16. Google Search Engine
17. Netgear 54 Mbps Cable/DSL Wireless Travel Router Model WGR101 Travel Router
18. OnlyMyEmail Pro Spam Filter
19. Sony PlayStation Portable Handheld Gaming Device
20. NVidia GeForce 6600 GT Graphics Board
21. APC Back-UPS RS 800VA 120V Uninterruptible Power Supply
22. 2BrightSparks SyncBackSE Utility
23. Moon Software Password Agent Password Manager
24. HP Officejet 7210 All-in-One Multifunction Printer
25. Winternals Software ERD Commander Data Recovery Software
26. Ubuntu Linux 5.04 Linux Distribution
27. Epson PictureMate Photo Printer
28. Mozilla Thunderbird E-Mail Program
29. Cloudmark Anti-Fraud Toolbar Browser Security Plug-In
30. Vonage VoIP Service
31. Cloudmark SafetyBar Spam Filter
32. Adobe Photoshop CS2 Image Editor
33. The New York Times on the Web Web Site
34. Apple ITunes Media Player
35. Seagate USB/FireWire Hard Drive External Hard Drive
36. Canon CanoScan 9950F Scanner
37. IRiver IFP-895 Flash-Based MP3 Player
38. Valve Half-Life 2 PC Game
39. Samsung HL-P5063W Rear-Projection TV
40. Tor Privacy Software
41. LG Flatron L1981Q 19-Inch LCD
42. Dell 3000cn Color Laser Printer
43. BlackBerry 7100t PDA Phone
44. Verbatim Store 'n' Go Pro USB Memory Key
45. Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 SATA NCQ Internal Hard Drive
46. Compaq Presario V2000 All-Purpose Notebook
47. Microsoft Windows Media Player 10 Media Player
48. Canon Pixma IP4000R Inkjet/Photo Printer
49. Best Software Simply Accounting Accounting and Personal Finance
50. Orb Media Streaming Service
51. Flickr.com Photography Site
52. Dell Inspiron 6000 Desktop Replacement Notebook
53. DirecTV HD DVR HR10-250 HD Receiver and DVR
54. ACD Systems ACDSee 7 Photo Organizer
55. Dell UltraSharp 1704FPV 17-Inch LCD
56. Olympus C-8080 Wide Zoom Digital Camera
57. Qnext Instant Messenger
58. IBM ThinkCentre A51p All-Purpose PC
59. SightSpeed Video Instant Messenger
60. Wikipedia Online Resource
61. Cerulean Studios Trillian 3.1 Instant Messenger
62. CMS 80GB USB 2.0 ABSplus Notebook Backup System Portable Hard Drive
63. Nikon Coolpix 7900 Digital Camera
64. Contour Design RollerMouse Pro Mouse
65. Adobe InDesign CS2 Desktop Publisher
66. Shuttle Computer XPC i8600b Small PC
67. IBM ThinkPad X41 Ultraportable Notebook
68. Adobe Premiere Elements Video Editor
69. Dell Axim X30 PDA
70. A9.com Search Engine
71. Toshiba RS-TX20 Digital Media Server DVD Recorder
72. Roxio Easy Media Creator 7.5 Burning Software
73. Plextor PX-716UF Rewritable DVD Drive
74. Casio Exilim EX-Z750 Digital Camera
75. Apple Mac Mini Small PC
76. Google Desktop Search Desktop Search Tool
77. Mitsubishi LT-3050 30-Inch LCD TV
78. Apple IPod Photo Large-Capacity MP3 Player
79. Dell 3300MP Projector
80. FileMaker Pro 7 Database
81. Sunbelt Software CounterSpy Anti-Spyware Software
82. Six Apart TypePad Blogging Tool
83. Acronis True Image 8 Backup Software
84. Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe Motherboard
85. Brother HL-5140 Monochrome Laser Printer
86. Apple ITunes Music Store Music Downloads
87. Internet Archive (Archive.org) Web Site
88. Opera 8 Web Browser
89. Copernic Desktop Search Desktop Search Software
90. Motorola Razr V3 Cell Phone
91. Delphi MyFi Satellite Radio
92. PDAapps VeriChat Standard Edition Mobile Instant Messaging
93. Sonos Digital Music System Streaming Media Device
94. EMC Dantz Retrospect Professional 7 Backup Software
95. Garmin StreetPilot C330 GPS Navigation Device
96. Klipsch ProMedia Ultra 2.0 Portable Speakers
97. Logitech Z-5500 Digital PC Speaker System
98. Antec P160 Desktop Case
99. Corel Painter IX Paint Program
100. 100. Citrix Online GoToMyPC Personal Remote Access
http://cache.directorym.com/creative...ource=AB_TAX_B
All links in original article
A Compilation Search Technology Book Reviews
Chris Sherman
Want to hack together your own search engine? Curious to dig deeper into data mining? Here's a compilation of various search-related book reviews published in SearchDay over the past several years.
This is the third installment of a list of all search-related book reviews published in SearchDay. This particular list covers books about search marketing. The first installment covered reviews of books about general web search tactics and techniques, and the second covered reviews of search marketing and search engine optimization.
Miscellaneous Search-Related Books
Use the alphabetically arranged links below to go directly to a review. Scroll down the page for a reverse-chronological listings and a brief description of each book review.
Firefox Hacks, Nigel McFarlane
Lucene in Action, Otis Gospodnetic and Erik Hatcher
Mining the Web: Discovering Knowledge from Hypertext Data, Soumen Chakrabarti
Peer-To-Peer: Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies, Andy Oram
Spidering Hacks, Kevin Hemenway and Tara Calishain
Reverse Chronological Listings
Hack Your Own Search Engine Crawler
SearchDay, February 4, 2004
http://searchenginewatch.com/searchd...le.php/3307271
Want to build your own customized search tool that can search the web, explore online databases, and mine virtually any other type of internet resource?
Spidering Hacks, by Kevin Hemenway and Tara Calishain, offers "100 Industrial Strength Tips and Tools" for creating and running your own spiders. Among these tips and tools, of course, are instructions for creating your own personal web crawler that works much like those used by the major search engines.
How to Build Your Own Search Engine
SearchDay, July 9, 2003
http://searchenginewatch.com/serepor...le.php/2220611
Want a detailed glimpse into the black boxes we call search engines?
Mining the Web: Discovering Knowledge from Hypertext Data is one of the first books that actually describes, in detail, the parts of contemporary search engines and how they function. The author, Soumen Chakrabarti, is an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay, and the book reveals a rare glimpse at the inner workings of our favorite search tools.
Hacking Your Own Search Engine
SearchDay, March 15, 2005
http://searchenginewatch.com/searchd...le.php/3489941
Got the itch to go head-to-head with Google, Yahoo and all of the other big search players on the web? A new book provides a detailed blueprint for using and customizing Lucene, open-source search engine software that's freely available online.
Lucene in Action by Otis Gospodnetic and Erik Hatcher is a thorough introduction to the inner workings of what's arguably the most popular open source search engine.
Peering at Peer-to-Peer
SearchDay, August 9, 2001
http://searchenginewatch.com/searchd...le.php/2157501
"Just as the early 20th-century advocates of psychoanalysis saw sex everywhere, industry analysts and marketing managers are starting to call everything they like in computers and telecommunications 'peer-to-peer,' writes Andy Oram in the preface to Peer-To-Peer: Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies published by O'Reilly & Associates.
Peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies may not have the same appeal as sex, but they have seemingly become all the rage in the early years of the 21st century. Though now crippled, Napster is the poster child for P2P, and its "dark twin" Gnutella has also received a lot of press. The Seti@Home project is another highly visible P2P effort. In this book, editor Oram has assembled a collection of articles penned by P2P experts.
Supercharging Firefox
SearchDay, May 18, 2005
http://searchenginewatch.com/searchd...le.php/3505756
The Firefox browser comes pre-configured with lots of great search tools, but it's also highly customizable, allowing you to push your online experience to new and fun extremes. I've written that Mozilla Firefox is the searcher's browser. Not only does it come preconfigured to easily search Google, Amazon and other important sites, it's easily extensible. You can snap-in plugins for literally hundreds of specialized search engines with just a few clicks, and just as easily remove them if you don't like what they do.
Adding new search tools to Firefox is just the tip of the iceberg of things you can do to extend and enhance the browser. A new book from O'Reilly, Firefox Hacks, shows you how to supercharge your browsing experience.
http://searchenginewatch.com/searchd...le.php/3569146
NBC to Sell TV Shows for Viewing on Apple Software
Saul Hansell
NBC Universal said yesterday that it would start to sell downloadable versions of 11 of its current and older television shows through the iTunes Music Store of Apple Computer.
NBC is the second major television network to distribute programming through Apple. In October, Apple started to sell episodes from five current programs on the ABC network, which is owned by the Walt Disney Company. Those programs can be watched both on Apple's latest generation of iPod portable players and on Apple and Windows-based personal computers running Apple's iTunes software.
NBC will sell episodes of some current shows, including "Law & Order," "The Office" and "Surface." The arrangement also includes some cable programs, including "Monk" from USA Network and "Battlestar Galactica" from the Sci Fi Channel. And there will be some older shows like "Alfred Hitchcock Presents," "Dragnet" and "Adam-12"; NBC owns the rights to all of them.
In addition to full programs - which will not have commercials - NBC will sell video excerpts from some programs, like the headlines feature of "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno."
All of these programs will sell for $1.99, the price for the ABC offerings.
Steven P. Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, said in an interview that he hoped that his company could create the same market for $1.99 video that it did for 99-cent song downloads. "We are doing the same thing with video we did with music," Mr. Jobs said. "We need to add more shows from more sources." He pointed out that Apple introduced the iTunes Music Store with 200,000 songs and now has two million.
Striking deals for video has been more complex than for music, however, because of the complex relationships among production companies, networks, affiliate stations, cable networks and various other rights holders.
Mr. Jobs argued that these conflicts will work out because of consumer demand.
"People forget we all work for the viewers," he said. "And consumers are demanding different services and different options."
And indeed, the apparent success of Apple's move with ABC is starting to draw interest. Apple has sold more than three million video downloads in the last two months. In addition to the ABC content, Apple sells music videos and some short films from Pixar, the animation company that Mr. Jobs also runs.
NBC started talking to Apple last spring about distributing programs through iTunes, but it decided to proceed only after seeing the initial result, said Jeff Zucker, president of the NBC Universal Television Group. One important factor is that the Internet distribution does not seem to affect the viewership of the broadcast programs, he said.
Ratings of ABC's "Lost" and "Desperate Housewives" have increased since they have been available for sale on iTunes. Similarly, Mr. Zucker said, the audience for "NBC Nightly News With Brian Williams" has grown since the network started making a Webcast of the program available at 10 o'clock Eastern time each night.
Jack Myers, editor of Jack Myers Media Business Reports, an industry newsletter, said that affiliates might complain privately about these deals but that "they are taking a wait-and-see attitude to see if they can get a piece of the action." He added, "There is so much going on right now it's hard for them to make heads or tails of any of it to see if they should get upset."
More broadly, Mr. Zucker said NBC had decided to offer its programming in many new formats rather than trying to protect its existing distribution arrangements. Last month, it announced a deal to let viewers watch episodes of some of its programs on DirecTV the day after broadcast for 99 cents.
"A year from now, you will see us on ever more platforms," Mr. Zucker said. "Whether it is a cellphone or an iPod or a computer, we don't care what screen it is."
While Apple and NBC are looking to profit from old television programs by selling downloads, without commercials, America Online and its corporate cousin Warner Brothers have moved to let people watch older programs from Warner Brothers' library free, supported by advertising. That service, called In2TV, which will start next year, does not allow watching programs on portable devices or even laptop computers that are disconnected from the Internet.
Mr. Jobs said Apple was not interested in offering video downloads supported by advertising.
"Never say never," Mr. Jobs said, "But we are not in the ad business now."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/07/te...y/07apple.html
Apple's Adventures In Video: You Ain't Seen It All Yet
Jonny Evans
US iPod users can look forward to new downloadable videos as media companies make online an integral part of their strategy.
Apple has sold three million videos since the video iPod's debut in October.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs told USA Today the figure: "Far exceeds our initial expectations."
He added that video iPod sales are strong: "It's no secret that we're shipping a lot."
Expect more from NBC
Apple also revealed a new deal with NBC Universal in which many new shows were made available through iTunes earlier this week.
NBC intends making even more video available through the service, company president Jeff Zucker told Variety: "You are going to see a series of announcements in the coming weeks," he said. "Eventually, a goal is to get all of our shows up there."
The Variety report confirms Apple began speaking with NBC in spring. The report also confirms that part of NBC's rationale for the deal was an attempt to provide a legal alternative to illegal TV show downloads. "NBC estimates that there are 430,000 illegal downloads of 'Battlestar Galactica' each week," the report adds.
"It proves there is tremendous interest in it and good people have developed bad habits by illegally downloading it. Now they will have to develop good habits," Zucker said.
It's thought some highlights from 'Bravo' will appear on iTunes in the coming weeks.
More networks will sign-up
Analysts believe Apple is likely to ink similar deals with a plethora of partners. Shaw Wu of American Technology Research said: "We do not believe we are anywhere near the end for content partnership; we foresee future deals potentially from CBS, Fox, and others."
Wu had been expecting new partners for the iTunes service, but observed that the "timing and magnitude" of the NBC deal was faster and broader than he had anticipated.
Wu estimates iTunes will see video sales grow to about 80,000 video downloads per day versus 50,000 per day in the first month.
Fox preps The Family Guy
Many reports have looked at Fox, suggesting that company will also make movies available online. Media Week this week confirms the broadcaster's plans.
Fox will soon make original episodes of cult US series 'The Family Guy' available for Internet distribution. Downloadable shows will be available by early next year on MySpace.com and IGN.com and will cost $1.99 each. It's unlikely Fox will leave market-leader iTunes in the cold, but any iTunes plans have not been confirmed.
Curiously, 'The Family Guy' was one of the most traded shows on peer-to-peer networks.
A subsequent DVD release containing episodes of the show generated huge sales, which some analysts speculate means that the file-sharing activity helped build interest in the show.
http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index...ge=1&pagePos=2
Looking for the Proceeds in TV-on-Demand
Richard Siklos
For five decades or so, the television industry's main mission has been to come up with hit programs, get them on screens, and hope people will stop and watch. Now, that is just the starting point.
As an era of ordering TV shows at the push of a button gets underway, new challenges are clouding the landscape in the year ahead: What business models are going to work and who is going to get paid what?
These questions loom behind attention-grabbing announcements in recent weeks from some of the biggest TV networks, cable operators, satellite companies, gadget-makers and Internet players, including Apple, Disney, NBC Universal and Comcast, offering what is expected to be the first of many new video-on-demand and downloading services.
"The video segment of the content industry is trying to be out ahead and not have happen to them what happened in the music industry," said Saul Berman, a partner specializing in media with I.B.M. Consulting, referring to the widespread illegal downloading of music in the absence of appealing legal ways to buy online music.
But the road to video convergence is crowded with convoluted business relationships and potential conflicts. Behind the press releases, a major power struggle is unfolding among a wide group of stakeholders - from studios to satellite operators to manufacturers of consumer products - as new ventures are being devised for the digital age.
"We've taken a couple of steps forward, but there really isn't a clear business model yet," said David Zaslav, the president of NBC Universal Cable.
One issue is whether consumers ought to pay for their shows individually or whether on-demand access should be a free component of a subscription to video services provided by cable or satellite operators or newer competitors like Internet or telecom companies. Another is whether the shows will be sold for viewing during a set time period, or will be permanent so that consumers can collect them like DVD's. And, not surprisingly, a big point of contention is how the revenue generated by these new services is shared. As a result, only a handful of the most popular shows on television are available on-demand so far.
Mr. Zaslav and other industry executives and analysts said progress was slow because of the longstanding and often convoluted relationships that exist among the companies that create content, the networks that package and market it, and the distributors who deliver it into households, which can sometimes all be tentacles of the same conglomerate. The News Corporation, for example, owns the Fox TV network and production studio and also controls DirecTV.
Also, the broadcast TV networks that reach the biggest audiences and have relied on advertising as their sole source of revenue have had to run on two parallel and seemingly conflicting tracks.
First, they've had to explore new revenue models as TiVo and similar digital video recorders threaten conventional advertising by allowing viewers to fast-forward through commercials on the shows they record. At the same time, they've had to ensure that marketers and especially the network affiliates that own the majority of the big networks' local stations around the country are not alienated by these new ventures. For example, making a popular show available on demand via cable or the Internet within hours of its airing may lead fewer viewers to tune in during its scheduled time slot. That, in turn, would mean reduced advertising revenue and hamper the ability of the local affiliates to promote other shows in their lineup.
Because of this, CBS, for one, will begin offering reruns in January of hit shows like "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" for 99 cents an episode, but only in markets where Comcast offers cable service and CBS owns the local TV affiliate. And, like NBC and ABC, CBS is so far only offering programming that it owns a large piece of and has the right to rebroadcast. Notably, the CBS partnership with Comcast only runs until the end of August 2006, an unusually brief period for such an arrangement.
Until recently, Comcast, the nation's largest cable company, has made free video-on-demand products a cornerstone of its strategy to convert more of its customers to its digital service. CBS was already allowing Comcast to offer programs like its CBS Evening News free on Comcast's video-on-demand service. But Comcast, faced with the prospect of NBC's deal to show selected programs on DirecTV for 99 cents a show, acceded to CBS's insistence that it be paid directly.
"There was no way we were going to do this for free," Leslie Moonves, the chairman of CBS, said in an interview when the deal was announced last month.
Josh Bernoff, an analyst at Forrester Research, a technology and market research company based in Cambridge, Mass., predicts TV shows available by video-on-demand will eventually be free, and that new interactive business models for advertising on demand will help pay the freight. For instance, he believes broadcasters will adopt "click though" pricing models similar to the fast-growing Internet advertising on portals like Google and Yahoo. Under that scenario, the network would be paid each time a viewer clicked on an ad or perhaps an icon super-imposed on the screen that paused the show they were watching and took them to a longer commercial.
Cable operators including Comcast, Cox Communications and Charter Communications have already made long-form advertising such as sponsored musical performances and infomercials part of what they offer on free video-on-demand. TiVo - a service for which subscribers pay a monthly fee to access - offers so-called showcases to advertisers. These showcases encourage customers to check out long-form advertisements and special promotions when they are browsing through a cable company's listing of TV shows, for example.
Mutual accusations of greediness are nothing new among the various players in the television ecosystem, but the newest technologies have intensified those accusations.
Broadcasters like CBS and NBC will continue to push either to be paid directly or to be compensated in some other way for what they see as their part in helping companies like Comcast or DirecTV put their digital boxes in more homes.
"If we're putting our best content on the digital platform - and if that content excites viewers and therefore increases the number of people that want to keep that box in their home - then we should get a piece of that value," Mr. Zaslav said.
Distributors such as cable companies, however, argue that they have invested tens of billions of dollars in the technology to make these services possible and the networks are already being fairly compensated under existing relationships.
Despite the pressure it is under from digital video recorders and the spread of video on the Internet, television supported by advertising is "a successful model that everybody understands," said Jeffrey M. Bewkes, who oversees Time Warner's entertainment businesses, which includes the Turner cable networks, HBO and the Warner Brothers studio.
Mr. Bewkes has been championing StartOver, a service developed by Time Warner Cable as an alternative to video-on-demand and digital video recorders. StartOver was introduced in a small test market in South Carolina several weeks ago.
StartOver offers digital cable subscribers a free restart button if they join a program in progress, with about 60 broadcast and cable networks participating in the venture. While the utility of the service is initially quite limited, Mr. Bewkes and Time Warner hope over time to be able to persuade the networks and their nervous affiliates to continue to extend the window when people could restart programs they have missed by hours and possibly days.
While this may sound exactly like video-on-demand, the difference is that StartOver viewers can pause a show, but not fast-forward past the advertising. It is far from clear that such a service would gain acceptance in households where people with digital video recorders are already zipping through ads. In Time Warner's case, Mr. Bewkes says that because the company has content, networks, the nation's second largest cable company and online heft through its America Online division, it need not pick sides in the shakeout over new digital business models.
However, he is skeptical of a future without TV networks as a platform to introduce programs, build loyalty or direct viewers to affiliate programming like local newscasts. "Nobody's got a crystal ball here," he said. "But I'm not sure we're ready to throw out 30 years of television industry economics."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/05/bu...a/05media.html
Media Revolutionaries Team With Old Guard
John Borland
Anne Sweeney, president of Disney-ABC Television Group, opened her speech with a line probably more optimistically befitting the times than literally true.
"The beauty of our company is that we love chaos," she tells techies, movie and music executives sipping their morning coffee in a posh Century City hotel ballroom. "We embrace change as a part of life."
As the Disney executive associated with bringing small versions of "Lost" and "Desperate Housewives" to Apple Computer's video iPod, she speaks of change with some authority. With a recent series of small but consistent steps, the TV and film world has put itself squarely on the often-painful digitalization path traveled by the music industry over the last five years.
Yet at the Digital Entertainment and Media Expo conference, held in the shadow of MGM's tall office tower here this week, it's utterly clear how much has changed. A similar event five years ago would have been peopled primarily by technologists promising to overturn the hegemony of old-media dinosaurs, with record label executives looking like the hunted, if they were in attendance at all.
Today, old-guard media feels far more in control of this particular technological cycle, even if it is one of chaos and change. Sweeney is joined at this conference by executives from other studios, record labels and TV stations. Few claim to have a definite picture of tomorrow's market. But it is clear that the start-ups and technology companies here see their futures as dependent on amicable relationships with those media titans.
Ask Conrad Teran, president of iSeeTV, a start-up that-like an increasing number of companies in the past six months-has allowed anyone to distribute video content online. Teran says this kind of alternative channel allows experimentation, amateur programmers into the business, and professionals to test commercial pilots and other shows without network support.
He's also quick to ask clients if they have advertising, sponsors or money. One of his first clients is a Clear Channel radio station that's turning its audio station into video.
The old giants "are still a big part of the game," Teran said. "They will never be irrelevant."
In many ways, the TV and video industries face the same challenges that record labels faced in 2000 and 2001. Consumers have begun experimenting with digitally downloaded versions of industry content, and early adopters' expectations already far outstrip what the content companies are willing to provide.
File swapping of movies and TV shows is widespread. Just as in the early days of the digital music business, the reluctance of TV and movie studios to provide a wide variety of online content has led to less-than-satisfactory official download services such as Movielink and CinemaNow.
Apple's iTunes store has provided a taste of one possible future for authorized downloads, but its available content has been scant and of poor quality compared to a DVD.
In 2000, that was recipe for consumer rebellion, as peer-to-peer shortcuts like Napster allowed pent-up demand for digital content to explode onto the Net, devastating any illusions the music industry had about its own future.
This time around, content companies have accumulated a half-decade of court support. Record labels and movie studios have filed thousands of lawsuits against individual file-swappers. Even if they've failed to stop file-swappers wholly in their tracks, it is now clear to parents and would-be swappers that copyrighted content isn't legal to download without permission.
A U.S. Supreme Court ruling has put peer-to-peer networks on the defensive; most are now seeking to make peace with content companies. And technology entrepreneurs remember the scores of now-defunct dot-com companies whose plans to revolutionize media distribution foundered on a lack of support from record labels, movie studios and TV networks.
Not that this makes life easy today for old media.
Just as transformations in the music business have made life difficult for retail music stores such as Tower Records or Sam Goody, the prospect of changes in TV and movie distribution is causing indigestion all the way down Hollywood's food chain.
Advertisers have been worried that Disney's relationship with Apple might lead to a further erosion of their ability to reach viewers. Theater owners, represented at this week's conference by the National Association of Theater Owners (NATO), have been fighting bitterly against the prospect of moving DVD releases and on-demand Internet viewing to more closely match theatrical release dates, an idea championed by Disney Chairman Robert Iger.
"At some point, that shrinking (release) window would dramatically affect cinema admissions," said NATO executive director John Fithian. "If the industry were to convert to simultaneous release on DVD, or with downloads, that would have devastating impact on the cinema industry."
There's plenty of chaos and change to go around. But the digitalization of Hollywood and its TV siblings is underway, and already taking a very different path than its musical predecessors.
http://news.com.com/Media+revolution...3-5978648.html
Thinking Outside the Box Office
Director Steven Soderbergh talks about the copyright cops, the remixing underground, and why he'll debut his new movie on DVD, cable, and in theaters all at once.
Xeni Jardin
When Steven Soderbergh releases his next film on January 27, it will have not only the critics squawking, but Hollywood studio execs, too. Bubble, an all-digital thriller, is
set in an Ohio doll factory, and all of the actors are completely unknown. But that's not even the interesting part. The movie goes out to theaters, DVD, and high-definition cable TV - all on the same day. It's an experiment that threatens to uproot the film industry's long-standing "release window" formula, which staggers a picture's release on various platforms to maximize profits. Wired caught up with Soderbergh, director of sex, lies, and videotape, Traffic, and Ocean's Eleven, while he was in Los Angeles shooting The Good German, with George Clooney and Cate Blanchett.
WIRED: Why did you decide to release Bubble in all formats at once?
SODERBERGH: Name any big-title movie that's come out in the last four years. It has been available in all formats on the day of release. It's called piracy. Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings, Ocean's Eleven, and Ocean's Twelve - I saw them on Canal Street on opening day. Simultaneous release is already here. We're just trying to gain control over it.
So this is a way to combat piracy?
It can be. Warner Bros. has talked about going out with low-cost DVDs simultaneously in China because piracy is so huge there. It will be a while before bigger movies go out in all formats; in five years, everything will.
Will people keep going to theaters?
Always. You're going to see attendance plateau a bit, but it's still the number one date destination. That's never going away.
Have you been to the movies recently?
I tried to go to a theater yesterday, but the fire alarm went off. The theater experience isn't always pleasant. Theater owners need to address that. There are often problems with projection; tickets and concessions are expensive; theaters aren't always clean; people talk during the movie. They're making it easy for people to stay home.
What's the reaction in Hollywood to your release experiment?
People are waiting to see what happens. A movie that costs only $1.6 million doesn't have to be a cultural event to turn a profit.
What's the biggest impact technology is having on filmmaking?
When the changeover from film to digital happens in theaters in five or 10 years, you're going to see name filmmakers self-distributing. Another thing that really excites me: I'd like to do multiple versions of the same film. I often do very radical cuts of my own films just to experiment, shake things up, and see if anything comes of it. I think it would be really interesting to have a movie out in release and then, just a few weeks later say, "Here's version 2.0, recut, rescored." The other version is still out there - people can see either or both. For instance, right now I know I could do two very different versions of The Good German.
Have you ever used BitTorrent or other software to download movies?
No. I know about it, but I haven't even downloaded music. I'm behind the curve.
Should hardware manufacturers be obligated to build copy protection into their devices?
It's a tricky question. I don't think somebody who creates something should have their rights violated. Yet we have a culture in which creating something like [Danger Mouse's] The Grey Album can get you thrown in jail. That's sad. It's an astonishing, amazing piece of work that should be heard.
Have you thought about making a mash-up?
I have ideas like that - video mash-ups. Some of them I've done privately. But there's no way for them to be seen legally. I wish we could come up with a system that allowed someone to do a Grey Album without having to pay millions of dollars for music rights. A system in which rights holders share profits of a new piece of work and people can access it without breaking the law.
Give me one idea for a video mash-up.
I was channel surfing the other night and Gus Van Sant's Psycho was on. It would be fascinating to do a mash-up of Gus' version with Hitchcock's version, because the whole thing with Gus' version was that he duplicated the original shot by shot.
I'd watch that!
Yeah! So right now, I could do that at home and give it to a friend, just as something for them to watch on a Friday night. But we don't live in a world where that can be made commercially available. So it goes underground. And underground is just a sexier word for illegal. It's frustrating.
You shot Bubble with the same kind of high-end digital cinema cameras that George Lucas used for Revenge of the Sith, but the results couldn't be more different. Instead of flashy effects, there's a stripped-down naturalism.
We wanted to do site-specific films. You hear that term used for other art forms, but not for cinema. The writer and I come up with a basic premise, go to a location, and the people fill it up. We interview people, incorporate their stories, try to make it as organic as possible. The cameras make that possible. You can shoot using available light. I sometimes ran two or three cameras at a time. In Full Frontal and K Street, I learned to take advantage of the mobility that digital provides. With Bubble, I wanted to go in the opposite direction and emphasize stillness. Because there isn't film running through the camera, you get an even more pronounced stillness. That's why you don't see much camera movement in the movie, just a lot of cuts.
With all this technology available, do you think the quality of movies is better today than 30 years ago?
I think it will be better. As technology gives filmmakers more freedom, you'll see them producing work that is more unique, less beholden to the mainstream film template. That means rethinking the economics. But I'm always willing to gamble.
How are you gambling with Bubble?
There are risks, and then there are risks. I'm not working in a coal mine. Still, everybody involved did it for scale pay, and everyone owns a piece of the profits.
Sounds like the financial model for a startup.
Exactly. I'd be thrilled if the model works well enough for me to do that all the time.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1...oderbergh.html
Movies With a Message and Their Money Trail
Caryn James
Film production companies don't usually have missions beyond the obvious one of making money. But two relatively new companies - Participant Productions, whose recent movies include "Syriana" and "North Country," and Walden Media, a producer of "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" - have overt social purposes and activist campaigns attached to their movies. The old Watergate-era dictum "Follow the money" has suddenly become relevant to moviegoers.
Participant's elaborate Web site explains, "Our goal is to deliver compelling entertainment that will inspire audiences to get involved in the issues that affect us all." The "Syriana" part of the site suggests ways to lessen our dependence on oil, and the "North Country" section deals with fighting domestic abuse and sexual harassment.
Walden, which produces family entertainment, has an educational component to go along with its movies. That can be as simple as basing the films on books that will encourage young viewers to read (its next big movie is "Charlotte's Web") or as elaborate as gathering schoolchildren in theaters for an interactive satellite conversation with an author.
It's no coincidence that these companies are backed by billionaires who understand the power of the media: Participant by the eBay tycoon Jeffrey Skoll, a Canadian citizen, and Walden by the Qwest mogul Philip F. Anschutz, a Christian Republican. Each company insists it is apolitical, which is true in the strictest sense; they don't support candidates. But in the broader, everything-is-political sense, the more liberal Participant and the more conservative Walden are pushing and pulling the social fabric and the landscape of filmmaking. This movie production money comes with strings attached, and for the ordinary moviegoer the questions become: Do you know who's controlling the purse strings? Does it matter?
Participant was started less than two years ago, and its involvement with each of its films has varied greatly. So have those films' accomplishments. Participant was involved from the start with "North Country," a preachy flop with Charlize Theron as a mine worker who files a class-action sexual harassment suit.
It has had better luck with "Syriana" and "Good Night, and Good Luck," which were both produced with George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh's company, Section 8 (and other producing partners). "Syriana," Stephen Gaghan's complicated, cynical thriller about the global politics of oil, is one of the most ambitious films in this especially ambitious movie season, and has done extremely well at the box office in limited release. (It opens across the country on Friday.) It may, in fact, be a model of the kind of risky film that viewers can welcome: its overlapping tales of power plays involving a C.I.A. agent (Mr. Clooney), an oil company executive (Matt Damon) and corrupt lawyers and government officials is gripping and thought-provoking. And while its political attitude is unmistakable - that the American need for oil shamefully depends on Middle East chaos - its fleshed-out characters never lecture the audience.
So far, though, the company's Web component (participate.net) is practical and dull. On the "Syriana" portion, visitors will find tips for reducing oil use at home and in their cars, and a form letter that can be e-mailed to their representatives in Congress urging them to reduce the country's reliance on oil. It's hard to imagine that moviegoers will race out of theaters and head to their computers. What's more valuable is that Participant is putting money behind works that the typical Hollywood studios might shy away from as dangerously controversial (that is, driving away part of the mainstream audience).
While there is nothing stealthlike about the politics behind Participant, many more questions have been raised about Walden because it is backed by Mr. Anschutz, whose money has often gone to conservative Republicans but whose views and purposes are little known because he has avoided interviews for decades. His Anschutz Film Group includes both Walden and the smaller Bristol Bay, whose purpose is to produce uplifting films with PG-13 ratings like the Matthew McConaughey thriller "Sahara." (Walden's ratings are PG.)
The founders of Walden, Cary Granat (a former executive at Dimension Films) and Micheal Flaherty, said in a joint telephone interview that their focus is on establishing a trusted family brand. "Phil is a hands-off partner who allows the managers to run the company," Mr. Granat said of the Anschutz connection.
But skepticism about that connection is understandable. Disney, which along with Walden produced "Narnia" (opening Friday), is handling the marketing and is heavily promoting the film to Christian groups. When the State of Florida recently sponsored a reading contest tied to the film, a group called Americans United for Separation of Church and State protested the book's choice, seeing it as proselytizing for Christianity.
A Christian allegory is embedded in C. S. Lewis's Narnia books, about four siblings evacuated from wartime London who escape to a fantastic world where an evil white witch persecutes a wise, virtuous lion. You don't have to see the lion as a Christ figure, but moviegoers aware of Lewis's allegory will have no trouble finding it. The film's central message, though, reflects Walden's family-oriented mandate: it concerns the siblings' complete devotion to one another.
Sometimes the line between activism and marketing vanishes. A teachers' guide for "Narnia" on the company's Web site (walden.com) bluntly promotes the movie with behind-the-scenes features. But the guide also includes lessons on history and music (not religion) based on the film. And Walden's other films - like the forthcoming "Hoot," adapted from Carl Hiaasen's young-adult novel - are not religious at all.
Walden isn't proselytizing, but the question is worth raising because money with strings attached can so easily open the door to insidious messages or restrictions that veer toward censorship. When Bristol Bay produced "Ray" (the Walden partners were not involved), the need for a PG-13 rating limited the film's language. It is easy to imagine a grittier, less uplifting, more realistic depiction of Ray Charles's life without that demand from the Anschutz company. Studios create restrictions too, but that's all about what sells.
The dangers of combining money and social philosophy are already apparent in television, where two groups with interchangeably bland names have very different purposes. The Family Friendly Programming Forum is a group of brand-name advertisers (like Johnson & Johnson) that encourages prime-time series on which the companies will feel comfortable buying commercial time. The forum's script development fund gives money at the earliest stage to cross-generational stories that families can watch together - seed money that has helped new series like "Commander in Chief" and "Everybody Hates Chris" - and the group's benign involvement ends there.
But the Parents Television Council is a political pressure group that orchestrates complaints to the F.C.C., like a recent complaint about an episode of the CBS series "NCIS" that dealt with the murder of an online stripper. The trade magazine Mediaweek reported that in 2003, 99 percent of all F.C.C. indecency complaints came from the Parents Television Council.
Any single group's ability to hijack the process that way is worrisome; if Participant's e-mail campaign ever achieves a similar distorting clout, it might be worrisome, too. The best way to prevent movies from sliding into this murky area is for viewers to know who is handing out the money and why.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/07/movies/07jame.html
Peer-to-Peer: The Problem is the Solution
The future of film distribution will take a cue from the pirates of today.
Fast Company Staff
Piracy is the sum of all of Hollywood's digital fears. All it takes is a leaked print of a film from a studio mole, or an advance copy from an Academy Award screener, or a filched workprint, and you have a pirated version ready to download.
So far, only one thing has prevented movie piracy on the scale that has cost the music industry about 25% of its revenues: file size. It may take just a minute to pull down a Kelly Clarkson tune from the Net, but a two-hour movie could take a day, depending on your connection speed. That's already changing. Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks such as BitTorrent and eDonkey, already used by tens of millions of people around the globe, are making it easy to share feature films by breaking up each giant file into tiny pieces. When a P2P user downloads a movie, it comes from thousands, if not millions, of hard drives; the more popular a film is, the more people are able to share it--and the faster the download. By the end of 2004, about 60% of Internet traffic was P2P activity, more than half of it video files, according to CacheLogic, a P2P company based in Cambridge, England.
With the P2P growth curve leaving Hollywood little hope for escape, the industry faces a turning point. Like the music business, it can try to save itself in the courts. But suing your customers isn't the smartest business move. (Besides, when the Motion Picture Association of America shut down some of the bigger BitTorrent servers, users simply migrated to eDonkey.) Or the studios could just accept the inevitability of Internet distribution. "Properly managed and implemented, P2P is the future of Hollywood and television," says Dmitry Shapiro, CEO of Veoh Networks, which lets broadband users create virtual television networks.
The music business does offer one encouraging example here: Steve Jobs. "Apple's success with the iPod and iTunes store shows that people will pay for copy-protected music if it is convenient and priced fairly," says Todd Johnson, chief executive officer of Kontiki, a Sunnyvale, California, company that sells P2P software to deliver video over the Net.
Transfer iTunes' quality and convenience to movie downloads, says Johnson, and the results would transform the industry. "By the middle of next year, consumers will have access to movies, sports, and TV shows through an online, TiVo-like experience," he predicts.
Before that can happen, though, the studios will need to be convinced that they won't face a piratical onslaught. Kontiki's solution is a closed P2P system, one based on membership rather than on an open network such as BitTorrent's. Coupled with Microsoft's Digital Rights Management, Kontiki harnesses P2P networking without giving unauthorized users access to its content. Johnson believes several business models could emerge: Content could be sold by monthly subscriptions or sold outright as iTunes does--or it could support advertisements before or even during a movie.
Clearly he's doing something right. Twenty million people have already used Kontiki software, and the company has signed deals with AOL, Cinequest (an independent film festival), and Open Media Network, which has 15,000 movies, video blogs, audio podcasts, and music files. The BBC began a three- month trial of Kontiki in September, letting 5,000 viewers watch programs online for up to seven days after they were broadcast on TV.
Now Johnson's angling for a deal with the Hollywood studios. So is Bram Cohen, BitTorrent's creator, who raised $8.75 million in venture capital in September. Whether that contest ultimately goes to Johnson, Cohen, or some kid still in high school, the point is that the studios can coexist with--and probably thrive on--the Internet. But they'd better get started. They have no choice.
http://www.fastcompany.com/subscr/10...ywood-p2p.html
For File Sharing, It's The Same Old Song
Andrew Kantor
"I think the best policy is to declare victory and leave," said Senator George Aiken (R Vermont) during the Vietnam war. I think that's a policy the entertainment industry is adopting in its ongoing battle against peer-to-peer file sharing.
Aiken's point, for those of you light on history, is that when the war is unwinnable, you simply redefine "victory" and get the heck out.
This logic would explain why the recording industry keeps saying that illegal file sharing is almost finished, yet the amount of stuff available on peer-to-peer (P2P) networks remains staggering.
Maybe in their collective minds the folks at the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) have redefined victory. My suggestion would be to celebrate when legal downloads surpass hard-copy CD sales and forget about the pirates, but that's just me.
Just this week came another nail-in-the-coffin announcement: BitTorrent, one of the most popular file-sharing protocols, had struck a deal with Hollywood to go legit.
To an uninformed person or a person being informed by the wrong people stories like that might make it seem that peer-to-peer file sharing is being pounded out of existence. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
Yours, mine, and ours
P2P has become the bane of the music industry. People buy a CD, "rip" the music into MP3 files, and then use P2P software to make those song files available on file-sharing networks to anyone who wants to download them.
There are a handful of those the eDonkey network, the FastTrack network, the Gnutella network, and the BitTorrent network; the Ares Galaxy network is a hot new up-and-comer.
Each has several clients (most free), and you can use any or all of them to share the files on your hard drive and get files from other users.
Some of those file-sharing clients are names you might know from the news: Grokster, for example, is used to access the FastTrack network; StreamCast's Morpheus uses the Gnutella network.
I mention those two specifically because they made the news in July. That's when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against them and in favor of the entertainment industry, saying that Grokster and StreamCast had promoted illegal file sharing on their networks and were thus liable for the rampant copyright infringement going on.
Many a news story was written about the 'major defeat' suffered by the file-sharing industry. Many a news story was wrong.
Basically, the Supreme Court's ruling was so narrow that, while it was bad news for Grokster and StreamCast, it was good news for other P2P software makers because it essentially gave a recipe for remaining legally in the clear: Don't encourage copyright infringement.
Grokster didn't survive the ruling; it closed its site on November 7, and plans to re-launch as a legal-download provider, a la Napster.
But what seems so often overlooked by the people writing about the world of P2P is that it doesn't matter what happens to the companies making this software. It's already out there. The creators could disappear into a black hole or a jail cell, and the software would still be there, being used by millions of people.
(This was not true for Napster, in which the company didn't just make a product, it also provided the file- sharing service and servers. No Napster, no files. That's why the next generation of P2P software avoided this model.)
It's all about the spin
and declaring victory.
Reality check
So now we have the latest news: BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen and his deal with Hollywood. No longer would you be able to find pirated content via BitTorrent's site. (It sports a search engine for torrents, which are the 'pointers' to files available for downloading.)
The Associated Press bought the entertainment industry's line that this would have the effect of "effectively frustrating people who search for illegal copies of films."
Um, no.
The story also said that "The agreement with Cohen would not prevent determined Internet users from finding movies or other materials using tools or websites other than Cohen's, but it removes one of the most convenient methods people have used."
Um, no.
If users want to find torrents, pointing to legal content or otherwise, there's a long list of sites they can use.
Once again, what's a drop in a very large bucket is being hailed as a victory against file-sharing. It's not.
Napster is run out of business. Grokster and StreamCast lose in court. BitTorrent goes legit. None of these things matter a whit in terms of piracy because the software and the technology used to make it is still out there
and new products are coming out all the time.
The entertainment industry certainly wants people to think that each bit of news is yet another nail in the coffin of music and movie piracy.
The reality is something else entirely.
On SourceForge, the clearinghouse of open-source software, five of the top 10 downloads including the top three are file-sharing programs.
At Torrentspy, one of many BitTorrent-indexing sites, there are 141,651 torrents available. Each represents a song or a movie or an image or a piece of software. And Torrentspy isn't the largest.
At The Pirate Bay, there's a section where you can view the top 100 files downloaded in a host of categories movies (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire), music (Madonna's Confessions On A Dance Floor), software, games, even audio books.
The site even sports a section of legal threats against it from the likes of Apple, Dreamworks, Microsoft, and Warner Brothers threats it ignored, as its based in Sweden and what it does (index files, not actually keep them) is perfectly legal there.
One response to Electronic Arts read in part, "Unlike certain other countries, such as the one you're in, we have sane copyright laws here. But we also have polar bears roaming the streets and attacking people :-(."
Does that sound like piracy is dying?
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columni...ng-lives_x.htm
Peers And Pals
Chan Chi-Loong
Content companies and carriers can no longer ignore peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. Some have even started to partner them.
Tech take: Legal P2P platforms could soon become the content distribution model of choice.
Biz take: P2P is here to stay, and content companies and carriers must learn to work with it.
Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks are alive and well.
Despite all the lawsuits that have been hurled at P2P firms and end-users, P2P networks have evolved and thrived. Despite all the regulations slapped on free P2P voice-over-IP (VoIP) Skype traffic in countries like China and India, P2P VoIP continues to flourish.
In fact, according to CacheLogic, a P2P networks analytics firm, P2P traffic is booming across the globe.
Says Andrew Parker, CacheLogic's CTO: "The single largest traffic type by volume on any ISP network is often P2P traffic." He estimates that on average, at least 50% to 60% of all downstream traffic and 70% of all upstream traffic on an ISP is P2P.
This means that a staggering amount of P2P data is transmitted across global networks. According to research firm TeleGeography, the US consumed about 1,125 Tbps of international bandwidth last year. This translates to about 50 exabytes (50 x 1018 bytes) of P2P data being downloaded in the US every day on average. This is the equivalent of 10 trillion songs, assuming a typical song size of 5MB.
Anecdotal evidence points to P2P proliferation as well. Slyck, a P2P news site, estimates that there are 8 million to 10 million users
on polled P2P networks at any one time. Parker says the actual number could be more than double this, as the poll excludes some P2P networks like the popular BitTorrent.
It goes without saying that such large-scale adoption of P2P worry the producers, distributors and carriers involved in the content supply chain.
Legal troubles
From a distribution standpoint, many content lobby groups and their powerful conglomerate backers view P2P networks as the root of all evil.
Often seen as abettors (or at least enablers) of piracy, P2P networks are continually harangued by the likes of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the International Federation of Phonogram and Videogram Producers (IFPI).
Unfortunately for them, however, P2P networks, like the mythical hydra, never seem to expire. Lop off one head, and two more spring forth to bare their fangs.
For example, when Napster, the first popular P2P file sharing application, was slain by the RIAA in 2001, AudioGalaxy rose to take its place. When AudioGalaxy keeled over in an out-of-court settlement with RIAA in 2002, its users turned to a slew of second-generation P2P networks. These include FastTrack (with file-sharing clients like Kazaa, Grokster and iMesh) and Gnutella (with clients like LimeWire, Morpheus and BearShare). Instead of being based on a centralized search server like Napster or AudioGalaxy, these resilient second-generation networks do not use a centrally indexed server, making them hard to bring down.
Technology, however, cannot shield these networks from a legal hailstorm, as seen in the current prominent cases of Grokster vs. MGM and Kazaa vs. ARIA (Australia Recording Industry Association).
Another interesting trend is that the typical size of objects being shared has grown over time. In 2002, the average P2P object was musical in nature and about 5MB in size. Today, the vast majority of P2P traffic is due to TV programs or movies measuring over 100MB.
The evolution has led to a growth in newer P2P networks better equipped to share big files. BitTorrent and e-Donkey are the most prominent of these networks, and comprise a large proportion of P2P traffic, according to CacheLogic. In Asia, for instance, these two networks account for more than 80% of tracked popular P2P networks (see chart below). Singapore has about 70% BitTorrent and 12% e-Donkey traffic. In contrast, South Korea, with its entrenched Korean e-Donkey client Pruna, uses mostly the e-Donkey P2P network (more than 90%).
Co-opt the enemy
Shunning the approach that a few belligerent lobby groups have adopted -- suing their customers -- some content providers are looking at a smarter way of tackling the problem -- by co-opting P2P networks into their ranks.
This revolution started with music. Apple's iTunes Music Store, which opened in 2003, lets users purchase songs via download, hugely contributing to the iPod's success as a lifestyle device. A raft of imitation sites like MSN music and Soundbuzz quickly followed.
Come next year, video will walk down this route, but with a twist. It will be free, and via legal P2P networks. Companies like BBC and AOL are going to offer free TV via Kontiki's commercial P2P platform. With In2TV (AOL's ad- supported P2P TV) and BBC's iMP slated to roll out by next month, there is little doubt that legal P2P content will soon become a force to be reckoned with.
Developments like these will definitely worry carriers. If content providers start bypassing them, carriers will loose yet another revenue source. P2P VoIP is already hurting their earnings, and being a pure dumb pipe player won't be a prospect most carriers relish.
Daryl Dunbar, director of 21CN from carrier BT, agrees: "Customers buy services, not networks. You don't want everyone else to extract value above you."
To that end, BT is embarking on its ambitious 21CN plan, which will convert its entire network to the IP platform. It is spending about US$7 billion to migrate 30 million copper lines in four years, hoping to roll out compelling triple-play services - voice, video and data - after that.
Not being able to offer services like IP-TV will spell doom for many telcos -- besides battling cable companies, they will soon have to fend off competition from P2P TV.
Bandwidth, monitoring problems
Revenue losses from content providers aside, P2P poses bandwidth challenges for carriers. P2P traffic gobbles up bandwidth, potentially causing quality of service (QoS) problems and incurring peering costs.
"If your traffic crosses peering links -- and our research shows that 92% of P2P traffic does so -- it can cost quite a bit if you have to pay for expensive transit bandwidth," says CacheLogic's Parker. However, not all carriers experience this problem or will state outright that they monitor P2P.
Singapore cable operator StarHub, for instance, says that P2P is "not high priority for their business" when queried on this issue. A spokesperson says the operator cannot open up the traffic and do deep packet inspection because this will "violate privacy issues" with consumers.
Other carriers like PCCW Global, which offers enterprise services, do state that they track P2P traffic.
Says Dan Lovatt, CEO of PCCW Global, who was in Singapore for VoIP Asia last month: "P2P does have an impact on the bottom line, and it needs to be managed and kept balanced between peering networks."
http://www.cmpnetasia.com/oct3_nw_vi...ion=Fe atures
Blogs Reflect Power Of The Pen
The continuing growth of blogging has changed the way journalists think about their work, argues technology analyst Bill Thompson. And it is for the better.
Bill Thompson
The students in my online journalism class at City University are all building weblogs this week.
Some have them already, of course, since they've realised that engaging with the new media is a sensible option for any journalist. But the others are taking their first tentative steps into posting entries, commenting on what other people say and trying to attract an audience, however modest.
They don't have to write personal journals or reveal anything about their private lives: they've been asked to blog interesting stories in the area of online journalism and new media, which may be a bit self-referential but is at least relevant to the course.
So it's more like John Naughton's Memex 1.1 than Belle de Jour's confessions.
The idea is to give them a better understanding of how the technology works, and show them just how easy it is to publish online even if you have no idea how the web works or what HTML is.
Engage, interact
There are many good reasons for any journalist to have a weblog - or two - although I don't believe that they'll need blogs when all the mainstream media sites go out of business.
I think that professional journalism will endure, even if it has to change.
It's useful for my students to understand how things get online, since most online publications these days insulate the content creators - whether journalists or not - from the detail of website creation by offering content management systems of more or less sophistication.
The BBC News website isn't built by hordes of dedicated coders who carefully hand-craft each page but uses such a system to let editors place text into standardised page layouts.
It's also important for any journalist or would-be journalist to have an online presence to supplement their CV and portfolio, since more and more people looking for jobs are going to find their online activities scrutinised as part of the application process.
And of course having to write a blog entry as part of their coursework forces students to read the papers, look around websites and generally take an interest in what is happening with new media, something I want to encourage.
But the real point of getting a journalist blogging at this early stage in his or her career is that the bloggers, in all their variety, with all their different skills and abilities and interests and biases, are reshaping the world in which professional journalists operate just as much as the telephone shook up the profession in the first half of the 20th Century.
Fact checking
On some stories, like the provenance of the letters claiming to be from George W Bush's commander in the National Guard, or the use of white phosphorus as a chemical weapon by US troops in Iraq, careful digging by bloggers has done a job the mainstream press failed to tackle.
Elsewhere every journalist now knows to expect comment and criticism from the blogosphere, and those who might once have cut corners by not checking facts or cutting and pasting phrases from other people's work should now find their lives less comfortable.
A few years ago readers of the Cluetrain Manifesto were exhorted to see the market as a conversation where customers engaged with sellers. This was presented as a break with the one-way advertising and marketing model that used to hold sway, made possible by the internet.
The blogosphere is doing the same sort of thing for journalism, whether in print or broadcast. It's no longer enough to write or say something and consign any responses to the letters page or occasional "have your say" programme.
My students have to get used to this. They have to engage with their readers in a way that respects the shared values of the online world.
They have to get used to being harshly criticised and dissected by those who disagree with them, and they have to accept that sometimes the people reading their work will know more about the subject than they do and may have a valuable contribution to make to their thinking.
At a later stage, they'll need to come to terms with Flickr and the other photo-sharing sites, and the way that any event attended by large numbers of people effortlessly generates its own online community, with hundreds of photos linked by common tags.
I noticed it vividly last month at WSIS, the World Summit on the Information Society, but it is just as true for a White Stripes gig or a major sporting event.
And of course, it's true for newsworthy events, no matter how tragic.
Figuring out the relationship between the press and those who see the news happening and post their photographs of it is the next major challenge.
But we can't expect to adapt to this changed world unless we engage with it now, and understand it from the inside as well as observing it from our editorial offices.
The growth of internet use and the emergence of easy-to-use publishing tools could well be the best thing that has happened to journalism since radio and then television offered new ways to reach people, but that requires a certain degree of modesty and a great willingness to learn on the part of a profession that is not noted for either attribute.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4492150.stm
IBM To Support Opendocument Early Next Year
Martin LaMonica
IBM plans to support early next year the OpenDocument standard in its desktop software, a product the company intends to market aggressively in developing countries.
At a press conference in Delhi, India, IBM executives plan to announce Monday that the company's Workplace Managed Client will be able to read, write and save documents in the OpenDocument format. OpenDocument, or ODF, is a standard set of document formats for desktop productivity applications.
IBM has already publicly endorsed OpenDocument, which the company views as a way to loosen Microsoft's dominance over desktop software. But the forthcoming Workplace products will be the first to support OpenDocument, a standard ratified in May of this year.
In a high-profile case, the state of Massachusetts in September decided to standardize desktop applications on OpenDocument.
That decision, however, is being contested by other branches of the state government. The governor's office this week said it is "optimistic" that Microsoft's Office formats, once standardized, will meet the state guidelines for "open formats."
Rather than create an analog to Microsoft Office, IBM is offering editors for creating documents, spreadsheets or presentations within a Web browser. Documents are delivered via a Web portal and stored in shared directories. Access control and document management tools allow people to share and edit documents with others.
Until now, Workplace supported the formats from open-source product OpenOffice, from which the OpenDocument was derived. Workplace Managed Client software also can read, write and edit documents created with Microsoft Office.
Arthur Fontaine, the marketing manager for Workplace Managed Client, believes IBM's support for industry standards and the server-centric design of Workplace will appeal to customers in developing countries, particularly governments.
"The governments of India, China and other emerging markets are very interested in this," Fontaine said. "They don't have the legacy of having everything saved in Microsoft Office to transition from...This is an opportunity to start out right."
In response to requests from government customers, Microsoft last month said it will submit the file formats for Office 12 to standards bodies ECMA International and ISO.
A representative for India's National Informatics Center (NIC) said in a statement that the country is pursuing a technology policy of "open standards and open source."
"The NIC has received a mandate from the Central Department of Information Technology to work in the areas of standards to facilitate implementation of the National e-Governance Program in the country," said M. Moni, deputy director general of India's NIC. "The choice, flexibility and reliability inherent in open standards like ODF are critical in our efforts to drive the eGovernance momentum in the country."
IBM has been testing the Workplace Managed Client software for the past year. With the release next year, the product will be generally available, Fontaine said.
http://news.com.com/IBM+to+support+O...3-5979150.html
Microsoft Move Eases Criticism That Led To Open-Document Campaign
AP
Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney appears to be having second thoughts about abandoning Microsoft software on state computers in favor of a rival open-source format.
Microsoft Corp. has pledged to standardize the document format for its Office software, undercutting much of the criticism that fueled Romney's closely watched plan to begin embracing a rival open-source format in 2007.
A spokesman for the Republican governor said Wednesday that Microsoft's attempt to win approval of its format as an international standard reduces the possibility that Massachusetts may eventually remove Office software from tens of thousands of government computers.
``If Microsoft follows through with their commitments, this will represent a seismic shift in their business model,'' said Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom.
Some rivals and industry analysts say they will continue to cast a wary eye on a company known for closely guarding its proprietary technology.
Fehrnstrom agreed on the need for scrutiny of Microsoft's announcement last week that it would ask a Geneva-based technical group to declare the format behind a new version of Office an international standard, which could aid outside developers who write supporting applications.
Concerns about licensing restrictions and compatibility problems with Office software led to the development of a rival standard called OpenDocument format, which is compatible with Sun Microsystems Inc.'s StarOffice software and free products such as OpenOffice.
Romney had directed state executive offices to begin storing new records in OpenDocument format by Jan. 1, 2007, to ensure records can easily be read, exchanged and modified decades into the future.
That made Massachusetts the first state to directly challenge the market-dominating Office software. Microsoft hopes to stem the rebellion's spread to other governments and the private sector.
Frank Gilbane, of Bluebill Advisors Inc., a Cambridge-based computer industry consulting firm, said Microsoft's announcement last week ``basically answers what all the technical people were complaining about.''
Microsoft said in June that Office 12, the next-generation version due next year, would use a new format called Office Open XML that would make it easier for outside programs to read documents created in Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
But it wasn't until last week that the Redmond, Wash.-based company announced it would submit the format to the standards body Ecma International -- a move critics had said was needed to lend credibility to Microsoft's statements that its new product would use publicly available software code that can be customized by outsiders.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...y/13302650.htm
RealNetworks to Offer Rhapsody Service
AP
RealNetworks Inc. to launch a Web-based version of its Rhapsody subscription music service, becoming the latest company hoping to capitalize on growing consumer interest in software and services that can be accessed anywhere via the Internet.
The Web-based Rhapsody service will let users listen to the songs from its catalog over the Internet without downloading the desktop application that is currently required.
That will open Seattle-based RealNetworks' service up to people using Apple Computer Inc. or Linux-based systems.
The system, which is launching Monday in test form, also makes it easier for people who already have the service to use it even when they aren't at their own computers.
However, the Web-based Rhapsody will only let people stream the music. Anyone wishing to download and buy a song will still need to have the Rhapsody application on a personal computer.
Rhapsody lets people listen to up to 25 songs per month for free, or an unlimited number if they buy one of its paid programs.
RealNetworks Chief Executive Rob Glaser said the company won't be disappointed if most people using the Web-based service choose only to listen to their free allotment of songs, rather than buying a subscription.
''If it turns out the vast majority decide they want to listen for free that's great because the Internet advertising market is doing pretty well, too,'' he said.
Along with its new Web offering, RealNetworks also unveiled the first step toward longer term plans to get other companies to use the Rhapsody service on their sites. For example, a Web site devoted to the songwriter Elliott Smith might eventually be able to offer users the chance to listen to Smith's songs on their site, via Rhapsody.
For now, however, Glaser said the service will only be able to offer a link from another site to the Rhapsody service, and users will have to log in with a Rhapsody account to hear the songs.
Glaser said company is hoping to have the more sophisticated offering in the first half of next year.
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Local News
Mary Travers Beat Cancer To Sing A Melody Of Life
Robert Miller
When she's not on the road, she lives in Redding. She and her husband, Ethan Robbins have been together 25 years. When she speaks, she is frank, open, and very down to earth.
"If you're going to stay sane, you don't want to live in a town run by the industry you belong to. You want to live with a variety of people,'' she said. "Here, we're part of the community. My mother ran the public relations at Danbury Hospital for 25 years."
But this year, as she lay in a bed at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York struggling against leukemia, the fame Travers has for so long tried to keep at bay actually helped her survive.
"There were about 10,000 e-mails to me on our Web site,'' she said. "That's not counting all the notes, all the presents, and cards I got, from places I've never been. It's as if I've tried all these years to just be myself . Then this came back to me, and I thought 'Really?'"
Travers 69, is now back at home. After a year of severe illness and slow recuperation, she's regaining her strength and spirits. On Friday, she and "the boys'' as she calls Peter Yarrow and Noel Paul Stookey will perform a Christmas and Hanukkah concert at New York's Carnegie Hall, complete with an orchestra and chorus.
"I'm 100 percent clean no leukemia,'' Travers said.
"Just before we started rehearsing," she said, "Noel called and left a message on our voice machine that said, very gently, 'I've missed singing with you and I'm looking forward to it.'I liked that a lot."
Said Yarrow: "By now, we have a sense of communication between us that lets us say as we sing, we are feeling joy, we are feeling sorrow. And that's been magnified'' by Travers' illness and recovery.
After a year's rest, Travers' voice is fresh she's even gained a couple of notes she had lost at the top of her alto range. Because of the medical treatment, she's lost 70 pounds. "I'm back to my 1970s body again,'' she said. "I needed a whole new wardrobe.''
And, because of chemotherapy, her trademark long, straight blond hair is anything but long, blond or straight. "I think I'll keep it this way,'' she said of her ultra-short, light brown cut.
"She's not only back, she's gorgeous,'' Yarrow said. "I think she's going to set a standard for women who are nearly 70.''
Peter, Paul & Mary began singing together in 1961, mixing their lilting harmonies and simple guitar accompaniments with a strong sense of social values. They appeared at the 1963 civil rights march on Washington, D.C., and in the decades afterward they appeared all over the world.
While almost all other folk acts of their generation have faded or passed on, Peter, Paul and Mary endure. Some of their renditions of songs "If I Had a Hammer,'' "Blowin' in the Wind,'' "Lemon Tree,'' or "Leaving on a Jet Plane'' are the versions that come to mind when those songs get mentioned.
Over the years, the group has won five Grammies. And their presence in the world continues when young children learn the anti- war song, "Where Have All the Flowers Gone,'' it is probably from Peter, Paul and Mary records.
Mary Travers' travails began around Thanksgiving 2004. She hadn't been feeling well for a few days. Then, while making Thanksgiving dinner, she nearly collapsed.
"It was if I had to lie down every 20 minutes,'' she said. "I thought, 'This isn't right.' I've never felt as exhausted as that.''
At Danbury Hospital, she and Robbins learned she had acute myeloid leukemia. "I felt so bad because I had no red blood cells to take oxygen to my lungs,'' Travers said.
Her oncologist, Dr. Robert Cooper, said that different forms of leukemia manifest themselves in very different ways.
"You can have chronic leukemia that progresses very slowly and has very mild symptoms. You can live with that for years,'' he said. "Mary presented with very abrupt symptoms.''
Those symptoms included lungs gummed up with fluid. Robbins said his wife's first crisis was simply surviving until the chemotherapy started working.
"I can remember feeling despair for two seconds, two minutes,'' Robbins said. "Then I immediately focused on moving moment to moment, on doing everything I had to do to help her.''
Robbins and Travers have nothing but praise for Cooper and the staff of the Praxair Cancer Center at Danbury Hospital. "Danbury Hospital literally saved my life,'' Travers said.
Within three days, Travers began to feel much better. But after a few weeks of treatment there, the couple faced a second crisis though her lungs were clear of fluid and her energy levels were high, Travers' leukemia was not going into remission.
"That was the one time I thought, 'I'm not going to make this,'?'' Travers said. "Then I said to myself, 'It's not over yet.'?''
So Travers and Robbins turned to Plan B. That took them to Sloan-Kettering and Dr. Stephen Nimer. The course of treatment they chose was a bone marrow transplant.
Under the procedure, the patient gets very high dosages of chemotherapy enough to kill the cancer, but also enough to destroy the bone marrow, the material that makes blood cells. A donor provides new bone marrow, which takes up roots in the patient's bones and begins making blood cells anew.
None of Travers relatives were a close enough match to make the transplant work. But through a national registry of bone marrow donors, doctors found someone whose marrow matched Travers' marrow in nine out of 10 markers ''close enough for folk music,'' Travers said.
In April. Travers underwent the transplant. She does not know who donated the marrow. "Whoever she was, she did a good job,'' Travers said.
Cooper, of Danbury Hospital, said that even five years ago, Travers might not have been considered a candidate for a bone marrow transplant because of her age. But because of dramatic improvements in patient care and in the delivery of the marrow, age is much less of a factor today.
"Along with chronological age, you look as things like general health and will and enthusiasm,'' Cooper said. "But the techniques have improved tremendously.''
Travers also received intensive chemotherapy, treatment that leaves many patients drained and nauseous. But Travers who wore a "Chemo Sabe" T-shirt at Sloan-Kettering said the treatments didn't bother her much.
"I have good innards,'' Travers said. "That made a big difference.''
The chemicals, she said, "were like mother's milk to me."
But because the transplant destroyed her immune system, Trevor had to stay in isolation at Sloan- Kettering for five weeks so she wouldn't develop an infection. Her husband slept in a bed in her hospital room for all five weeks, providing round-the-clock attentive care.
"He's been magnificent,'' Travers said. "He's been what you would want someone to be in this situation. He just gave and gave and gave.''
And all their friends rallied around them, taking care of all the essentials feeding the cats and dog, house-sitting and performing many other small chores that need to be done to keep the outside world running.
"I heard Kurt Vonnegut say that you don't get through life just with your family,'' Travers said. "You need a gang.''
One of the best gifts Travers got in the hospital, she said, was a video montage of her home all its rooms, all its windows. "I just missed things like hearing the birds sing,'' she said.
Once home, she began to slowly recover. Because she had spent so much time in bed, her leg muscles were weak. She's spending time on an exercise machine to strengthen them.
But her leukemia is gone, her blood counts back to normal. Her husband is learning now that he doesn't have to do the laundry or the cooking all the time that his wife is healthy again.
"I have to keep telling Ethan now that I'm not sick, that he needs to be a bit more selfish,'' Travers said. "Being a caregiver is exhausting. And I don't want him sick.''
The lessons of the past year haven't fully made themselves clear.
"I think I've learned patience,'' Travers said. "I'm not a patient person. My basic instinct is to say 'You can't tell me what to do.' But if you have to wait in a doctor's office for two hours, you can sit around biting your lip and getting upset. Or you can read a book.''
Most of all, Travers and her husband have gained a sense of gratitude. "Every day we have is a day we hoped and prayed for, and we are so grateful for,'' Robbins said.
And Peter, Paul and Mary will be back on the road in 2006. She acknowledges the group's career has been an extraordinary one.
"When we first started singing together, we knew we had something,'' she said. "But we were thinking it was maybe something we could earn a living with. I don't think we knew it would be as big as it got.''
And in the past year, that bigness the thousands of concerts over four decades, the millions of listeners brought her returns she never thought she'd get. Or need.
"Music travels much farther than you travel, and it touches people you never met,'' Travers said. "Whatever comfort you gave people, they offer that comfort back. And it works. It's good medicine.''
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