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New years revolutions

Another exciting year ahead, with bigger companies bobbing and weaving to get the most out of any "monetising" opportunities on the web. As far
as TV goes, video downloading is going to be a big battleground this year.

Apple and iTunes have already got a foot on the ladder with the selling of videos of TV programmes, to be downloaded to the new video iPod. This month sees more people joining the fray, with Sky and Microsoft announcing their (somewhat vague) plans for downloads of their programmes to the home via PC. Up to now the IP service has been criticised for being slow. With the approval by the Office of Fair Trading for the Easynet purchase, and the links with DirectTV in the US, the challenge will be to serve video at a rate to keep up with demand.

Google will obviously have some influence in this arena. They have huge experience in serving bandwidth from their distributed servers. The link up with ITN, Sony, NBA and especially CBS will give them a huge amount of video content, from old favourites like Star Trek to the newer CSI and Survivor titles. (Not sure why CBS split with Viacom) Google are giving facilities for anyone to upload and rent or sell their videos, which will give a widespread reason for people to visit the site. Free videos will build an audience which will then have a growing acceptance of paying a dollar for some interesting content. They have an angle or two with innovations as usual - a viewer can browse the scenes in a video to see content, suppliers can add the usual metadata for their videos and they have their own video player. It will be interesting to see the quality of this player compared to others on the block, but it has no Flash video formats listed. They seem to be preferring the MPEG4 formats

Meanwhile, Adobe has finalised the $3bn Macromedia takeover and will also be moving in this direction. Flash video has been making good progress in the areas of quality and ease of use for video on the web. The new sevices will be a challenge to the Flash video software, but there must be some significant changes coming for Apple and perhaps the PDF format. PDF has become a de facto standard for portable documents. If Flash were to be integrated it might be a way for video to have correctly structured meta data content contained within it. This is what is missing in the MPEG4 versions of basic encoded video. While playing the video we need some method of bringing data to display the graphics that are associated with the film. Current TV has subtitles and teletext information. In a similar fashion, there should be more facilities to drive animations in the same or partner applications to display the stats content to go with the action.

Content is King still holds sway, and content producers will be able to set the charges for the video, but the audience is moving to less and less, bigger portals to see it. The content owners will have to be careful in their choice of pricing, in order to be competitive. The portal owners will surely make the money as they take their small percentage of millions of small transactions.

Some number games

Informa Telecoms & Media have come out with a new report on the Games industry.

Global games industry to hit a peak value of $58.4 billion in 2007

"The highest growth will come from broadband, mobile and interactive TV, which are together forecast to generate revenues of $20.6 billion by 2010 - up from $3.8 billion in 2004."

The Dynamics of Games (5th Edition) gives you comprehensive coverage of:

Consoles - the console market is, and will continue to be, the dominant platform throughout the global industry

Handheld - this sector will see growth for both hardware and software sales, driven by the recent launch of new handhelds from both Nintendo and Sony

PC - PC gaming will continue to decline - with revenues falling to half the 2001 total by 2010 - due to factors such as new generation consoles boasting the same functionality traditionally associated with the PC

Broadband - the rapid take-up of broadband, as well as interest in services such as Xbox Live are helping drive the broadband games market

Mobile - as 2.5G & 3G mobile services spread, the mobile games market is due to accelerate extremely quickly over the next few years

Interactive TV - still only a small sector within the industry, interactive TV gaming will continue to gain popularity with the spread
of digital TV services

Full report from www.informamedia.com/games

Information Management

There is a lot of information flying around these days. Far too much to be able to do more than a quick filter as it flies through, from one ear to the other. I decided to have a look at the Information Management Show at Olympia to see what new techniques are around. It had a few CMS stands there as well, so I could look at some ideas in that area as well.

You'll find the exhibitor list at http://www.online-information.co.uk/cgi-events/exhibitors.pl?exhibition_id=79&search_trail_7=618&search=SEARCH

There are some big companies getting involved in putting information online. Libraries, universities, large company research teams, the list is endless. I know that people like Google, Microsoft and Amazon are involded in trying to scan all the available books in the world. At the show, there were numerous companies that are trying to sell their database and indexing services to allow us to access the precise piece of data that we need from this wealth of information. It was interesting to see the numer of strategies being employed, but , surprisingly, not many had much more than a passing interest in images and I'm not sure that I spoke to anyone involved in the indexing of video or film clips. The Israeli image processing software that recognises faces and scenes, that I saw at NAB years ago, is nowhere to be seen. Even Canon had no ideas on indexing. They were more interested in the scan and print functions.

The main push was to make the step past keyword search, with synonyms and homonym databases, sometimes sensitive to categories. Searching for relevance in the text is becoming quite a science. I haven't looked at it for a while, and there is now some heavyweight ( and usually expensive ) software around that can help. People like MondoSoft are offering very comprehensive indexing strategies, with behavioural tracking applied to their indexes as well. The software indexes all the pages, but also sits on the servers watching where users go. Words that are mispelt can be picked up and added to the thesaurus to build more power into the indexes over a period of a few months. I suppost the software is not that expensive if you have a large site, but a little over the top in our terms. Simpler engines like Filehopper might give a more simple way of doing things. They have a J2E engine that sits in the back end. There are quite a few Java engines around actually. This seems a popular system to use with Information Databases.

I spent a while trying to grab all the concepts of Topic Maps from the inventors of the techniques, Ontopia. It is a way to describe a series of links between items, with more of a relational database feel about it. Items are classified according to their type, adnd placed in one or more context layers. By adjusting the values of the importance to the contexts and item types we can get a feel for the relative importance of the links. There are some interesting aspects to it, so I should download the white paper to read when I have a little more time.

As for CMS companies, EasySite was there with a reasonably priced offering. It still has some good facilities at the lower end. Easy to use and quick for a budget package. Not many of the open source companies were there. Squiz.net the only one I noticed, but they still just use Postgres, so I'll wait til they have their mySQL interface before I look at them again. Microsoft were pushing the SharePoint packages. Probably makes sense for the larger user, but seems over engineered for the type of businesses that I have to deal with. I'm going to make some time to use the latest ASP .NET 2 development software over the next few weeks, so I don't think I'll get involved with the SharePoint distraction. There are far more interesting things to play with.

One interesting CMS from Denmark was Sitepoint. They are a tad more expensive than I'd like, in the versions that had fuller facilities, but they had all the right buzzwords on their stand. Longhorn was one of them, but I don't think we have to wait for that to have a play with the CMS. The interesting aspect for me was that it was very much a Microsoft based package using all the latest XAML, ASP.NET C# technologies, but they also advertise running it on Linux by using the Mono platform. Something to look at another day. Might have a look at the CMS though, if I take some time to load up the WPF laters under XP. I'd like to look at Sparkle and Cider anyway, so I should have a more in depth look at XAML. I wonder how it matches up to the 2005 versions.

Another CMS that could do with more time to look at was Digimaker. This time from Norway. Must be those long Arctic winters giving the Scandinavians time to write software. It's dotNet based and they talked well about a number of areas.

Homework

Harry Potter out this week in the US. Over $100 million takings, so it went better than most others by a long chalk. Must get out there to watch it with the kids. Must get Midnight to the same state.

Midnight has moved on, I'm part way through building the Midnight shopping website. I'll publish the link when it goes live. We are trying to have a big push with the project over the Christmas period. The graphic novel is coming out this week. Order through Diamond Distribution. Everyone seems to be giving it a chance, so let's hope we get part of the merchandising action. If we make enough, we might have some more funding for the film. The guys have produced another version of the animation. More depth to the story now, as we have enough footage to edit it correctly. The voices are still a bit amateur, but the animation is good for the amount of time we've had. Francis is due to take it down to Brighton for the UK Comic Expo. He's on the stage, talking down there and is sure to pull in a few more enthusiasts for the cause. The new DVD should be playing on the plasmas again. We've now actually got the Beyond Starlight site into the rankings. I know it's just over four millionth, but it's nice to get some recognition of the work. It can only get better now, so we should look at advertising deals for all the sites.

The easyIndex web rankings are back up thankfully. We are back in the listings after a couple of weeks missing. Strange how that happened. Putting easyindex into UK mode was a bit of an effort, but I didn't think we had let up on the push for the site. We should have been on the increase all the time, but it showed that we were under par for almost two weeks. Now that the site is UK wide, we should be able to take it back to the associations and get them on board. There are now a lot of options for us. Let's mail a few people and see what happens.

The EasyIndex cinemas page is going well with all the video previews of the movies. I shall try to put this into the Google Base pages. Google has started the pages for any information that people want to make available. These seem to cover all sorts of ideas, from sales to sermons. They say that it is not there to be competition with ebay, but the sort of items that people have already put up there seem to fit the sales idiom. Similar to Loot and the classified ads but with a myriad of both useful and useless information. Someone needs to set some standards for people to use to enter their data. It should be like the microformats in that people could format their data in a particular XML data format that everyone used for the same type of data. Data spiders could then search for and aggregate all the sources and be the provider for the main news streams. All these various feeds could be linked into the whole set of listings on the the main Google site. Not sure how it might affect the reankings, but we might as well put something in there.

You never know.

Google and Microsoft - more sparring

Google have now opened their new London offices, down in Victoria. They have a huge list of jobs available. It's interesting to see if you can guess what direction they are taking. Looks like WiFi and Mobile are the main areas of development over here. The UK must be spending more money in this area. Perhaps they'll offer to do the same for London as they have offered to San Francisco, full wifi coverage of the city. That would be so convenient, but I'm sure that many of the phone companies must be having similar ideas. There's going to be a lot of money spent before any return. Sounds like the 3G auction doesn't it! Sounds a great place to work tho'. Free lunch twice a week, free breakfast once a week, 10 percent of your time should be on your own projects, 20 percent on blue sky ideas. What more could you ask for!

How did Microsoft get the www.live.com address. Did they have it for a few years, or have they just bought it? Would be expensive to buy. Looks pretty similar to Google with lots of space and a smattering of adverts. They'll be competing soon, so I should try to put up all the pages from our websites to get them logged into the search database. Do it this week. The sidebar seems different but isn't it the same as the Bookmarks area in Firefox/Explorer? Seems that people are moving towards configuring a page for all that they need to use. We can add our email to the window, if we have Live Mail or Hotmail, have a weather forecast in the corner, add some RSS feeds to give us information as it happens. These are all things that can be added to Firefox or Explorer with plugins, but MS Live will have it all built in, and delivered with the Operating System. It will be a big advantage and something that Google will find hard to overcome. Firefox has put a dent into Explorer, but it hasn't got major penetration yet. Google has that major penetration, so we shall see how quickly Microsoft Live takes up its share. Maybe the Vista OS will be its salvation, by opening up as the machine is powered on. It's extendable as well. Gadgets are Microsoft's name for plugins. They have their own dedicated site. Already they have some new ideas there, with people asking for things that thay are used to having on their msn sites.

I'll try using it, see what more there is to it. Might even build a gadget. There's probably a Wizard in the new Visual Studio 2005 developers kit to do it.

To counteract this publicity and to take the fight in a different direction, Google have leaked out their new GoogleBase It allows people to post any information they like up to it and tries to categorize it in some or several ways. Searching is similar to Google, but the items you come up with might be information, trying to sell something, event dates, jobs etc etc. Quite confusing. They say they are not aiming it at ebay, but it seems to have a lot of people on there selling things already. I must get the web sites published on there as well. Anything to add to the links count. Who know which direction this may take. I'm sure that there will be a lot of people using it and, being a beta, it will grow to be more useful as people come up with more ideas.

There are an awful lot of web pages out there on the net. Around 4 billion by all accounts, with around 17 billion links between them. But will all these pages around, over half of the people browsing, go to only the top 500 sites. That is an awfully small percentage, as well as being an awfully large number of people. How can I get them to my site?....answers on a postcard....

Around 5 million sites get a significant amount of traffic, enough to survive on. What are the rest doing? It would appear that you just have to have a web site for the few occasions that people want to find you, but it is a hard task to set some pages up to make a living from. One in a billion chance that this blog will ever be read by anyone? I only started it so that I could remember what I was doing the previous year. It is there to remind me of all the ideas that I should have looked at, but have been too busy for. The internet just seems to give me more ideas that my brain can cope with! Better go do some work!

MicroTags and microformats

I've been looking at HTML techniques this week. More accurately, the indexing of HTML pages that contain these tags called micro formats. They seem to be cropping up everywhere. Instead of trying to invent new XML formats, people have been starting to use the old HTML tags in a structured way, to be recogniseable to other, perhaps automated, systems. Information can be tagged in this way, to make it available as a "search for" item. The tags might be harvested like Google harvests pages, but the structure of the microformat makes it much easier to catalogue particular types of information. Inserting semantic information can be done in several ways without interfering with the existing presentation of the pages.

Meta tags can contain a lot of data that describes the page.
Class attributes can be used to show the type of the data being shown.
Rel tags use the "rel" attribute to attach data to other HTML tags.
Abbr and Span elements can extend their normal use to add information in a structured way.

These are largely ignored by current browsers when laying out a page, unless the class is involved in the css description. The information embedded in them is waiting for some more complicate searcher, that is either spidering the pages, or is to be built in the the next generation of browsers.

For a simple example, we can look at the date-time design pattern.

The page would show,

The party is at 10 o'clock on the 10th.

But the HTML would contain,

The party is at <abbr class="dtstart" title="20051010T10:10:10-0100">10 o'clock on the 10th.


where the datetime is specified in a fully machine readable format. This tag can then be read by the browser to allow the system to add it to the calendar etc. Page editors will have a plugin to add this html in just the same way as you now add the href to a link.

I had a look at the XHTML Friends network which tries to hold people's relationships is rel tags but it's a complicated area. How they will cope with people that meet and then marry then split up, is too complicated for my part. The links that they are laying down are held in pages that may not be retrieved in the same order. I don't see how that might work. Freinds and aquaintances, meetings etc should be ok, but not reversible situations. Have a look at http://gmpg.org/xfn/ if you feel a bit more positive than I do.

The relTag idea is similar. Authors of pages can add particular labels to links, for example, to show the type of link that they are describing. The following link,

Animation facility

would allow a spider to search out animation links, rather than relying on pulling the idea from the text in the page. There will be a flood of specific tag labels for different industries and areas, and there will be facilities for people to search for a variety of these links across the web. Again, a simple HTML tag has become a much, much more useful piece of information, without any impact on the readability of the page. It will allow us to set up tag links to search through our web space, or the web as a whole. If users are allowed to add the tags, as Flickr do with the photos that people add, it allows others to come along and search in a more structured fashion, using the cross-site tagging that has been created. Adding the data at source is much more efficient than trying to add it later, and it's done by the users rather than being a load on the system.

Another format that seems to be popular is the hCard which is an HTML version of contact information formatted so that a machine reader can convert it to a vCard contact information block which Outlook and other mail programs can use (Not Thunderbird yet?). It allows people to give correctly formatted information, while keeping the page readable. Quite why people want to put their email into a public place is beyond me! I'm sure there's a reason.

More information from the microformats site

A path through the jungle
More high tech rumblings this weekend. The usual suspects are all trying to round up the available technology, and to find a way to make a profit out of what they have.

Microsoft have pulled out the www.live.com domain...how much did that cost? and did whoever sold it realise that Microsoft were buying it? It looks like Google in that it has plenty of white space, there are ad's on the right. Blogging and email as well. How did they get the idea. Everything seems to be moving into a browser interface, it seems. As the technology moves on, the devices will get smaller, or phones will get bigger and the connection to the portal would seem to be what they are all fighting for. Content is King? Maybe not. Content might just be yet another minor reason for goint to the site.

Talking of content... Yahoo! have now linked up with TiVo to allow their content to be downloaded to the TiVo box.They have linked up with Google to put the Google content on to mobile phopnes and similar devices. Google Maps and then Google Local will be the first to move across. Phones that support Java software will be able to download the Google Local application. From there, they can conduct searches for businesses or services in a specific geographical location and view the search results plotted on a map. Is this app a browser, or is is Google/Yahoo's own version? Lookout Firefox? Maybe Yahoo will have it built into the Nokia Yahoo mobile phone.

Location services will become important and should pull the rug from all the directories out there, including easyindex. They seem to be sticking with Yellow Pages to provide the data. Perhaps there's an opening to provide web ad's to a mobile device. Build ad's automatically? The big players get bigger and competition becomes harder, or more expensive at least.

TiVo might make a comeback then. We need a clever recorder that can listen to IP messges to make it do what it is told. The new Sky box can somehow get content from the internet as well. They should be competing products. Depends when it comes out, and at what price. The current Sky+ box has only just turned a million users. Doubled in a year tho'. TiVo will now allow content from Yahoo to be downloaded on their box. You need a Yahoo email to connect. They are also looking at producing a search engine that will allow users to search the internet for video content, and download form there. Maybe the equivalent of open access iTunes, where the iTunes are just pointers to the real content. RSS versions anyone?

New Mod for Half Life

We've been playing aroung with Gary's Mod for a while now. It's amazing to me how much you can do with a mod. There seems to be so many additions that must take almost as much time to create as the original game! The kids meanwhile, just take it in their stride as something that is entirely normal. How I wish they appreciated how much work has gone into the system, from the number of transistors in the graphics card, right through to the dedication of the Half Life modders community. It couldn't be done by one person, but one person can so much to the whole experience. I must find out more about Gary.

I must also find out more about how to drive these graphics cards. All the lighting effects in the new technical Mod for Half Life 2 that my son has. It's a seaside area and looks as tho' it is done to show off some of the techniques that Valve are looking at. The lighting is the main source of inspiration. The software uses HDRI images to enable some fantastic lighting effects. The scene is dulled down when looking at a bright light, just as though your iris is closing a little to cope with the brightness. The seaside water reflections are great. Valve also offer a talk through of all the effects, explaining the pros and cons of each. You should definitley look for this download and check it out. It's called the "Lost Coast".