My "Failed" business model is the same business model as Google. Provide a popular service supported by advertising.
PS I wouldn't say "we've failed" at all, rather we're still in start up mode and I have yet to see a start up profitable 4 months out of gate, much less covering as much operational costs as we are so early in the game.
My company httpwww.vidiac.com creates ad-supported Video portals for website owners. For example http://videos.streetfire.net/ is one of our ~12 Video portals. We're streaming close to 300,000 videos a day to close to 100,000 people and have only been in operation for 4 months. The *only* way we have covered our cost is in advertising, and even then, just barely. None of the founders of the company has yet to take a nickle out of the company because we're allways scrounging to support our 1Gbps Internet feed that averages over 120Mbps. (FWIW Right now we're averaging more than $1,000/month a piece out of our own pockets to cover the success of the site)
I understand that nobody wants to see a Viagra banner ad, but I also understand we are growing by 30% per week as people watch free videos online. If our site was subscription supported, pay per view or otherwise, we would never have attained this level of popularity. Reading the responses here, I can see that a lot of people feel entitled to free content online. This content has to be subsidized in some way. If anyone has a suggestion on how we can continue to offer 300K videos a day to 100K users, while covering the 100+ hours a week the owners of the company are spending on this site I would love to hear it.
PS we have allready looked into pay-per-view, and it was categoricly rejected by users.
While I think it is a *good step* to have Rich Media support interactive user interfaces, I think it's a *BAD STEP* to make that part of the compressed file format. Windows Media, Quicktime and Real all understand that and handle playlists, and user meta-controls outside of the content. This allows you to abstract the system and make controlable (programable) interfaces. Putting Menuing into the compression opens a can of worms that we just don't need to go down. This would be akin to putting Javascript functionality inside of JPEG images.
I would love to see a player built on a Bit-Torrent type solution, but unfortunatly, Bit Torrnet has some limitations for on-demand streaming.
BT doesn't have a "click/watch" type solution. BT is only good for asynchronous delivery of content due to it's download nature. That said, if a future version of BT provided for buffer-demanded priority queing, this would solve the problem. That is my "player" plugged into BT, would know that the next 30 seconds of content is Very high priority, the following 30 seconds is high priority, the next 30 seconds is low priority and the following 30 seconds is very low priority. This could evolve from an MPLS style label switching paradigm of some sort (in model only, not saying to use actual MPLS, rather some of the MPLS best Practices combined with BT).
Thanks for the input it sounds like you have some solid industry insight. I too have to wonder why Audio/Video copyrights get protection to the point of stiffling other artist, yet visual arts have more lenient creative commons...probably because less money is at stake.
PS: As an aside to my above post. My company is currently operating in the negative (as any new start up does). So if the RIAA/MPAA comes a knocking asking for a cut of the profits, right now we'd just hand them a bill:-)
Most people mixing up their own derivative works for fun will share within their circle of friends privately, or via centralized services that haven't grown big enough to care about being legally anal, or via decentralized p2p (which is where I find most of those anime music vids, halo vids, GTA trick vids, CS cheater vids, WoW "hammertime" vids, and whatnot).
True, but it's still unfortunate the really good stuff can't make it onto more mainstream web-sharing services. Bit Torrent is great, but I wouldn't call it mainstream or even user friendly when it comes to the "can my grandmother use it" test.
This reminds me a lot of a problem my company is facing. One of partner sites that uses our free video hosting software http://video.freevideoblog.com/ gets a lot of "fan" dedications to popular TV shows like Buffy the Vampire slayer or Anime music videos set to popular songs. It's damn good work, and IMOHO only creates more awareness and popularity to the original work, but because we're paranoid of getting sued by the RIAA and MPAA, we have to delete those videos from the system.
I have to wonder how the Music industry gets around this as often I hear music that "samples" tracks from other artists, or even sound bites from TV and the movies. So I know there is a process in place to take an original work and modify it (And combine it with your own original work) to create your own unique art...but I don't know what it is, or where that shade of gray turns black.
I have to say that in this lawsuit happy time I'm more inclined to ere on the side of caution, but I feel a lot of unique and original work is lost or covered up by folks like myself moderating content off the system.
Anyhow just some idle rambling from my own experience.
With more and more ISP's offering DDoS protection in the cloud I have to wonder how much longer DDoS in it's current form will remain relevant. Most of the Tier I backbone providers are shutting down these things in the cloud keeping the traffic from ever reaching the customer Gateway (for customers that subscribe to this service), however these systems are looking for uncompleted TCP connections and scripted browsing sequences. So in the next round of DDoS arms escalation, any thoughts on what the next evolution of the zombie net attacks will be?
110KB for the StreetFire page, sure blast me for it if you want. Just shows you aren't a very competent designer. Rather than evaluate a web application based on what a user needs, you would rather dictate your own needs as a designer on what is and is not needed. Again Elitist, and shows a lack of business sense.
What is StreetFire? It's a high bandwidth VIDEO STREAMING site. Site design in based on USER NEED, not not the DESIGNER'S NEED. StreetFire's main page could be two megs and my 40,000/users a day wouldn't give a rip, because the first thing they do is watch, on average, watch 15MB of video each. They could give a flip about a 110KB page. Thus it's not a requirement. (BTW we average 75MBps on our 1GBPS Internet Pipe, and run on average 150-200 simulataneous 400Kbps Video streams). These are not low bandwidth types using brail browsers. The site popularity would suffer if it was designed that way.
Second, and you obviously missed this point as well. StreetFire is one of many Video portals I manage from the same code base. 90% of my customers have HTML 1.0 Level skills. Case in point, http://www.ls1tech.com/ just signed with us, with their 60,000/user per day site. In less than 10 min we were able to get their video portal up http://video.ls1tech.com/ (and populate it with 300+ videos relevant to their portal). We have the capability to be that responsive because we don't rebuild their site to the latest greatest code base. Heck their users don't even want that, they want the same old same old site.
Did they care what HTML standard we used? Nope. As a matter of fact I have to write my code to fit their need of reusing their site style. Had I used a Sexy DOM site with no nested tables, etc, I would have to rebuild their entire site to fit my standard. Simple as there site is, that's more work for me (and/or them). Thus, the requirements for my application dictate that when I get a customer with a complicated site, such as http://www.crossroadvideos.com/ I can depreciate my code base to fit their site, rather than re-write their site to fit my code.
Program to your user's need, not your need to feed your ego with "sexy code" forcing your customers (or yourself) to reinvent the wheel every time the W3C farts.
Firstly once you've made a stylesheet it's done - you can use it for one page, one thousand pages or a million pages.
All my sites use styles. As a matter of fact http://videos.streetfire.net/ uses CSS, and that same code base is running (5) other sites with their own style sheet and skin. for example http://www.crossroadvideos.com/ is the same server same code, different ASCX "master tamplate", different CSS. Guess what though, CSS has been around since 1996, so that's not what we're talking about here, and as I said before, since CSS/DHTML came out there have been no improvements to the standard significant enough for me to EOL all my old site code.
Do you have any idea how tiny Mac/IE5's market share really is? That's like saying you don't use CSS at all because 0.01% of your users view it in NN4. And of course you're forgetting that the job of the web is to propegate and present information - our ability to make the information look nice is just a bonus.
*confused* so I have to use XHTML to cater to blind people, but making code that looks just as good on a MAC as a PC isn't a factor? Is Disabled > MAC users? *sigh*
Once again it's a matter of professionalism, it disgusts me just how unproffesional the majority of the 'website development' industry is
No offense but this just sounds elitist to me. `I use XHTML, and EOL HTML because I'ma "proffesional" all you writing HTML just simply aren't "proffesionals"'?
Again my users never once judged the validity of my website based on what HTML standard I'm using or how "proffesional" they think my coding practices are.
That is a value of course, but for the time it takes to render a site on multiple devices (hand held Cell phone.... apparently Brail Browser too considering what that Anonymous Coward wrote) It's almost.... not it is easier for me to just go ahead and write a new site for each device and let the CMS propogate content as needed. It's not as Sexy of a solution, but it saves oceans of times for cross browser/device compliance. Case in point.NET server pages with complex client side controls render fine in Safari and OSX-Firefox, but blow up in OSX-Internet Explorer. It's easier for me to just write a custom IE-OSX specific control, than it is to make a single control work in all environments. Google had this same plroblem with early releases of GMail too, and we all know they are the ultimate God's of how to do things right....(faceous).
My point is that you write code to cater to the largest possible demographic of your user base. They don't care if it's XHTML or HTML 1.0 if they can't tell the difference in the end result, and they also don't care how sexy or basic your code is either. Now I can go the new standards route, but why should I if it' just as easy... no easier to just pop it out in the old trusted reliable format? There is allways a price to pay for trying to keep up with technology for technology's sake, especially if your users aren't even asking for it. I think I-Drive in the 7-series BMW was a good example of that.
"...
That shows great ignorance as to what a disabled person might want to access. In some countries (and I guess even states) such websites border on being illegal...."
So it's against the law to make a video website that doesn't cater to blind people?...yea right....Show me where it says that. Sorry, if I have to adopt a new *DESIGN* technology to cater to people that don't ever visit my website and wouldn't want to anyways, then you're failing to explain to me the value of assuming the cost to forklift my site. No, I think it's smarter to design sites to the lowest common denominator to reach the largest number of people rather than cater to a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the site users with new technologies every time someone comes out with a new change in standards.
99.99999....% of the websites out there don't even use CSS much less XHTML. All this scuttle butt about future browsers not being backwards compatible is just FUD.
The P tag sucks because it's redundant and the new P tag standard agrees with me. It makes more sense to say "New Line" instead of "Stop Paragraph""Start Paragraph". Obviously if you need a new Paragraph then the old one has ended.
Also if you need to scootch your text down just a smidge, it's easier to just drop in a BR than dig into the CSS.
As for my HTML skill level, it rises to the needs of the project and I have yet to see an end-user affecting need that requires a drive to newer standards. It makes more sense to write code in the most backward compatible spec that gets the job done.
As for how I handle Content Management, http://videos.streetfire.net/ is an HTML skin with.NET objects embeded as needed by the Nav state. The main page uses 13 nested objects to be built and at ~200 concurrent users we rarely see CPU utilization go above 4%. (and that's because we're running 5 domains being dynamicly skinned real time with App and DB servers running on the same pipe). We use HTML instead XHTML because Site Owners can upload an HTML template with a Tag that says "insert video player" and the server builds the page dynamicly from there.
http://video.freevideoblog.com/ is running the same objects and the same server with different content and a different skin. We scratch built the CMS/VMS (video Managment System?) to allow N number of skinned video portals. Go to http://www.vidiac.com/ if you want more overview.
Well, in 90 days we've gone from 1,000 unique visitors/day to 40,000 with 30% week to week growth and are now pushing a sustained 70Mbps of traffic. Are you trying to tell me that if I designed the site using XHTML the site would be more popular?
I highly doubt that. I've never had a user complain to me that the site wasn't designed with a more modern HTML standard.
As for disabled users and yourself, if you're text browsing then you're really not the type of user our site is looking for anyways, as our sites are designed for High Bandwidth Eye-candy types, and I think our site growth reflects that.
Call me an old dawg, but I've been doing webpages since 1994 and the only worthwhile change to HTML was CSS. So I don't see a need for the standard to be advanced any more. No driving need. Keep in mind that needs are driven by the website visitor, not by you the designer. So if your visitors needs FRAMES and BLINK tags then good luck with XHTML, becuase your visitors don't give a rip about "advancing the standard" unless it fits their needs.
Macromedia, Adobe and gang have to push things forward to keep getting us to buy product right. Is HTML now "designed obsolescence"?
No
Jakob Nielson and the gang have pushed us to really boring text based browsing that is a chore to read, and not worth a casual flipping. Why should *I* care if my website is Modem/text based browsing compliant? Sure if I had a research website I can see the point, but my website is a video hosting portal http://videos.streetfire.net/ [streetfire.net] so I doubt the 40,000 folks coming to my site every day care about text based browsing or low-bandwidth options, since the end media is video.
FWIW though I chose 3.0 HTML because it's easier to integrate the 13 ASCX objects into my single ASPX page than if I kept styling separate with XHTML.
Now that if course is just me and maybe I'm bothered by people saying my site is obsolete. I admit there are a lot of neat things you can do with XHTML http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=/152/152.css& page=1 [csszengarden.com] (Click "select a design to see the style changes). But again I see that as new candy that doesn't really solve problems that neither I nor my viewers are having. [/rant]
PS I used the BR tag too, because I still think the P tag is lame.
From experience, large companies do not inovate, typicall you see disruptive bottom up change. My prediction is that we'll first see a viable consumer-generated video system, then a viable "indy" production system, then the "sienfelds" of the world wil finally come on board. There is a ton of embedded process, contracts, people, and existing ways to do business that would have to change to make this viable for the large production companies.
As we all know video streaming has been around forever. what's driving it is
1.) Bandwidth, Storage, and Server Capacity has become cheap enough to economiclly host videos.
2.) DV Cameras have become cheap enough that almost everyone has one.... or at least some mechanism for capturing video.
3.) Home Broadband connections have become fairly ubiquitous.
4.) Tools for making "watachable" home movies are finally in place. Windows movie maker can actually make even a horrible travel video tolerable.
My company gets 100+ video uploads a day, and yes 99% of it is crap, but because of the 1:1 broadcast nature of the net, what I consider to be part of that 99% somone out there loves. The trick is to make it available and expose it. That's were Google is trying to play with their video service.
I am part of a small start up http://www.vidiac.com/(Vidiac Networks) that is in this space already and I can say it's huge. There is oceans of consumer-generated media being created as inexpensive DV cameras become popular combined with, cheap bandwidth and home broadband connections.
While I admire the author for being aware of the consumer-generated video content revolution, I think his focus on pay-per-view and subscription based video is too heavily weighted. Our experience is that advertising supported video is less intrusive to a viewer as they are used to that paradigm growing up on TV. Never would you hear "Hey Mom, Will and Grace is about to come on, can I have $1.99 to watch it?".
Conversely There is a cadre of people that will not suffer ads, and will pay a one-time fee to opt out of them. (in effect that's what a TiVo is, a one time or monthly subscription fee to opt out of advertising). The problem here is that while TiVo works for television it "breaks" the broadcast company's business model, thus there is a ton of ruckus in the advertising world on how to deal with TiVo.
The Internet Solution most likely needs to focus on a dual-offering. Ads for free video, or micro-payments for no ads.
Now the second issue I have with this article is it's missing the number one biggest problem with consumer generated media. Where do you find it? Not until I read this article did I realize there even was a "DaveTV" to go to...and I live in the same city and even listen to "DaveFM". Where do I find videos online? Message forums, blogs, links from friends. Completely decentralized.
Now pardon me while I toot my own horn with Vidiac.com, but I'm actually rather proud of our solution to this issue. Our solution was to become a "Video ASP" We have a centralized server that offers brandable skinable video portals to message forums and websites. For example http//videos.streetfire.nethttp//video.freevideoblog.com. This is a win for the web site owners, because they get free video portals added to their site. It's a win for content creators as they get a free place to host with a consistent level of service. It's a win for viewers because they find chanalized content. And it's a win for us as every new domain we add grows our reach into new niche markets. Advertisers get to buy video ads in bulk across multiple domains (win for them), and revenue is shared between the site owners and content creators.....one of these days when someone invents the 25 hour day I'll program in a pay per view system as well, but so far none of my 300,000 viewers last month has asked for it.
What's nice about this is it creates a lot of synergies. For instance if I'm into the import car scene, and create a illegal street race video, I'll share it with people on my own import car forum. Visitors to that forum, are likely into import cars and the content is relevant to them. Thus all uploaded content becomes "chanalized". Instead of TLC, G4Tech TV, and Comedy Central, I now have video portals around various interests (just like websites, duh). What's nice too about our solution is the ability for a site moderator to move a video out of his/her domain, if the video isn't relevant to their site (say a Skate video on a car site). We allow moderators to put such videos into a general bank, then other forum owners pick up those videos to add more content to their site.
To sum up in the 90 days we've been live, I've seen our webtrends go from 100 users a day to 40,000 unique visitors a day. We're now serving 80,000 videos per day to 4 websites, and have 5 more in queue for launch. Every day users upload over 100 new videos into the system, so it's always fresh. It's a very exciting segment to be in.
The Street Racing Video Portal is just one example of our techology. Any website can add a video portal using our application. That is:
Videos.*yourWebSite*.com
The Admin of *yourWebSite*.com can moderate content to whatever area of interest your "virtual channel" is pertinent too. For example if you're into video games and have a website called myvideogame.com You can point the CNAME "VIDEOS" to our server.
videos.myvideogame.com
We take your website skin and intergrate our video portal into your skin.
The need it addresses is "myvideogame.com" may have a message forum with a multimedia section where people need videos hosted. This way myvideogame.com can provide that service to their users.
Now with Google coming along the reaction will be "just go host your video on Google and link it here".
Thus our business model gets hacked...yet again.... by the "Benign Conquerer"
Well the idea is to be my own boss and not have to work for another large company. It's a sad day when us "little guys" keep getting squeezed out by the large corporate empires.
Okay this pisses me off, the "Benign Giant" yet again kills another one of my fledgling companies.
Last year I started a company to offer people and business free 1GB email and 2GB File Sharing... within a month of use debuting, Google anounces GMAIL. The writing was on the wall they had buzz, and name, we had nothing. I would literally see people say "Anyone have a good webmail account?" I'd post "feel free to use mine 1GB mail and 2GB file/photo sharing" Next post down someone would say "I have 6 GMAIL invites" and my post would be ignored.
Okay so we canned that (software we had spent 4 years developing) went back tot he drawing board and made it into a video sharing service you can add to your website. (That is point CNAME.yourwebsite.com to our server and we skin your site with our video portal).
We debuted this in February and in 6 weeks we went from 500 visitors a day to 25,000 and 55,000 videos served a day. 30% week to week growth. Finally we had something that people wanted and was growing fast.
Now Google launches free video hosting and yet again I'm screwed. Do they have my phones tapped or something?
Next I'm going to launch a free Potatoe Gun building service just to see how Google destroys that business too.
GOOGLE I HATE YOU!!!!
-Adam, destitute programmer watching a big company destroy my livelyhood...again.
Slashdot Mirror
My "Failed" business model is the same business model as Google. Provide a popular service supported by advertising.
PS I wouldn't say "we've failed" at all, rather we're still in start up mode and I have yet to see a start up profitable 4 months out of gate, much less covering as much operational costs as we are so early in the game.
My company httpwww.vidiac.com creates ad-supported Video portals for website owners. For example http://videos.streetfire.net/ is one of our ~12 Video portals. We're streaming close to 300,000 videos a day to close to 100,000 people and have only been in operation for 4 months. The *only* way we have covered our cost is in advertising, and even then, just barely. None of the founders of the company has yet to take a nickle out of the company because we're allways scrounging to support our 1Gbps Internet feed that averages over 120Mbps. (FWIW Right now we're averaging more than $1,000/month a piece out of our own pockets to cover the success of the site)
I understand that nobody wants to see a Viagra banner ad, but I also understand we are growing by 30% per week as people watch free videos online. If our site was subscription supported, pay per view or otherwise, we would never have attained this level of popularity. Reading the responses here, I can see that a lot of people feel entitled to free content online. This content has to be subsidized in some way. If anyone has a suggestion on how we can continue to offer 300K videos a day to 100K users, while covering the 100+ hours a week the owners of the company are spending on this site I would love to hear it.
PS we have allready looked into pay-per-view, and it was categoricly rejected by users.
-Adam
While I think it is a *good step* to have Rich Media support interactive user interfaces, I think it's a *BAD STEP* to make that part of the compressed file format. Windows Media, Quicktime and Real all understand that and handle playlists, and user meta-controls outside of the content. This allows you to abstract the system and make controlable (programable) interfaces. Putting Menuing into the compression opens a can of worms that we just don't need to go down. This would be akin to putting Javascript functionality inside of JPEG images.
just my opinion, YMMV
-Adam
I would love to see a player built on a Bit-Torrent type solution, but unfortunatly, Bit Torrnet has some limitations for on-demand streaming.
BT doesn't have a "click/watch" type solution. BT is only good for asynchronous delivery of content due to it's download nature. That said, if a future version of BT provided for buffer-demanded priority queing, this would solve the problem. That is my "player" plugged into BT, would know that the next 30 seconds of content is Very high priority, the following 30 seconds is high priority, the next 30 seconds is low priority and the following 30 seconds is very low priority. This could evolve from an MPLS style label switching paradigm of some sort (in model only, not saying to use actual MPLS, rather some of the MPLS best Practices combined with BT).
Just some thoughts.
-Adam
Thanks for the input it sounds like you have some solid industry insight. I too have to wonder why Audio/Video copyrights get protection to the point of stiffling other artist, yet visual arts have more lenient creative commons...probably because less money is at stake.
PS: As an aside to my above post. My company is currently operating in the negative (as any new start up does). So if the RIAA/MPAA comes a knocking asking for a cut of the profits, right now we'd just hand them a bill
Most people mixing up their own derivative works for fun will share within their circle of friends privately, or via centralized services that haven't grown big enough to care about being legally anal, or via decentralized p2p (which is where I find most of those anime music vids, halo vids, GTA trick vids, CS cheater vids, WoW "hammertime" vids, and whatnot).
True, but it's still unfortunate the really good stuff can't make it onto more mainstream web-sharing services. Bit Torrent is great, but I wouldn't call it mainstream or even user friendly when it comes to the "can my grandmother use it" test.
This reminds me a lot of a problem my company is facing. One of partner sites that uses our free video hosting software http://video.freevideoblog.com/ gets a lot of "fan" dedications to popular TV shows like Buffy the Vampire slayer or Anime music videos set to popular songs. It's damn good work, and IMOHO only creates more awareness and popularity to the original work, but because we're paranoid of getting sued by the RIAA and MPAA, we have to delete those videos from the system.
I have to wonder how the Music industry gets around this as often I hear music that "samples" tracks from other artists, or even sound bites from TV and the movies. So I know there is a process in place to take an original work and modify it (And combine it with your own original work) to create your own unique art...but I don't know what it is, or where that shade of gray turns black.
I have to say that in this lawsuit happy time I'm more inclined to ere on the side of caution, but I feel a lot of unique and original work is lost or covered up by folks like myself moderating content off the system.
Anyhow just some idle rambling from my own experience.
-Adam
Regarding being "practically irrelevant"
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"every time [some software engineer] says, 'nobody will go to the trouble of doing that,' there's some kid in Finland who will go to the trouble."
Taken from Kevin' Mitnik's "The Art of intrusion"
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/sim-explorer
With more and more ISP's offering DDoS protection in the cloud I have to wonder how much longer DDoS in it's current form will remain relevant. Most of the Tier I backbone providers are shutting down these things in the cloud keeping the traffic from ever reaching the customer Gateway (for customers that subscribe to this service), however these systems are looking for uncompleted TCP connections and scripted browsing sequences. So in the next round of DDoS arms escalation, any thoughts on what the next evolution of the zombie net attacks will be?
little off your rocker with rage now aren't we?
110KB for the StreetFire page, sure blast me for it if you want. Just shows you aren't a very competent designer. Rather than evaluate a web application based on what a user needs, you would rather dictate your own needs as a designer on what is and is not needed. Again Elitist, and shows a lack of business sense.
What is StreetFire? It's a high bandwidth VIDEO STREAMING site. Site design in based on USER NEED, not not the DESIGNER'S NEED. StreetFire's main page could be two megs and my 40,000/users a day wouldn't give a rip, because the first thing they do is watch, on average, watch 15MB of video each. They could give a flip about a 110KB page. Thus it's not a requirement. (BTW we average 75MBps on our 1GBPS Internet Pipe, and run on average 150-200 simulataneous 400Kbps Video streams). These are not low bandwidth types using brail browsers. The site popularity would suffer if it was designed that way.
Second, and you obviously missed this point as well. StreetFire is one of many Video portals I manage from the same code base. 90% of my customers have HTML 1.0 Level skills. Case in point, http://www.ls1tech.com/ just signed with us, with their 60,000/user per day site. In less than 10 min we were able to get their video portal up http://video.ls1tech.com/ (and populate it with 300+ videos relevant to their portal). We have the capability to be that responsive because we don't rebuild their site to the latest greatest code base. Heck their users don't even want that, they want the same old same old site.
Did they care what HTML standard we used? Nope. As a matter of fact I have to write my code to fit their need of reusing their site style. Had I used a Sexy DOM site with no nested tables, etc, I would have to rebuild their entire site to fit my standard. Simple as there site is, that's more work for me (and/or them). Thus, the requirements for my application dictate that when I get a customer with a complicated site, such as http://www.crossroadvideos.com/ I can depreciate my code base to fit their site, rather than re-write their site to fit my code.
Program to your user's need, not your need to feed your ego with "sexy code" forcing your customers (or yourself) to reinvent the wheel every time the W3C farts.
Firstly once you've made a stylesheet it's done - you can use it for one page, one thousand pages or a million pages.
All my sites use styles. As a matter of fact http://videos.streetfire.net/ uses CSS, and that same code base is running (5) other sites with their own style sheet and skin. for example http://www.crossroadvideos.com/ is the same server same code, different ASCX "master tamplate", different CSS. Guess what though, CSS has been around since 1996, so that's not what we're talking about here, and as I said before, since CSS/DHTML came out there have been no improvements to the standard significant enough for me to EOL all my old site code.
Do you have any idea how tiny Mac/IE5's market share really is? That's like saying you don't use CSS at all because 0.01% of your users view it in NN4. And of course you're forgetting that the job of the web is to propegate and present information - our ability to make the information look nice is just a bonus.
*confused* so I have to use XHTML to cater to blind people, but making code that looks just as good on a MAC as a PC isn't a factor? Is Disabled > MAC users? *sigh*
Once again it's a matter of professionalism, it disgusts me just how unproffesional the majority of the 'website development' industry is
No offense but this just sounds elitist to me. `I use XHTML, and EOL HTML because I'ma "proffesional" all you writing HTML just simply aren't "proffesionals"'? Again my users never once judged the validity of my website based on what HTML standard I'm using or how "proffesional" they think my coding practices are.
That is a value of course, but for the time it takes to render a site on multiple devices (hand held Cell phone.... apparently Brail Browser too considering what that Anonymous Coward wrote) It's almost.... not it is easier for me to just go ahead and write a new site for each device and let the CMS propogate content as needed. It's not as Sexy of a solution, but it saves oceans of times for cross browser/device compliance. Case in point .NET server pages with complex client side controls render fine in Safari and OSX-Firefox, but blow up in OSX-Internet Explorer. It's easier for me to just write a custom IE-OSX specific control, than it is to make a single control work in all environments. Google had this same plroblem with early releases of GMail too, and we all know they are the ultimate God's of how to do things right....(faceous).
... no easier to just pop it out in the old trusted reliable format? There is allways a price to pay for trying to keep up with technology for technology's sake, especially if your users aren't even asking for it. I think I-Drive in the 7-series BMW was a good example of that.
My point is that you write code to cater to the largest possible demographic of your user base. They don't care if it's XHTML or HTML 1.0 if they can't tell the difference in the end result, and they also don't care how sexy or basic your code is either. Now I can go the new standards route, but why should I if it' just as easy
"... That shows great ignorance as to what a disabled person might want to access. In some countries (and I guess even states) such websites border on being illegal...."
So it's against the law to make a video website that doesn't cater to blind people?...yea right....Show me where it says that. Sorry, if I have to adopt a new *DESIGN* technology to cater to people that don't ever visit my website and wouldn't want to anyways, then you're failing to explain to me the value of assuming the cost to forklift my site. No, I think it's smarter to design sites to the lowest common denominator to reach the largest number of people rather than cater to a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the site users with new technologies every time someone comes out with a new change in standards.
99.99999....% of the websites out there don't even use CSS much less XHTML. All this scuttle butt about future browsers not being backwards compatible is just FUD.
The P tag sucks because it's redundant and the new P tag standard agrees with me. It makes more sense to say "New Line" instead of "Stop Paragraph""Start Paragraph". Obviously if you need a new Paragraph then the old one has ended.
Also if you need to scootch your text down just a smidge, it's easier to just drop in a BR than dig into the CSS.
As for my HTML skill level, it rises to the needs of the project and I have yet to see an end-user affecting need that requires a drive to newer standards. It makes more sense to write code in the most backward compatible spec that gets the job done.
As for how I handle Content Management, http://videos.streetfire.net/ is an HTML skin with
http://video.freevideoblog.com/ is running the same objects and the same server with different content and a different skin. We scratch built the CMS/VMS (video Managment System?) to allow N number of skinned video portals. Go to http://www.vidiac.com/ if you want more overview.
Well, in 90 days we've gone from 1,000 unique visitors/day to 40,000 with 30% week to week growth and are now pushing a sustained 70Mbps of traffic. Are you trying to tell me that if I designed the site using XHTML the site would be more popular?
I highly doubt that. I've never had a user complain to me that the site wasn't designed with a more modern HTML standard.
As for disabled users and yourself, if you're text browsing then you're really not the type of user our site is looking for anyways, as our sites are designed for High Bandwidth Eye-candy types, and I think our site growth reflects that.
-Adam
Call me an old dawg, but I've been doing webpages since 1994 and the only worthwhile change to HTML was CSS. So I don't see a need for the standard to be advanced any more. No driving need. Keep in mind that needs are driven by the website visitor, not by you the designer. So if your visitors needs FRAMES and BLINK tags then good luck with XHTML, becuase your visitors don't give a rip about "advancing the standard" unless it fits their needs.
Macromedia, Adobe and gang have to push things forward to keep getting us to buy product right. Is HTML now "designed obsolescence"?
& page=1 [csszengarden.com] (Click "select a design to see the style changes). But again I see that as new candy that doesn't really solve problems that neither I nor my viewers are having. [/rant]
No
Jakob Nielson and the gang have pushed us to really boring text based browsing that is a chore to read, and not worth a casual flipping. Why should *I* care if my website is Modem/text based browsing compliant? Sure if I had a research website I can see the point, but my website is a video hosting portal http://videos.streetfire.net/ [streetfire.net] so I doubt the 40,000 folks coming to my site every day care about text based browsing or low-bandwidth options, since the end media is video.
FWIW though I chose 3.0 HTML because it's easier to integrate the 13 ASCX objects into my single ASPX page than if I kept styling separate with XHTML.
Now that if course is just me and maybe I'm bothered by people saying my site is obsolete. I admit there are a lot of neat things you can do with XHTML http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=/152/152.css
PS I used the BR tag too, because I still think the P tag is lame.
-Adam HTML guy since 1994.
My video site http://videos.streetfire.net/ is advertising supported and growing at 30% week to week averaging 40,000 unique visitors a day. 99% of our content is Junky DV stuff, and no one video dominates our 80,000 daily video views. Check this article out. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html
From experience, large companies do not inovate, typicall you see disruptive bottom up change. My prediction is that we'll first see a viable consumer-generated video system, then a viable "indy" production system, then the "sienfelds" of the world wil finally come on board. There is a ton of embedded process, contracts, people, and existing ways to do business that would have to change to make this viable for the large production companies.
As we all know video streaming has been around forever. what's driving it is
1.) Bandwidth, Storage, and Server Capacity has become cheap enough to economiclly host videos.
2.) DV Cameras have become cheap enough that almost everyone has one.... or at least some mechanism for capturing video.
3.) Home Broadband connections have become fairly ubiquitous.
4.) Tools for making "watachable" home movies are finally in place. Windows movie maker can actually make even a horrible travel video tolerable.
My company gets 100+ video uploads a day, and yes 99% of it is crap, but because of the 1:1 broadcast nature of the net, what I consider to be part of that 99% somone out there loves. The trick is to make it available and expose it. That's were Google is trying to play with their video service.
I am part of a small start up http://www.vidiac.com/(Vidiac Networks) that is in this space already and I can say it's huge. There is oceans of consumer-generated media being created as inexpensive DV cameras become popular combined with, cheap bandwidth and home broadband connections.
While I admire the author for being aware of the consumer-generated video content revolution, I think his focus on pay-per-view and subscription based video is too heavily weighted. Our experience is that advertising supported video is less intrusive to a viewer as they are used to that paradigm growing up on TV. Never would you hear "Hey Mom, Will and Grace is about to come on, can I have $1.99 to watch it?".
Conversely There is a cadre of people that will not suffer ads, and will pay a one-time fee to opt out of them. (in effect that's what a TiVo is, a one time or monthly subscription fee to opt out of advertising). The problem here is that while TiVo works for television it "breaks" the broadcast company's business model, thus there is a ton of ruckus in the advertising world on how to deal with TiVo.
The Internet Solution most likely needs to focus on a dual-offering. Ads for free video, or micro-payments for no ads.
Now the second issue I have with this article is it's missing the number one biggest problem with consumer generated media. Where do you find it? Not until I read this article did I realize there even was a "DaveTV" to go to...and I live in the same city and even listen to "DaveFM". Where do I find videos online? Message forums, blogs, links from friends. Completely decentralized.
Now pardon me while I toot my own horn with Vidiac.com, but I'm actually rather proud of our solution to this issue. Our solution was to become a "Video ASP" We have a centralized server that offers brandable skinable video portals to message forums and websites. For example http//videos.streetfire.net http//video.freevideoblog.com. This is a win for the web site owners, because they get free video portals added to their site. It's a win for content creators as they get a free place to host with a consistent level of service. It's a win for viewers because they find chanalized content. And it's a win for us as every new domain we add grows our reach into new niche markets. Advertisers get to buy video ads in bulk across multiple domains (win for them), and revenue is shared between the site owners and content creators.....one of these days when someone invents the 25 hour day I'll program in a pay per view system as well, but so far none of my 300,000 viewers last month has asked for it.
What's nice about this is it creates a lot of synergies. For instance if I'm into the import car scene, and create a illegal street race video, I'll share it with people on my own import car forum. Visitors to that forum, are likely into import cars and the content is relevant to them. Thus all uploaded content becomes "chanalized". Instead of TLC, G4Tech TV, and Comedy Central, I now have video portals around various interests (just like websites, duh). What's nice too about our solution is the ability for a site moderator to move a video out of his/her domain, if the video isn't relevant to their site (say a Skate video on a car site). We allow moderators to put such videos into a general bank, then other forum owners pick up those videos to add more content to their site.
To sum up in the 90 days we've been live, I've seen our webtrends go from 100 users a day to 40,000 unique visitors a day. We're now serving 80,000 videos per day to 4 websites, and have 5 more in queue for launch. Every day users upload over 100 new videos into the system, so it's always fresh. It's a very exciting segment to be in.
The Street Racing Video Portal is just one example of our techology. Any website can add a video portal using our application. That is: Videos.*yourWebSite*.com The Admin of *yourWebSite*.com can moderate content to whatever area of interest your "virtual channel" is pertinent too. For example if you're into video games and have a website called myvideogame.com You can point the CNAME "VIDEOS" to our server. videos.myvideogame.com We take your website skin and intergrate our video portal into your skin. The need it addresses is "myvideogame.com" may have a message forum with a multimedia section where people need videos hosted. This way myvideogame.com can provide that service to their users. Now with Google coming along the reaction will be "just go host your video on Google and link it here". Thus our business model gets hacked...yet again.... by the "Benign Conquerer"
Well the idea is to be my own boss and not have to work for another large company. It's a sad day when us "little guys" keep getting squeezed out by the large corporate empires.
Okay this pisses me off, the "Benign Giant" yet again kills another one of my fledgling companies.
Last year I started a company to offer people and business free 1GB email and 2GB File Sharing... within a month of use debuting, Google anounces GMAIL. The writing was on the wall they had buzz, and name, we had nothing. I would literally see people say "Anyone have a good webmail account?" I'd post "feel free to use mine 1GB mail and 2GB file/photo sharing" Next post down someone would say "I have 6 GMAIL invites" and my post would be ignored.
Okay so we canned that (software we had spent 4 years developing) went back tot he drawing board and made it into a video sharing service you can add to your website. (That is point CNAME.yourwebsite.com to our server and we skin your site with our video portal).
For Example:
http://videos.streetfire.net/
http://video.freevideoblog.com/
We debuted this in February and in 6 weeks we went from 500 visitors a day to 25,000 and 55,000 videos served a day. 30% week to week growth. Finally we had something that people wanted and was growing fast.
Now Google launches free video hosting and yet again I'm screwed. Do they have my phones tapped or something?
Next I'm going to launch a free Potatoe Gun building service just to see how Google destroys that business too.
GOOGLE I HATE YOU!!!!
-Adam, destitute programmer watching a big company destroy my livelyhood...again.