Hosting Milestone with AWS

We've maintained a rack of servers at Viawest (now Flexential) and formerly RMI (Rocky Mountain Internet) for 25 years. So it was quite nostalgic to breakdown our cabinet and move all our servers to storage and recycling. Over the last few months we've moved all our customers to the AWS platform. We even have a physical server in Frankfurt for our German customers. We have no regrets with Viawest, they were a good company, but the Amazon cloud was just a better fit for us moving forward.

One picture is worth a thousand words, but a video subtitle is worth a thousand pictures.

Many years ago I worked for MAGI (Mathematical Applications Group, Inc) in Elmsford, NY. The company was a pioneer in computer generated imagery and 3D modeling technology. In 1966 they started developing software based on the concept of tracing radiation from its source to its surroundings. Eventually, the software was adapted for use in computer generated imaging by tracing light instead of radiation, making it one of the first systems to implement the concept of ray tracing.

The software was a solids modeling system, in that the geometry was a series of solid primitives (boxes, cylinders, extrusions, etc.) along with combinatorial (Boolean) operations. The combination of the solids modeling and ray tracing made it a powerful system for generating high quality images like those seen in the movie “Tron”. The graphics and engineering application side of MAGI, called MAGI/SynthaVision was started in 1972 and finally sold to Lockheed in 1985 to be integrated with CADAM.

At the time, CADAM was one of the most widely used CAD/CAM systems on the planet, but considered by most to be just a computer aided drafting system. I remember traveling around the world speaking on the subject of solids modeling. I often used the expression “if a picture is worth a thousand words then a solids model is worth a thousand pictures” since we could make an infinite number of pictures from a single 3D model.

I did a little research on the saying and found that Fred R. Barnard originally created it when he coined the phrase “One look is worth a thousand words.” Printers’ Ink, 8 December 1921, p. 96. He changed it to “One picture is worth a thousand words” in Printers’ Ink, 10 March 1927, p. 114, and called it “a Chinese proverb, so that people would take it seriously. It was immediately credited to Confucius.

This got me thinking about how search engines have a hard time building context from web videos. Unfortunately, spiders can’t watch a web video and extract the relevant information like humans can. Metadata can provide an overview, but is fairly limited in size. Well, this lead me to the video subtitle and the possibility of using an XML document to feed the subtitle to the video, as well as the search engine.

There are several methods for identifying spiders visiting your website. Once you’ve identified your visitor as a spider crawling for keywords and phases, you can replace the video on the page with the exact “word-for-word” account contained in your video subtitles. Clearly, you would NOT want to abuse this technique since search engines have been known to verify user agent delivery implementations and there are a variety of tools to view your website as the search engines do to validate your results.

This method seems to be particularly powerful for localized content since video subtitles are commonplace in foreign countries, but you’ll want to translate your page title and Meta description too. The cost to translate a video script usually comes out to be somewhere between $0.25 and $0.35 per word so providing the context of your video in multiple languages is very reasonable today.

So this brings me back to the old saying “One picture is worth a thousand words”. I wondered if Mr. Barnard were alive today if he would agree with me to reprint it for Internet users as “One picture is worth a thousand words, but a video subtitle is worth a thousand pictures”.

I said “You look fat in those pants”

Authoring content can be a labor of love or a laborious chore. Few people are gifted with the talent of successfully communicating their most refined ideas and perspectives the first time around. Have you ever wished you had the opportunity to respond to someone in a different way after the fact? Have you ever thought of something else to include in a correspondence after hitting the send button?

On the surface, there are some cases where modifying predated content makes sense; for example, let’s say you move your office, wouldn’t it be convenient to automatically replace your latest contact information in past eMail correspondences? Branded eMail application have “dynamic” content features so text in your eMail can actually be changed at a later date. This got me thinking and I have to admit that I have some reservations about possible abuse.

The overall topic reminded me of a friend I had when I was single. Let’s just say he wasn’t the most politically correct individual on the planet. Back then, going out on Saturday night to meet new friends sometimes included dancing; unfortunately, neither of us were very handsome and it was always intimidating to make the first move.

We would blurt out something original like “Do you want to dance?” and I’d say 9 times out of 10 the response would be an apologetic “not really” or “not right now”. Well, in the event that this happened, he later told me that it helped his pride to say “I said you look fat in those pants”. I’m guessing he had some sort of inferiority complex, but he would probably explain it as “getting the last laugh”.

Most of the time, web site content is published in a well-defined manner. Many content management systems archive revisions through workflow processes and applications like Wikis provide a good history of content modifications. However, with the proliferation of authoring tools that don’t track and/or timestamp changes, I’m afraid the practice of altering predated content goes somewhat unnoticed.

What people say and when they say it (content and publishing) cannot be considered subjective. Next generation web applications can address this issue with the widespread acceptance of emerging metadata standards like Dublincore. Now, this brings me back to my friend and his callous remarks, I later told him that consoling his victims about his insensitivity and lack of honesty landed me on the dance floor on several occasions.

Parabolic skis and web widgets (aka gadgets)

Being from Colorado, I like to go skiing in the mountains at least a couple of times a year with the family. It feels like a responsibility and justification for living in a climate that can be cold for many months out of the year. It’s strange how, at the same time, I always notice that the skis and associated hardware have changed slightly. You know, the color and design of the skis or maybe the way the boots and bindings work. I’m usually intrigued enough to see if the change could improve my ability to ski or to enjoy the experience.

Skiing in Colorado typically starts at about the same time as Webmaster World’s annual conference in Las Vegas, which kicked off on November 11th at the convention center and ended with the traditional pubcon gathering at the Hofbrauhaus 4 days later. I always enjoy catching up with friends and getting the latest information on the search engines and web development trends. If you have a web site and you want to promote it, this is the one conference no one should miss.

This year I noticed that every session had rows of tables for participants to place their laptops on, unlike past years, when we only had chairs and took session notes manually. I observed people multi-tasking from the rear of the conference rooms. IMs, eMails and tweets were flying back and forth on a variety of devices. I even noticed someone answering customer support messages from their web site using Live Person right in the middle of a session.

It made me wonder if I was missing something. I remembered my old skis and how they had lasted for so many years. Could there be similarities with web development? It seems like a bizarre correlation, but underlying web technologies are moving ahead at a relatively slow pace. We’re just bombarded with a lot of extraneous items that make it feel like things are moving faster than they truly are. The number of options and tasks that we have to monitor has surely increased, but underlying changes in technology happen slowly.

I guess what I’m trying to do is draw a correlation from my latest ski adventure to my latest web conference; after all, it is that time of year and I recently purchased a new pair of parabolic shape skis. Besides the significant difference in my ability to carve up the mountain slopes, I noticed that nearly everyone is now using the relatively new technology.

So what do parabolic skis have to do with this years Webmaster World conference sessions? During the widget (aka gadget) session, one of the presenters showed a slide that overlayed web usage and web traffic to corporate sites and social networks. It showed how valuable it can be to find ways to embrace Web 2.0 technologies and provide your content on these networks (and devices) in the future.

It seems like only a few years ago that we were introduced to web widgets, even though they have been around for more than a decade. I believe that is about the same time that Elan introduced parabolic skis. After attending the gadget session at Webmaster World this year we built and served-up several custom gadgets. Somehow, it reminded me of carving up the back bowl at Copper on my new skis…piece of cake!

Tournament Draws and Search Linking Algorithms

This year I turn 55! Quite a milestone when you think about it. I can tell you a number of things go through your mind when this event occurs and I’m guessing everyone goes through some sort of “right of passage“. Having been a tennis player most of my life, I decided that 55 was my opportunity to join the 55-and-over tennis tournament circuit. I imagined filling my trophy case with hardware from my triumphs.

In my first tournament, the draw had me play a first round match late in the evening, followed with a meeting with the number 2 seed early the next morning. This didn’t seem fair, but as a newcomer I didn’t feel it was my place to complain. Well, the good news was that I won my first match, but the bad news was that I resembled a pretzel the next morning. Needless to say, I went down in defeat, but on my drive home I had a bit of an epiphany on tournament draws and search linking algorithms.

What I realized was that search algorithms actually use a similar process. You see, as an unknown, the tennis tournament directors could not credibly seed me; similarly, search engines don’t rank newly found URLs very high in their listings. Now, if I would have won my match against the number 2 seed, I’m sure the Colorado Tennis Association would gladly seed me in the next tournament. Likewise, search engines start recognizing URLs when other prominent (seeded) sites point to you.

The lesson here is that “talk is cheap” in both sports and web search. I plan to continue my quest for Colorado tennis stardom, but in the meantime we’ll plan to get as many valuable links (from seeded websites) to Viewmark as possible.

Does size really matter?

It’s pretty cool how Facebook has connected me with a lot of old friends from my college days back in southeast Ohio. My guess is that this is not an isolated event and many people are experiencing a reunion of sorts. For me, the phenomenon generated a renewed interest in those idealistic days and even prompted me to digitize some old content in an effort to bring the pictures and sounds online for us to reminisce the memories together.

When embarking on this sort of thing, I always seem to come across a plethora of issues from both an organizational and technological perspective. In this case, I was hoping to bring our college music recitals online. Encoding them as MP3 was easy enough, but getting them online using the same approach I had used for other media files was another story. Here’s why:

Over time, I have become more comfortable using online tools for storing and maintaining various types of media. Most portals offer functionality to limit the access to personal information such as family celebrations, but I have generally felt okay with placing this type of content online anyway. What I struggle with is coming to terms with the best strategy for using and managing the data for the long run.

I’ve been using Picassa to store our family photo albums, YouTube for videos and Facebook, Blogger and Google Sites for content and navigation. We do use WordPress for our corporate blogs, but let’s table that discussion for some other time since we are talking mostly about using tools that don’t require any IT support.

Placing large media files on a hosted solution has 2 major advantages: First, the hosting provider is responsible for the delivery of the bits and bytes and there is typically no cost involved for the extra bandwidth associated to rich media files. Second, these companies must provide the archival and redundancy needed to assure your data won’t be lost over the long haul. So, as long as they are in business, things should be fine. I guess I’m betting that Google is going to be around for many years to come.

So here’s what happened when I tried to place our college music recitals online. First, YouTube doesn’t seem to provide a mechanism to add audio files like MP3s. To get around this, it appears that most people just combine several pictures with the audio file using video editing software and upload it as a video. Unfortunately, YouTube restricts the length of your video to 10 minutes and audio files like interviews, seminars, training courses and in my case musical recitals can be much longer than this.

The sizes of these files are rather small since the majority of the data is related to the audio track and easily falls under YouTube’s data size limit of 1GB. To put this in perspective, if one (1) minute of audio in the MP3 format is equivalent to 1MB of data you could place over 1,000 minutes of audio on YouTube based on the size of the file alone.

Ultimately, I was able to upload the video files of our music recitals to Blogger and Facebook since neither of them have a restriction for a video’s length and my files were well below the 1GB size limitation. Unfortunately, this threw a wrench into my overall strategy of placing audio and video files in the same place online. It sure would be convenient to have a single online media repository where people could store their large media files and link to them using gadgets. To date, I’ve been using Picassa and YouTube in this way, but now I have another location for audio files that are longer than 10 minutes. I guess you could say “size really does matter”.