Category Archives: internet

adobe, bbc, internet, media, web authoring

BBC standardizing on Flash for web video

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I’m at Qcon London listening to John O’Donovan, Chief Architect, and Kevin Hinde, Head of Software Development, both from the BBC.

They are talking about video on bbc.co.uk. Previously this has been handled through pop-up pages that give a choice between Windows Media Player and Real Media. The BBC will now be standardising on Adobe Flash video, embedded in the page rather than in a pop-up. Their research has found that embedded video has a much better click-through than the pop-up style. It also has editorial implications, because it is better integrated into the page. In due course, Flash will be the sole public format (an archive is also kept in some other format).

There is going to be increasing video on the site. Apparently the BBC is getting better at negotiating rights to video content, and we can expect lots of video from this year’s Olympics, for example.

As far as I can tell, this has nothing to do with iPlayer, the service which offers the last 7 days of broadcasting online. This is mainly about short videos of news content.

Incidentally, I’m disappointed that we are not getting more detail on the rebuilding of the web platform about which I posted earlier, though it has been mentioned in passing as a move to dynamic publishing. That was more interesting to me, and perhaps more in tune with what Qcon is about. Still, this is worthwhile as well.

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bbc, internet, web authoring

The BBC is rebuilding its web platform

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Yesterday here at Qcon I attended an informal get-together to discuss the BBC’s “tech refresh”, which turns out to mean the rebuilding of its web platform.

Apparently the budget has just been approved, which means the BBC will be going ahead with a new content platform built on Java supplemented by a lightweight PHP layer. The primary goal is flexibility. Recently the BBC went live with a new widgety home page which demonstrates its interest in personalization; ambitions include more extensive customization, more of a social platform (possibly using OpenSocial, OpenID); making a platform more amenable to mash-ups; data-only APIs.

As an aside, the BBC home page right now is a bit broken; it says “due to technical problems we are displaying a simplified version of the BBC homepage.” After yesterday’s session, I know a bit about why this is. The BBC’s current site is mostly based on Perl scripts and static pages. It’s not really a content management system. The recent home page innovations, which I blogged about recently, are not hosted on the new platform, but are a somewhat hacky affair built on the old platform using SSI and parsing cookies with regular expressions. It went live, but is currently not very reliable. It also uses more CPU, which ultimately means more servers are needed.

So what is the BBC’s backup plan for when its site fails? Well, it has a “big red button” which is really designed for moments of crisis when the whole world descends on the BBC to find out breaking news – an example was the London bombing in July 2005. At such times, scalability trumps everything, so the big red button switches on a simple home page which removes non-critical features like user tracking or smart widgets. The same procedure is handy for fallback if there are technical problems.

Another thing which interested me: apparently BBC pages are designed in PhotoShop and handed over to HTML coders for implementation. Unfortunately this doesn’t fit well with what I would like, which is pages that reflow nicely when you resize the page.

The BBC is conscious of its archival responsibilities and works with the Internet Archive. One of its problems is having to keep old material online, including some driven by old Perl scripts or even in some cases C scripts where the code has been lost. It is considering the use of virtualization to host old versions of Perl for content like this.

There is a bit of Ruby on the site but this has been problematic because of memory leaks. Maybe JRuby would help.

The current/old BBC site may be built on old and unfashionable technology, but I’ve personally appreciated its great availability and performance. And the lack of ads, of course.

I’m attending a further session on the BBC news site later today, so perhaps another post later.

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internet, microsoft, software development, web authoring, windows

The psychic powers of the man from Mozilla

I spoke to Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager of the Internet Explorer team at Microsoft, and used some of his comments in a piece for Guardian Technology. I’m pondering putting the whole transcript online.

One of the topics was whether Internet Explorer will ever support ECMAScript 4.0 (aka JavaScript 2), which has been a contentious subject. For the sake of balance I also spoke to Mike Schroepfer, VP of engineering at Mozilla, who was also at Mix08. I told Schroepfer that I’d spoken to Hachamovitch and that he had said he could not commit to ES 4.0 when it was not yet finalized. Schroepfer then said:

…but what he didn’t say was, we’re actively working on it, we’re excited about it, we hope when it’s finished we will implement something in the future. He didn’t even go anywhere near that. He gave you a correct and politically astute answer.

Schroepfer was spot-on and I was impressed by his psychic powers, since he had not been present when I spoke to Hachamovitch. Microsoft has lots of experience in implementing languages with features similar to ES 4.0 and it seems to me that its reluctance to embrace it must be for strategic rather than technical reasons.

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internet, software development, web authoring

Imagine this: A REST microkernel

Here at QCon, I realised that the Googly “cloud as middleware” track was probably not going to deliver what I want to discover, which is where Google thinks it is going with all its diverse offerings, being mostly about third-party services such as Yahoo Pipes and Amazon Web Services with which I am already familiar. I therefore went instead to what proved to be a fascinating session on programming REST (REpresentational State Transfer). Peter Rodgers of 1060 Research spoke about his NetKernel, which is a kind of REST runtime. “I’m typing byte code”, he explained, as he put together URI strings that performed various operations. He observed that much computing can be reduced to doing something to some resource with another resource, and that this can be expressed as a URI. Here’s an example:

Active:toUpper+operand@ffcpl:/demo/data.xml

In effect this is functional programming via URIs.

Unfortunately I had to leave a little before the end of the session; but one of the points I notice from the 1060 research site is that URI-based programming is tailor-made for caching results, with potentially improved performance.

A thought-provoking session; my quick reaction is that he may be onto something.

The session was packed; I’m not sure if this is because folk were interested specifically in NetKernel, or whether like me they just went along because REST is a focus of activity right now.

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eclipse, google, internet, microsoft, software development, web authoring

QCon London

Today I’m at QCon in London. I enjoyed this conference last year, when among other things I got the scoop on Microsoft’s Volta (then LINQ 2). First up this year is Erich Gamma of Design Patterns and JUnit fame, who will be talking about how Eclipse has influenced his view of software development (others would talk about how Gamma has influenced Eclipse). I’m also intrigued by what Google’s Gregor Hohpe is going to say about “The Cloud as the new middleware platform.” It’s going to be an interesting contrast to Microsoft’s Mix08 conference last week. Be sure I’ll be reporting back here; or if you’re here too, by all means get in touch.

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internet, microsoft, silverlight, software development, web authoring, windows

Mix08 is all online

Microsoft has put the sessions from Mix08 online. You can stream them with Silverlight, or hit the download button to save them in WMV or MP4 (“for iPod”). The quality of the sessions I’ve attended or watched was uniformly high, so I recommend these if you have any interest in Microsoft’s web development plans. In particular, the sessions on IE8 and Silverlight deliver lots of new information.

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.net, internet, microsoft, search, software development, web authoring, yahoo

Steve Ballmer: post Yahoo, we will be a PHP shop

Steve Ballmer took a few questions yesterday at Mix08 in Las Vegas, and I asked him what Microsoft would do with all Yahoo’s PHP applications if its takeover bid succeeds, especially where they duplicate home-grown applications that are running on ASP.NET.  PHP is deeply embedded into Yahoo’s culture, and Rasmus Lerdorf, who invented PHP, works at Yahoo as Infrastructure Architect.

He gave me a fuller answer than I expected, which is worth quoting in its entirety:

There’s really two different questions. In a number of areas, and I won’t go into specifics, but we will have to make some kind of integration plans after presumably we reach deal and it will be appropriate to talk to the Yahoo guys. We shouldn’t have two of everything. It won’t make sense to have two search services, two advertising services, two mail services, and we’ll have to sort some of that through. Some of that technology undoubtedly will come from Microsoft’s side, and some will undoubtedly come from Yahoo’s side, whatever technology comes, it will also come with an infrastructure that runs it.

You ask what we will do with those PHP applications? I’m sure a bunch of them will be running, at high scale and in production for a long time to come.

I think there’s going to be a lot of innovation in the core infrastructure which we have on Windows today with ASP.NET, and Yahoo have in Linux and PHP today, and over time probably most of the big applications on the Internet will wind up being rebuilt and redone, whether those are ours, or Yahoo’s, or any of the other competitors. But for the foreseeable future we will be a PHP shop, I guess if we own Yahoo, as well as being an ASP.NET shop.

One of the things I love which we got into the new Windows Server, is that we put a lot of attention in to making sure that PHP applications run well on Windows Server. That’s not the current Yahoo environment and I’m not suggesting that we would transition that way, but for those of you who do have PHP skills, we are going to try and make Windows Server the best place to have PHP applications in the future.

It was a good answer, though I’d still expect integration to be difficult. One danger is that post-merger infighting over what gets preserved and what gets scrapped could stifle innovation. Microsoft’s Live platform actually looks increasingly interesting, as we’ve learned here at Mix, and I imagine that some of these teams will be nervous about what will happen to their efforts in Microsoft-Yahoo becomes a reality.

internet, microsoft, web authoring

What’s new in IE8: Activities and Web Slices, developer tools

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Here at Mix08 in Las Vegas, IE head honcho Dean Hachamovitch has introduced Internet Explorer 8, which he told us will be available for beta download later today.

The big features are CSS 2.1 standards compliance (now the default), and two new things called Activities and Web Slices.

Activities are a way of installing browser add-ons that enables new instant links. You can select text in a web page, right-click, and get links for things like “buy on eBay” or “see user reviews”. This is enabled by an XML specification called the OpenService Architecture, which is being released under the Microsoft Open Specification Promise.

Web Slices are a way of subscribing to page fragments, or perhaps pagelets (my term). This then appear as links in the IE8 toolbar. Examples we were shown were an eBay auction, and Facebook feeds. Like Activities, this is enabled by an XML specification, this one called the Web Slices Specification. The page author determines what content ends up in the pagelet.

If the specifications catch on, I imagine other browsers could easily implement them.

Activities remind me of the almost-dead Smart Tags, in the way that they enable a new in-page menu of options related to a keyword or phrase. The difference is that there is no auto-recognition; the user has to select some text and right-click.

Finally, we saw some great developer tools for debugging JavaScript and CSS. In particular, I liked the feature which lets you select an element and discover which CSS rule is winning in the rendered page.

Note: Post edited to clarify how Activities work. I misunderstood these at first, thinking they were extra links authored into a page. Apparently they are not: you have to select some text and then use a pop-up menu. The advantage is that we will not get pages festooned with extra links. The disadvantage is that you can easily select text that returns no meaningful result.

I rather liked the idea of multiple destinations for a single link, but it seems this isn’t it.

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internet, microsoft, mono, silverlight, software development, web authoring

Moonlight update: Silverlight 2 on Linux hardly started

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Miguel de Icaza has an update on Moonlight, a third-party but official implemention of Silverlight for Linux.

Although progress is rapid, it is disappointing to read that a Silverlight 2.0 implementation is hardly started:

Silverlight 2.0 Other than the JIT support for Silvelright 2.0 at this point we have not done any work on it (well there are 3 classes stubbed privately).

There are two reasons for this: the updated 2.0 API is not public and although we have access to it, it is a bit of a mess to try to keep two separate trees (public and private) to support this and since Mix is just around the corner, we will just wait until next week.

The second reason is that we want to focus on shipping 1.0, completing the media pack integration and working on the configuration aspects of Moonlight (auto-update configuration for instance).

Good reasons; but the question it raises is this: by how long will Linux implementations lag the Windows and Mac releases of Silverlight? Silverlight 2.0 is hugely important because it enables .NET code to run. I constantly meet folk who are developing for Silverlight but waiting for version 2.0 as the real thing. Version 1.0 is browser JavaScript only.

More positively, at least we know that Mono already has a decent desktop implementation of .NET, so the fundamentals are there.

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adobe, flash, internet, silverlight, web authoring

Latest stats: Video web growing fast

Nielsen Online has released statistics about the most popular social networking sites in the UK and their growth year-on-year:

Rank
Jan 08

Rank Jan 07

Website

UK Unique Audience (000s) Jan 08

UK Unique Audience (000s) Jan 07

Change in UA Jan 07 – Jan 08

Social media type

1

2

YouTube

10,426

6,667

56%

Video

2

1

Wikipedia

9,557

7,758

23%

Information

3

18

Facebook

8,513

1,048

712%

Network

4

4

Blogger

5,145

3,697

39%

Blogging

5

3

MySpace

5,026

5,513

-9%

Network

6

8

Bebo

4,090

2,670

53%

Network

7

16

Slide

3,355

1,092

207%

Add-on tool

8

10

Yahoo! Answers

3,319

2,111

57%

Information

9

6

Windows Live Spaces

3,127

2,716

15%

Network

10

9

TripAdvisor

2,364

2,186

8%

Travel reviews

Source: Nielsen Online, UK NetView, home & work data, including applications, Jan 2007 – Jan 2008
E.g. YouTube was visited by 10.4 million Britons in Jan 08, 56% more than in Jan 07

Three things I found interesting. First, huge growth for Facebook and a decline for MySpace – but this is a volatile market and Facebook may the the next site to beome less fashionable.

Second, the huge reach of these sites. Neilsen reckons that 20.8 million Brits visited at least one of these sites in January, representing 63% of those online.

Third, the growth of video. I think this is the most reliable long-term trend. You can see it more clearly in Neilsen’s figures for the fastest growing sites, five of which are video sites (vidShadow, Veoh, Youku (Chinese site), Tudou (Chinese site) and Video Jug), as well as in the rise of YouTube to first place.

Is the Internet moving towards video in the same way as traditional media (print -> radio -> TV)? Possibly.

There is a technical story here too. I’m at Mix08 this week, where Microsoft is promoting its Silverlight plug-in for video and rich visual content. However, all these sites currently use Adobe’s Flash plug-in, which will be hard to shift. Without the ubiquity and ease of installation which Adobe has achieved with Flash, I doubt we would be seeing this growth in video content.