shawn rider dot com

A quick look through some of the stories listed in any current Google News search for “tiered internet” reveals that there is plenty of interest in recent legislative activities surrounding the issue of multi-tiered internet services.

What’s going on? Earlier this month, the US House of Reps rejected an ammendment that would have prevented lobbying actions by AT&T, Verizon and Qwest. A group of internet providers, led by AT&T, are pushing to introduce tiered internet services for internet content providers. According to the companies, nothing would change for consumers (as long as your favorite websites cough up the extra cash to fund high-speed transfers). That means that if Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft maintain their positions and refuses to pay extra fees to these internet service providers, they could find their sites being maliciously throttled back, likely driving users to other (paid up) outlets.

The argument from AT&T and friends is that it costs money to maintain the network lines that connect node to node. They do not intend to charge customers different prices for access to individual sites; rather, they will charge the sites themselves for faster access to browsers.

One major flaw in this argument, of course, is that there is precedent in the phone system for companies NOT charging to access lines. After all, it takes a lot to keep traditional telephone systems online, and that is all, presumably, factored into our montly phone bills. Why internet access charges would only apply to the “last-mile” of the network (that is, the part that goes from the Internet Service Provider to your house) rather than some fraction of the entire network is a complete mystery to me.

The much larger issue is the significant decline in quality, quantity and variety of online content that would no-doubt follow this change in billing practice. I think of this in relation to GamesFirst!, which we’ve had online for ten years now. It predates me, even, and it has always been a small, independent website. It might not always offer the latest or greatest material, but I think it’s unarguably contributed in some quality way to the growth of the Web. We’ve published short films, comics, podcasts, and thousands of articles.

If we were forced to pay extra (beyond the hosting fees we already pay) to run GF!, it could realistically put us out of the biz. If users found that our site loaded slower than another game site, they would not come back. And in the world of gaming websittes, there is plenty of competition. In the face of monoliths like Ziff-Davis, Imagine Media, and IGN, we would be simply buried in a pile of marginalized sites.

The infinite shelf space of the Internet is one of the qualities of the network that make it so worthwhile to engage in online production. If tiered internet service billing for online content providers became the norm, the Web would be forever altered in a negative way. It would probably feel a lot more like cable television…

Look Around You: Germs

Look around you: It’s a whole new website. I’ve moved my blogging in-house, and I’ve re-created the site. I have a lot of thoughts about why I did things the way I did, but I’m not sure those thoughts would be interesting to any of you in the least. I do plan on making a much more minimal theme available, and this should resize fairly nicely.

To celebrate, I’m including the “Germs” episode of Look Around You, one of my favorite television shows. It’s a wonderful thing, and it’s still free on Google Video. I noticed that BBC America has just started showing the second season of Look Around You, so try to catch it while you can in the US (there are only six eps, so it will go quickly). I hope they release a real DVD set of both seasons in the US soon.

And as an extra bonus, a clip from Look Around You Season Two’s Music 2000 competition:

The Rapping Song by Anthony Carmichael

Development on the new site proceeds. I am very close to making this active on the main page. I just have to settle down to do the style, which will be no small feat, I’m sure. I have a couple ideas beginning to rumble around, so I’ll try a few things out and see what happens.

Today I managed to get some comments spam protection (the little Math quiz), although I think there are better ways to handle that. I’d like to try some new things I’ve seen out there, such as asking people to recognize certain images. It seems like it should be easy enough to implement. Then again, it’s not much of a problem for me now, so I think I’ll content myself with the math questions and see how things go.

Not much new on the site, but I’m pretty much done converting the old work pages into the new site. For future projects I’ll blog more about them in-progress, so they’ll have accompanying postings, but the main pages will remain pretty lean listings of my major projects. Although I can already feel rising issues of genre and formal classifications…

I did add in a Gravatar feature that will automatically link in people’s Gravatar’s based on their email addresses. I think it’s a cool idea, although I once again blanked on what to make for my Gravatar. And as I was implementing it, I realized that Wordpress is not using the comments.php file in my theme directory, but rather the comments.php file in the default theme dir. Weird, eh? I found the line in wp-includes/comment-functions.php (line 36 if I remember correctly) that defines the template to be used for comments, and, assuming that code works OK, I imagine it must be something with my environmental variables? Or maybe a setting the theme would have set? I am stumped, but it’s not such a big deal for me now.

Alive in Joburg made the meme-circuit last Fall. I was totally blown-away and have been glad to see it remain available on Google Video for quite a few months now. It’s an indy film, directed by Niell Blomkamp, whom I believe is South African. Blomkamp is well-known for his CG work: Many people remember his transforming-Citroen commercial, which made the old viral video rounds quite awhile ago. Blomkamp is also responsible for an incredible, and much lesser-seen, short “commercial” (hard to tell if this is real sci-fi marketing or fanciful filmmaker) advertising future cop-bots. The latter video is very much like Alive in Joburg, which posits that aliens land in Johannesburg, South Africa and are not exactly welcomed.

Thanks to Skarcha’s WPvideo Plugin, which makes it possible to share so many cool vids. Expect this to be a feature on the page, for the benefit of all of us.

I have downloaded the Cloudy Plugin for WordPress, which does a little dynamic analysis to generate a keyword cloud. I have been excited by these clouds since I saw it first on Tim O’Reilly’s Radar. So I had to modify it a little bit to get it to work with my modified WP table names, but then I started looking at it, and I have done a good amount to optimize the layout for my site. I can now style the whole cloud as well as each word. I think I will re-work the plugin to add two things: First, to add a time-based fading to the words I will modify the formatting to utilize a set scale of size and opacity. Second, I will implement time-based fading, which will cause the words to fade as they are not used (i.e. if I don’t write about Google for two weeks, then the Google keyword in the cloud fades out and eventually disappears). I think this will help with optimization of the analysis, too; it seems like it will slow things down as the site gets larger and larger unless there’s some kind of date-limit.

Like the headline says. I’m in-progress on a new version of ShawnRider.com which will unite my blogging habits with the stuff that’s already available. It should be amazingly wonderful. I’ve finally settled on WordPress for the site, which is so far working out very nicely. I am digging the PHP base of WordPress, and it’s amazing I haven’t heard more raves about it from friends. I can see already that the themes setup and whatnot is a bit wild — I’ve seen people doing things in a couple different ways already — but I like that it’s all so transparent and very easy to hack-in different elements.

I’ve already managed to accomplish a lot by just perusing existing plugins, and I’m well on my way to having this theme completely customized. I’ve already got the bulk of my construction working. I am very happy with things so far.