Mike Butcher

On Tuesday evening I met up with a guy I’d contacted online, Liam Casey, who runs Zed PR and Zeriously, a ’speed networking’ event along the lines of Ecademy and Ryze.org. Later we went to Renards, which is (I gather) one of the more exclusive clubs in Dublin, where the Corrs and Bono have a permanently reserved ’sofa area’. Needless to say they weren’t in, but the night was great fun all the same.

On Wednesday I had lunch with one of the few remaining contacts I have here, Damian Ryan, who started one of Ireland’s earliest Internet advertising companies and now runs an events and publishing company called Digital Media Intelligence and a consultancy called Perfect World.

As my friend Karlin Lillington (a tech journalist who writes for the Irish Times, among others) was out in the evening I went to ‘Bowling for Colombine’, an excellent documentary by Michael Moore, which has more or less totally changed my view of America, of which more later.

Karlin has been working on a great story about how the Irish government has been secretly planning to retain data on its citizens for far longer than has been mutually agreed by the majority of EU states. This is unusual given that Ireland has been more or less at the forefront of thinking about how to attract and develop e-business in the country.

This afternoon I’m off to the annual luncheon for the Irish Internet Association, which should be interesting. A minister is speaking and the ‘Net Visionary’ awards are being handed out.

Firstly, although Rev. plans to continue updating its site for news (as Media Guardian’s Owen Gibson confirms), it surely can’t justify the manpower investment without a weekly magazine to support it. Which means probably just a couple of hacks tapping out press-release re-writes to keep things ticking over. So which site will win the lion share of Rev’s existing traffic when it drops down a gear? NMA – an obvious choice – is known to be considering (if not already implementing) a redesign, because they conducted a survey recently. Then there is Netimperative which could benefit.

But the loser in this game could well be BrandRepublic which currently takes a feed from Rev. Suddenly they will find themselves having to work a whole lot faster to stay current in the new media space. Will they get an extra reporter over from Rev. which won’t need the staff of a news weekly anywore? Quite possibly.

Either way, it’s impossible to see where things stand or how they’ll change since hardly anyone seems to have an ABC Electronic certificate. Somewhat ironic after so much carping out other sites not having them…

At least we can rest in the knowledge that, as Rev’s own bulletin board The Wall attests, Handbag.com’s Nancy Cruikshank will now only get “10 major features and interviews a year…..anyone else need an inciteful exclusive!?”

The problem is down to the Internet’s success. The sheer weight of numbers online means that streaming audio and video using the paid-for, legitimate, server-driven likes of RealPlayer and MediaPlayer means greater costs for rights holders.

That RealNetworks is desperate to hack its way out of this problem was highlighted recently when the media leviathan released most of the source code to its software. The move is designed to make RealPlayer more robust and open to the cutting edge of the programming community, and allow it to extend more seamlessly into other environments like wireless.

But it’s physics not business which RealNetworks is competing with. During the past five years the client-server model, where more and more of the load is placed on the server, has been steadily growing. The result has been thinner and thinner clients and bulkier server software expected to do more and more.

The practical upshot of this is exactly what was highlighted on 11 September: the destruction of online media properties as vast audiences tried to log on for the latest information. As many of us found out at the time, it was email, which relies on a much more distributed architecture, which held up to the strain.

But Gartner Group argues that time is being called on the old client-server model. Two things will change the way we access online resources: Web services and P2P technologies. These will give rise to a heavier software client capable of more than the humble Web browser. Supporters call this the ‘rich client’, as opposed to the more inflammatory ‘fat client’.
The advent of the rich client concept has been prompted by the increasing weakness of HTML Web browsers. For a start, Web-based applications are unavailable when you’re disconnected from the Web; and second, cramming the browser with code to perform other functions leads to slower performance.

The solution is to store more of the logic and data needed for complex applications at the punters’ end, on the client platform. To supplement this code-crunching power, the client will dynamically draw in functionality from other servers or other clients which are inactive at that moment – exactly what file-sharing music at the moment is like.
And guess who has already started to incorporate P2P thinking into its future? Yes, Microsoft. Microsoft’s .Net framework and Windows XP see the client software not as a cast-in-stone package so much as a recent ‘cache’ of the latest code.

So what is RealNetworks going to do when someone comes up with a P2P technology that distributes streaming audio and video without recourse to its weighty server technology, which costs thousands to install and is liable to fall over whenever there’s a surge of traffic which exceeds its capabilities?

In London, four programmers have formed a small company to create a P2P software application to take on the likes of RealNetworks and Windows MediaPlayer. What they plan could be revolutionary: a distributed system for handling vast, live streaming Webcasts, with little or no latency, able to handle the largest audiences. They foresee Webcasts, with no bandwidth restraints, and up to 80% bandwidth savings.
It’s P2P technology that connects directly with other peers over protocols other than HTTP which looks like becoming the new software battleground.

Revolution’s last ABC figure (controlled circulation, which means largely ad-supported, not subscription) was 15,849. That’s roughly what it stuck at after the boom. New Media Age’s circulation is (as of June) 10,325, which is a lot less (and I think it’s dropped from the teens?), but then they charge

Possibly the same links: Interconnected

O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2003

Social_Software_seminar.txt

plasticbag same link? check

The event was BeyondBricks.com, the British government’s DTI-sponsored initiative to energise the flagging internet industry, and two sages of the London scene were holding forth.

The "Beyond Bricks" phrase refers to the term "clicks and mortar", coined to describe the marriage of the internet with traditional business. It was allegedly minted by Microsoft researcher Kevin Scholfield or David Pottruck, co-chief executive at Charles Schwab in 1999, depending on whether you fall into the techie or business camp.

Beyond Bricks is less about "clicks and bricks" than it is about the now rather out-of-fashion process of setting up pure internet companies. At the event were some very persistent entrepreneurs, battling against a battle-scarred investment community and the withering scepticism of swathes of now-unemployed dotcommers who bought into the dream. Where it used to be a case of the bright young things accelerating past traditional businesses, it’s now more a case of the slow old men filling the sneakers and chinos they left behind.

Jason George, the 30-something creative director of Brighton-based interactive firm Victoria Real, could still be considered a young man. Likewise Simon Waldman, head of the Guardian Unlimited websites. But at Beyond Bricks, they were lecturing a predominantly middle-aged business audience on such things as the future of wireless and the prospects for e-commerce.

Of course, age has nothing to do with it – both men have been working in the online industry since the early 1990s and have a wealth of experience. And there’s nothing unusual about middle-aged businessmen per se. But I did wonder what greying businessmen were doing at an event aimed at internet firms in a marketplace which these days has more in common with the 1930s mid-western dustbowl than the San Franciscan goldrush.

When I was rattling around London at the beginning of the millennium, it was almost impossible to find anyone in any position of importance over the age of 35. At the extremes were people like 17-year-old Benjamin Cohen, whose Jewishnet was once valued at