Data Knowledge Center published a post this morning titled Slashdot Down. At the time of this writing, Slashdot had returned to the scene but surely frustrated readers had already felt their frustration and had begun venting their fury.

The outage was confirmed by Netcraft who indicated the problem occurred not only on Slashdot but also on the source code repository SourceForge.net, software release site Freshmeat and merchandise supplier ThinkGeek. All of Sourceforge.net’s sites are hosted by Savvis.

If you don’t believe in coincidence, Savvis shares are down $4.52 to $14.16 a share, a loss of 24 percent from yesterday.

Data Knowledge Center published a post today titled Velocix Accelerator Offers Free CDN Service and my first thought is what’s the catch?

Maybe it’s because I’m older that I have such cynicism but things are really free are there? I mean, I still believe in the saying that there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

Personally, I’m going to take them up on it and check them out!

Bryan Gardiner from Wired wrote a post titled Broadband 2.0 Poised to Reshape Web, TV that speaks of the coming 50-100mbps opening us up to the realm of jitter-free hi-def videos.

First, the consequences of this on television, as we now know it, could be a mind blower. I think about this and my brain starts spinning with thoughts of interactive television and how this could quickly easily affect everything from American Idol to The Biggest Loser. Think about those stupid reality shows…

Next, when we think of the web, the plot thickens. How much greater would be the divide between the haves and the have nots? Think of all the online applications that now are acceptable, then will be like it’s sitting on your desktop. Zero latency, zero load times.

As with salary, I’m sure we will rise to our potential and soon develop something that will not only use all that available bandwidth but, even more.

Data Center Knowledge wrote a post titled $461 Million for Online Video Startups in 2007 that struck me as good news this morning.

Amid troubles in the country with the economy, skyrocketing gas prices, and the credit crunch - optimism still prevails, at least in our industry. When there’s money to made and blood in the water it seems like almost everyone is willing to jump and get into the frenzy.

So why are investors willing to part with almost a half billion dollars for someone’s dreams? Simple. ROI. While I would concentrate on the failures, I believe that you’re going to see quite a few successes this year. So you think the YouTube/Google conglomerate has got a stranglehold on things? I think not. There’s so much more out there and the companies that are finding those niches and the technology innovators are destined for glory.

What will 2008 bring? When we reflect upon what was accomplished in 2008 I believe we’ll be satisfied with the work we’ve done but I think that 2008 will be judged more conservatively than 2007 since the economic troubles are making everyone tighten their belts and the demand for visible ROI strengthen. 2008 has been and will be a great year for the industry and everything it touches (CDN, Data centers).

EPISODE TWO
The ladies have competition from an out-sourced suicide hotline. Randy struggles with her Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. A prank caller takes a bite out of Pear. Heather might have a bun-in-the-oven.

Ben Homer wrote a post titled Mobile Advertising is So Ghetto and while I may not understand the title of the post I do understand the content.

Watch out kiddies, more ads are coming your way and now they’re headed to your cell phone. Gone are the days when a phone was a phone. Now our phone is a text communications tool, a full-fledged PDA and an internet browser. We’re Dick Tracy (or Capt. Kirk, whichever is your preference) walking around with our Bluetooth headsets, about to bombarded with yet more advertising coming our way via our cell.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been in the online industry since 1988 (anybody remember BBSs?) so I understand that the need to monetize any property is necessary for survival and I also understand that, although the internet was purely utopian at the beginning, those days are long past and we’ve gotten over it.

But please… ads coming to my cell? This is akin to a man knocking on my bathroom door asking to demonstrate air freshener (for me to purchase, of course). Is no place sacred? I feel the answer is, that we can run from the marketing mavens but we can never hide.

This guy’s a lot more optimistic on Silverlight than I am but it’s worth reading and he hits a lot of different areas. Not just flex, but also how it supposedly hooks into CDN and online video.

http://charlesjeter.com/2008/01/05/adobe-flex-vs-microsoft-silverlight-part-1/

As Akamai continues it’s legal onslaught (Read Dan Rayburn’s article Latest Update On Akamai/Limelight Patent Suit and Potential Limelight Sale to get up to speed on the latest) and another victim falls to a patent suit, one has to wonder what the heck is going on out there in CDN land.

It seems that Akamai, for all of it’s supposed glory, is running rampant and like it or not, it’s winning. Pardon me, I always root for the underdog. Because normally that’s where innovation comes from.

Check this out:
The suit asserted that Limelight was infringing on Akamai’s patent which, upon examination, seems to be somewhat on the obvious side. ‘In accordance with the invention, however, a base HTML document portion of a Web page is served from the Content Provider’s site while one or more embedded objects for the page are served from the hosting servers, preferably, those hosting servers near the client machine. By serving the base HTML document from the Content Provider’s site, the Content Provider maintains control over the content.’
(from Slashdot http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/02/1831240&from=rss )

Now this basically could describe almost any CDN regardless of the technology employed. IMHO, it’s a real shame that such a patent was granted on this but, then again, I guess it’d be different if I were the owner and got to throw my weight around. Let’s just say though that Akamai was the only game in town (no boys and girls, that’s NOT really true, ok?) where does that leave innovators who want want to approach things differently? What if you were an employee who had a different vision but your way lost out in some conference room one day?

Personally, I think this is putting a patent on a search engine that says “provide searchable list of other websites”. This definition is too broad, lacking in sufficient detail of the technology, and is overall bad for business and the future of the internet.

Welcome to the future of online video: With the rush to monetize every freaking thing our eyeballs make contact with, prepare yourself for pre-rolls, mid-rolls, and post-rolls well… till your eyes roll in the back of your head. At least emails from the wife don’t contain ads…oh yeah she’s on Yahoo! Mail so there goes that one too…

Adap.tv Launches First Open and Universal Online Video Advertising Platform: Adap.tv OneSource
SAN MATEO, Calif., April 22 /PRNewswire/ — Adap.tv, a leading provider of contextual advertising for online video, today launched Adap.tv OneSource, the first open and universal video ad platform. Adap.tv OneSource empowers publishers to add, configure, and optimize video advertising across virtually all ad sources and all formats using sophisticated technology and a simple, single interface.

Dan Rayburn brings up some excellent points in Amazon Slowly Turning Into A CDN For Video and you need to read the Wired article on Cloud Computing he mentions.

The points he brings up, makes one question what really constitutes a CDN? There are certain features that are inherent with a CDN but when are we providing a CDN and when are we just replicating and caching? Does that qualify one’s service offerings then as a CDN?

I guess the really scary part of this is that with the deep pockets of an Amazon.com, can the entire landscape of CDN providers as we know them change and go from unknowns to household names. Anyone who is near the bleeding edge knows CDN is our pathway to the future. Without CDN, large sites brimming with rich media and video laden cannot survive their own success.

http://blog.streamingmedia.com/the_business_of_online_vi/2008/04/amazon-slowly-t.html
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-05/mf_amazon