A gent named Jeff Albertini produced this great short video about the 2012 US National Curling Championships in Philadelphia:
Philly Curling Nationals 2012 Documentary Short from Jeff Albertini on Vimeo.
Nicely done!
April 10, 2012 archive
Apr 10
Would You Buy a ".blog" Domain Name?
.blog" for your blog site, would you buy one?
Over on Domain Incite, Kevin Murphy reports on the first applicant to publicly state that they are applying for ".blog" as part of the massive generic top-level domain (gTLD) expansion by ICANN. Murphy expects that ".blog" will probably be the most heavily contested new gTLD, meaning that multiple companies will be vying to be the registry for ".blog". He points out:
Media analysts NM Incite (great name) tracked 181 million blogs in 2011, up by about 25 million from 2010. A gTLD that could grab just 1% of that business would still be a nice little earner.
I'm not sure, myself. I remain rather skeptical that people will break out of their reliance on ".com" and go for all these other gTLDs. We've seen some of the existing gTLDs like ".biz" and ".pro" that haven't really gone anywhere. (In fact, the only .biz address I personally am aware of is the FIR podcast.)
Still, with a range of more gTLDs perhaps we finally will see people starting to use and accept other domain endings beyond .com/.org or the various country codes.
But would I register "danyork.blog"? or "disruptiveconversations.blog"?
Probably not, given that I already own the .com and .org variants on the names... although admittedly "danyork.blog" would be tempting purely because I do own .com/.org/.me/etc. and could see that one fitting in well with my "personal brand" online. Probably not for my other sites because I already have established names for them.
If I were crazy enough to start up another new blog, the ".blog" gTLD might be interesting... although to be honest I find the name "blog" to be a bit tired these days. I tend to talk more about my "sites" versus my "blogs" as the difference between what is considered a "blog" and what is considered a regular "web site" seems to get increasingly narrow. I'm not sure if I would want a new site to be labeled as a "blog".
What about you? If a ".blog" becomes available sometime in 2013, would you buy one?
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Apr 10
Want To Monitor the North American IPv6 Summit? Follow #NAv6Summit on Twitter
Would you like to track what is going on at the North American IPv6 Summit this week in Denver? If so, just follow the #NAv6Summit hashtag on Twitter. A number of people are tweeting out some of the major points and occasionally providing photos like this one:
As we noted yesterday, our Richard Jimmerson is there presenting today, in fact, as part of a panel about World IPv6 Launch.
Apr 10
An Excellent Collection of Node.js Links
Want to learn more about Node.js, a topic I’ve frequently written about here? If so, a friend recently pointed me to an excellent collection of Node.js-related links compiled by Stanislav Stoyanov:
(UPDATE 5 Mar 2013: It seems that the site may unfortunately no longer be available. In a quick search online I was unable to find any alternative sites hosting the document.)
It’s a great collection of companies, tools, games, platforms, frameworks and more all associated with Node.js. While Joyent also maintains a list of Node.js resources, this list from Stanislav Stoyanov contains many excellent pointers for those looking to learn more and get started with Node.js.
Great work!
Apr 10
Skype Hits 40 Million Simultaneous Users!
Congrats to the folks at Skype for hitting over 40 million concurrent users! Today at 2pm US Eastern when I typed "
/users" in any Skype chat on my Mac, I got this great message (Windows users should see the count in the lower left corner of the Skype client):
That's a pretty amazing milestone, given that some of us can remember back to when the concurrent user count was in the upper 20s (early 2011) or even way back to the earlier days when it was down in the low millions (2007). This time of day has historically been one of the highest times, so I expect that we'll see the count drop off for the remainder of the day and then hit this number again tomorrow around early afternoon US Eastern time.
Hudson Barton has an interesting trend chart showing the growth of Skype users over time:
The jump in the last quarter has been particularly dramatic - and probably has much to do with the expanded availability of Skype on smartphones and other devices.
Regardless of the reason, it's a rather amazing milestone. Congrats to the folks at Skype!
P.S. Skype now has a blog post up about this milestone as well.
UPDATE #1 - A couple of folks have asked about how Skype can have 40 million people online concurrently. The answer is that Skype uses a peer-to-peer (P2P) network architecture. I explained a bit of this back in November 2010 in "A Brief Primer on the Tech Behind Skype, P2PSIP and P2P Networks". Those of you seeking more info may find that post - and the related links - useful.
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Apr 10
Video: Here Comes Another Bubble (The Richter Scales)
After yesterday's news of Facebook's acquisition of Instagram for $1 billion USD, a friend pointed out that perhaps the only response is this video from The Richter Scales... :-)
Note - the "credits" page has some interesting links to follow.
