ISP's Happy with Telecom Peering Proposal

It seems that at least one of Telecom's proposals has been greeted positively by the ISP community. Telecoms plan for regional peering would set up 29 regional peering points to ensure that local Internet traffic stays within New Zealand.

There is no current peering agreement between the major New Zealand ISP's after they stopped peering at Internet exchanges in 2004. This means that traffic generated within New Zealand can sometimes still be routed through international links, having a real effect to broadband capacity in an already under performing infrastructure.

Hopefully this is a only one of many positive steps between Telecom and ISP's on the road to LLU?

Pay-For-Blog Site...Is it Kosher?

Associated Content is a user driven site that allows bloggers to write articles and get paid for it. Online content is the major component of any good site and Associated Content have seen a market for licensing content to online publishers.

However, issues have been raised about the style of the content that is been generated by Associated Contents' bloggers. Instead of quality articles, the content has been described as "made for marketing"; written specifically for its advertising-value as opposed to its value for site users. This is probably valid given that the amount each blogger gets paid is dependent on how well their articles "perform", viz. how much revenue it generated via Googles' Adwords.

Questions have also been raised about a potential conflict of interest for one of the Associated Content board members, Tim Armstrong - he also works for search engine giant Google. Working for both Google and a company that makes money from a Goggle service is not illegal, but is it perhaps a little dodgy? Does Tim Armstrong have unfair advantage over other companies that look to make money from Google services? Surely he is the best person to make money from Google if he works there too?

Less Content Is More

It seems that researchers have determined that when providing content choice to users, less really is more. The study found that when provided with a list of options, in this case it was pictures, online users were able to better focus when provided with a smaller number of options. When presented with a small number of pictures - 6 - as opposed to a larger number - 24 - the test subjects were found to recall the pictures with greater accuracy.

So it seems that all those news sites that try and cram more and more on the front page have been going the wrong way.

The Future of the Web

An interesting interview with Tim Berners-Lee, the "creator" of the World Wide Web (WWW), discusses how he sees the world wide web evolving. Berners-Lee gives good examples of some of the more abstract concepts and specifically discusses the difference between the currently hot term web 2.0 and his own future vision of the world wide web, which he calls the semantic web. In a nutshell the semantic web is defined by Berners-Lee:

The Semantic Web is about putting data files on the Web. It's not just a Web of documents but also of data. The Semantic Web of data would have many applications to connect together. For the first time there is a common data format for all applications, for databases and Web pages.

These are some fairly exciting prospects...now someone just needs to figure out how to do it - luckily Berners-Lee mentioned that he is part of a research group at MIT which is developing systems that may be able to achieve these lofty goals.

The article also touches on many other aspects of the Internet such as net neutrality and future Internet governance as well as a quick reflection from Berners-Lee's regarding his time at CERN.