Five years ago this January, I wanted to solve a personal problem: finding events I cared about and sharing them with my friends. Nine months later, Upcoming.org popped out and changed my life forever.
After five years of working on Upcoming and two years after its acquisition, I’m moving on. This Friday is my last official day as a Yahoo!, after which I’ll go back to being a lowercase yahoo.
I started this blog five years ago today with a basic idea: keep it original and keep it relevant. Unfortunately, I left out “keep it updated.” As you can probably tell, Waxy is taking the back seat these days to other priorities, namely work and family. (I don’t even have the time to weed out comment spam.) I terribly miss the quirky form of investigative reporting I used to do and I certainly miss spending more time exploring the backroads of the web. I promise I’ll be back. In the meantime, the infrequent updates continue. Happy birthday, little blog!
By now, everyone knows that Twitter exploded at SXSW and everybody’s seen the Alexa charts. But this is mostly a mobile app, so pageview traffic is only part of the story. How fast is Twitter really growing?
I decided to find out by using Twitter’s founder Evan Williams himself, albeit indirectly. Since Ev’s Twitter history goes from message #28 in March 2006 to #8,281,991 about three hours ago, it’s a convenient snapshot of Twitter’s growth since it began. Update: The data from November 2006 to present is faulty, since they apparently switched to non-sequential IDs. More information below.
I threw it all in Excel and charted the sequential IDs and dates for each of Ev’s 1,226 messages. The moment SXSW started, Twitter’s growth curve changed radically and hasn’t slowed down. (The huge orange bar for March is only half the month.) But more interesting to me are two other dates: November 23, when Twitter’s growth rate sped up drastically and then on February 5, when the rate seriously slowed. Are there problems with my data? If so, I can’t find it. If you have any sense of what triggered those changes, please comment and let me know.
To help with your search, and any other visualization, I’ve posted the full Excel spreadsheet with inline charts and tables. Enjoy!
Note! The last three are cumulative charts, not month-to-month growth numbers. That means there were not 8 million messages sent this month, but 8 million total since Twitter started.
Update: Jason and I just discovered that the IDs since November 2006 have not been sequential, rendering these charts useless. The jumps in activity were largely artificial. Jason has more information.
For the last few years, the movie industry’s battles with Internet pirates offered an entertaining diversion during Oscar season. Their problem: they need to “leak” their films to Academy members for consideration, but don’t want those official leaks to fall into the hands of pirates. In 2003, the MPAA banned all screeners, causing a massive uproar from directors, actors, critics and indie studios. The plan was eventually scrapped in December 2003, but they stepped up their legal efforts, using encoded watermarks to bust 70-year-old character actor Carmine Caridi and a “piracy ring” of three employees of a post-production shop for distributing screeners.
Since then, they’ve tried other approaches, from sophisticated watermarks to shipping out custom DRM-laden DVD players. In 2004, a company named Cinea spent $5 million distributing custom DVD players to Academy and BAFTA members with very mixed results. Lately, it seems the new strategy is to stop trying. Maybe the industry is finally realizing that the best way to get recognized is for people to see your movie, despite the risk of piracy. For example, Munich was very likely snubbed for a British Oscar nomination in 2005 because the screeners were late and defective. The best case study is Lionsgate’s promotion of Crash vs Disney’s Cinea-encrypted screeners:
In a way, Lionsgate’s strategy was the opposite of Disney’s. While the indie sent its film to as many voters as possible, upping the odds copies could be pirated, the Mouse House focused on minimizing piracy, with the result that at least 26% of Oscar voters didn’t watch its screeners.
The outcome: Crash shocked the world by winning Best Picture over the favored Brokeback Mountain, while Disney only got Best Makeup for The Chronicles of Narnia.
After the MPAA decided to ban all screeners in 2003, I started tracking the distribution of Oscar screeners online to see how effective their ban was. I found that screeners for all but one of the 22 nominated films were leaked. I followed up the following year, but took a break last year. So, how did they fare this year?
I researched every nominated film, excluding the documentary and foreign film categories. Out of those 34 films:
Some notes on terminology: A cam is a low-quality bootleg, usually filmed with a camcorder inside a theater. The next level up is a telesync, which has a direct audio feed to match the low-quality movie footage. A screener is the holy grail — a (generally) high-quality promotional video for industry insiders only, including the Academy members that pick the Oscar winners.
Also, for some films, the retail DVDs were released before October, rendering the scene’s screener release pointless. This is almost certainly why Thank You for Smoking and Pirates of the Caribbean never saw a screener leak.
If you notice any other interesting trends in the data, or want to poke holes in my analysis, feel free to add a comment and I’ll post updates.
The full results are below. Click on any date to view the NFO file for that particular release. Click the photo icon to see a screen capture for each video, where available, so you can compare the quality for yourself.
In yesterday’s New York Times, Tom Zeller writes about Internet access in North Korea, touching on their almost non-existent web presence. Among the tiny handful of official sites mentioned is the Korea Computer Centre’s Naenara (or “My Country”) — the nation’s official portal. Hosted in Germany and translated into a number of languages, it’s a very entertaining glimpse into the public exterior of the DPRK.
In addition to being a mouthpiece for national propaganda and a free e-mail provider, they also have an unusual and quirky web-based store. Aside from the usual books, CDs, and software (?), they offer an entire section of both cell phone ringtones (“handphone melodies”) and wallpaper (“characters”). (Cell phones are banned in North Korea, so these must be designed for sympathizers outside of the country.)
The wallpapers section is particularly good. For only US$0.50, you could have an animated caricature of George W. Bush as a panting dog with American flag necktie. Or head to page two for delightful animations of burning American flags, giant fists crushing the White House, or what appears to be an American soldier with a missile embedded in his chest, sulking dejectedly to a graveyard. They take Mastercard and Visa, so buy now!
I couldn’t read the ringtone pages, but let me know if one of them has the melodious voice of Kim Jong Il. (I’d take that over Fergie any day.)
Oh, and they have really, really great error messages. If you try to link directly to any of their images (like this one), you get this error: “You are fool!”
