Monthly Archives: January 2009

Ryan Paul, via Ars Technica, highlights Mozilla’s $100,000 donation to its collaborative initiative with the Wikimedia Foundation to improve open standards-based technology for video on the web. Excerpt:

Open Web standards have evolved considerably over the years and browser compatibility is better than ever, but one important area where standards are just starting to catch up is support for streaming video. Proprietary browser plugins are used extensively across the web to play video from popular sites. This creates serious lock-in risk and gives proprietary software vendors like Adobe a lot of control over the medium.

… Mozilla and the Wikimedia Foundation have launched an initiative to help improve the quality of open, standards-based video technology.

Mozilla has given the Wikimedia Foundation a $100,000 grant intended to fund development of the Ogg container format and the Theora and Vorbis media codecs. These open media codecs are thought to be unencumbered by software patents, which means that they can be freely implemented and used without having to pay royalties or licensing fees to patent holders. This differentiates Ogg Theora from many other formats that are widely used today.

The Ogg development improvements will be coordinated by the Wikimedia Foundation. The organization uses Ogg for virtually all of its rich media, which makes it one of the largest open media format adopters on the Internet. In a statement published at the organization’s Web site, Wikimedia deputy director Erik Möller expressed his support for the initiative and explained that open formats are needed to ensure the availability of free content in unrestricted formats.

Ethan, via Netsquared, deliberates on the changes he anticipates to materialize in 2009: an increasing trend in online collaboration focusing not just on content, but form and functionality. Excerpt:

Communication on the web and evolving fast in diverse forms.  Collaboration, meanwhile, has fewer variants; it’s mostly about editing content together.  True, there are many ways to collaborate on content (simultaneous editors are making strides), the variety of content is growing beyond simple text (online spreadsheets are blossoming), and the great communication tools facilitate all sorts of collaboration at a distance.  But — with important exceptions like Second Life — when people are building things other than content, chances are the creation isn’t happening live on the web in the Wiki Way.

I think that will start to shift in 2009.   More and more people will collaborate on the web to cultivate not just content together, but also form and functionality.  Where teams now innovate locally and then promote their innovations online, they will increasingly do their creation together right on the web.  Our project Wagn (wiki on wheels), will take part in the shift, as will many other projects helping “content management” grow into “community creation.”  Web conference software will grow and flourish as cost-cutting companies look to improve collaboration at a distance, and virtual world partnerships will both broaden and deepen.

All this will be fueled – as usual – by finding ways to make scary things less scary.  Wikis knocked many steps out of the process of publishing and linking content.  The same simplification is awaiting us for data structures, design, and even programming.

Trickier than the tools is building understanding of collaborative processes.  2009 will show us some new ones, but it will only be the beginning.

ComsScore Inc, a pioneer in measuring progress in the digital world,  announced the latest results, based on data from its World Metrix audience measurement service. Snippets:

Total global Internet audience (age 15 and older from home and work computers) has surpassed 1 billion visitors in December 2008.

The Asia-Pacific region accounted for the highest share of global Internet users at 41 percent, followed by Europe (28 percent share), North America (18 percent share), Latin-America (7 percent share), and the Middle East & Africa (5 percent share).

The most popular property in the world in December was Google Sites, with 777.9 million visitors, followed by Microsoft Sites (647.9 million visitors), Yahoo! Sites (562.6 million visitors). Facebook.com, which has grown a dramatic 127-percent in the past year to 222 million visitors, now ranks as the top social networking site worldwide and the seventh most popular property in the world.  [Wikimedia Foudnation sites were visited by 272,998 visitors]