heianblog

2007-02-13T21:40:00.000-08:00

Government categorizations - .gov extension; supported by tax dollars; departments/agencies; policy briefings; on local level provides links to community resources, contacts, etc. - serves as information resource; safety/emergency alerts

www.cityofseattle.gov - offers several links to local community resources; has directory listings and information on policy

www.whitehouse.gov - provides public service links; information directories by issue/dept.

www.irs.gov - documentation; federal resources for processes

2007-02-13T17:02:00.000-08:00

I reviewed THE DESIGN OF SITES by Douglas Van Duyne, James Landay, and Jason Hong at the recommendation of Dr. Gill for a text assessing web site genres. The book took it several steps further than what I was expecting in terms of web classifications and offered a complete profile of what they listed as 'patterns' - observable trends in web design that should be followed to lay the foundations for successful sites. The rules they prescribed, while perhaps achievable instinctively, are excellent prescriptions for what otherwise may be neglected in the early-advanced development stages. Like our inclass text, it strongly emphasizes user-centric design and offers several tips relating from page layouts, navigation, searching, writing & managing content, and e-commerce. The authors are keenly of the 'usability' camp and arguably pay 'design' attention only insofar as to express how valuable it is on a homepage (i.e. first impression) and its role in site branding. The text is a terrific comprehensive resource for all stages of site planning and implementation, but it offers little in the way of innovation.

http://students.washington.edu/lheian/book_review/

2007-02-04T18:15:00.000-08:00

Group 3 Discussion_

Within our group, I focused on "Cognitive Psychology & IA: From Theory to Practice". The article strives to conjoin the (perhaps) not so immediately similar schools of cognitive psychology with information architecture and, I believe, succeeds insofar as that it successfully communicates interactive behaviors with the web should take cues from our real life interactions with actual environments.

Along cognitive lines, the article discusses mental category as a tool information architects can use to unite otherwise dissimilar groups of information by way of patterned commonalities or categories. The predominant challenge here is described as the process of categorization itself. Consider the nav bar for Amazon.com. If you wanted to search for the new Nike iPod shoe, would you be more likely to search under 'athletic gear' or 'electronics'? Be as broad in categories as possible without limiting the user in presented information. Cognitive/IA relationships are also discussed in terms of memory - limit nav bar items to a succinct amount and create layouts that are easily scannable and provide quick information retrieval. Furthermore, our brains naturally are inclined to stick with one topic and explore it. IA architects would best follow suite and structure information accordingly - providing links to related content the further users delve into the site. Finally, transference is discussed as the online mind's instinct to expect sites to function in certain ways based off of its experience with other sites. Employ cues, styles, and patterns that are easily recognizable in web culture. Don't break the mold insofar as to turn off or confuse your audience. Use their expectations to your advantage.

The science of laying out information in a manner corresponding to our natural habits of interaction. Simple things like following horizontal/vertical cues that our minds naturally respond due in laying out grids, starting search tools and nav bars at the top left corner of the screen where our eyes naturally start first to read.

2007-01-30T19:15:00.000-08:00

From the homepage, I went to 'projects' in the upper right nav bar. I first went to 'Experience Design' first. It looked like it MIGHT contain videos in an option that wasn't immediately obvious. I explored a bit through hyperlinks and found nothing. I backed out to the homepage and tried 'Identity' with the exact same results. The web browser back button also sent me back to the course homepage where the hyperlink originated each time.

I finally tried the third option down - Interactive. Exploring, I lucked out with the first hyperlink I found and located the web videos for Honda. Probably twelve or so clicks total until I found the webvid page. The layout is very confusing in that the remainder of their project pages

The second task was easier. I was tempted to click on 'Company' but chose 'Contact' and was presented with the list of options to where their stateside offices were. I chose the New York office and was taken to mapquest, where a map was not immediately available, but rather the address to the location - this is where the error occurred. I went to 'map this location' and finally saw the map.

Gestalt would have a fit with this. The homepage alone places the most emphasis on their featured video projects, and less emphasis on their primary navigation bar. The navigation bar is small text in the upper right of the corner (it is not the first place the avg person starts to look) and appears as a sub-menu to the site.

The actual submenus were also not clearly distinguished from each other in terms of easily identifiable genres. It would've helped to have visual icons to compensate for this.

The news section had the appearance of an undeveloped page. The link icons were blurred (of course which clear when the cursor hovers over them). And the fact that text doesn't appear until that point was frustrating. This means you have to hover over each icon in order to browse to get to the story that you want. They appear grouped randomly with no discernable genres to them.

In text pages, there was a great waste of visual space throughout. Users are prompted to scroll down constantly when it is unnecessary (and the scroll bar doesn't work very well.)

2007-01-16T21:35:00.000-08:00

http://www.peekvid.com/

This is suggestion is a bit biased toward the students who were in digital streaming course over the summer, but this is a very straightforward site that offers a large library of (albeit non-licensed) on-demand video content. The overall layout of the site is quite simple and very straightforward and emphasizes little else than the content itself. Individual files aren't organized in a very efficient way, so I think we could improve on something like this. But there are enough ppl in the class with experience in video compression, and I imagine it wouldn't be that hard to figure how to upload video files to a remote site.

http://www.refugeestories.org/

The second is a fairly simple but moderately well-organized collection of refugee stories, interviews, and other profiles regarding global refugee plights and survival stories. The flash animation is going to be beyond our level, but I think it incorporates a good use of pics and content that is achievable. I would hope we would be beyond even this level in 5 months' time, but I think it is a safe bet we can accomplish something like this.

2007-01-16T19:27:00.000-08:00

'Rethinking Goals' (revised)

It's easy to confine goals to the personal level, but this course is more about team coordination than I had really anticipated. I can definitely see knowing how to navigate team flows, expressly in terms of web development, as a highly relevant skill set in the Seattle area. Along those lines, I would consider more relevant goals to be site planning (gathering input from the team and structuring a well-established foundation for a site), complementation (if that's a word?) - (publishing visual/text content that flows well together and is effectively coordinated by a team) and coordinated site maintenance/editing.

I would consider graphic design and copy writing to be my strongest assets - and the ones I would be the most comfortable contributing work to a team. I am only just starting to learn Dreamweaver, so I would prefer not to be responsible for local/remote site maintenance and technical adjustments.

2007-01-16T18:52:00.000-08:00

'A Virtual Project'

The benefits of an all – distance work group for such a scenario is that those inputting the content are forced to think in a frame of mind that, ideally, benefits web interaction, ultimately. They are forced to consider people “outside the room”, whereas a physically-proximate work group may fall privy to thinking ‘locally’ and thus introduce a different design and functionality impact on the site itself. Another advantage, if this is to be an employee-wide website, is that it guarantees a diversity in corporate representation and interest across the company’s theatre of operations. Say, for example, Amazon.com sought a dramatic re-invention of its e-commerce site and the work team consisted only of developers native to the Seattle office. User interaction habits on the East Coast or Deep South may be paid significantly less attentions in the early development stage and would possibly result in a site that may have a fine local, regional appeal but perhaps less utility in other parts of the country/globe. Disadvantages count as coordination challenges, regional time zones, communication flows, and general site interaction. In such a situation, it is absolutely vital to have a project manager who can oversee all aspects of site development and serve as the core source of information and direction for an otherwise segregated, disparately focused team.

“We-ness” is especially difficult to accommodate over the web, though it would be assumed that the team members bring a certain degree of experience with online task forcing. I would most likely incorporate a combination of all available web technologies to facilitate as close to personable interaction as possible, at least in the early development stage. Combinations of tools such as Live Meeting, teleconferences, and video conferences (if accessible) would be employed to introduce the work group to each other and during staged demonstrations of site progress. More novel approaches like ‘Second Life’ meetings most likely wouldn’t serve as substantive development devices, but would do much to foster engagement and interest in the project at hand.

2006-11-06T23:52:00.000-08:00

'Communities in Cyberspace' alluded to the notion that online communities and the emerging means by which to engage them are offering sensory experiences so advanced that it is difficult to distinguish user behavior here apart from that of the 'real world'. Second Life is one such MUD - growing considerably in popularity and hosted features.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=synxFmQJ_0A"

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6431819

The above links provide video and audio insights to the advantages and appeal of Second Life. It is a 3D virtual reality platform founded by Linden Labs and former RealNetworks CTO Philip Rosedale. Hearkening greatly to Keller & Smith's discussion concerning extended 'identity' (those who opt for digital interpretations of their 'real' selves or go for more egotistic interpretations), Second Life users can choose their appearance and are given tools to alter and interact with the virtual world around them. A network community, it operates and evolves independently of any one user. Fluid (or dynamic) access as such is representative of the progressively dominant real time forums that are emerging - echoing real life as synchronous worlds of their own.

In the discussion of gender and racial issues, I thought the complexity of those issues, in terms of digital extensions, owe much to the choices that users are presented with. Users in Second Life can follow more real world confines in the creation of their digital self : choosing between man and woman, African American and Asian, etc. Or they can create fantastic creatures and characters entirely unavailble in reality. This forum hosts both dominant emergent viewpoints as to how cyberspace should be engaged.

Keller & Smith noted the impact of cyberspace onto the 'real world' when discussing political activism. Second Life offers perhaps an even more tangible avenue for this, as users accumulate 'points' which are convertible to actual cash. In effect, you can run a virtual business (selling property, virtual goods, rights, etc.) and reap real monetary profits. One can even create a virtual mockup of a real world conference room and run an actual PowerPoint presentation that you've created to show to your coworkers.

It also offers a prime example of the ultimate 'culture layer' : a digital replica interface of actual buildings, people, parks, streets, etc, as well as a truly interactive and randomly accessible new media portal, suggested in Principles of New Media as two of the definers of the title's name topic. In Principles, VR auteur Jaron Lanier suggested virtual reality will void the need for language-based and symbol-based communication.

2006-10-30T18:45:00.000-08:00

Week 5 - The World is Flat : Flatteners 3 & 4 (for Group 2) @H-H@!

I'm prompted to wonder if Kathy's choice of divvying up Chapte 2 between groups is to see if we would all merge upon the same interpretation of Friedman's 'flat world'. He seems to be rather fanatic in sporting his personal terminology all over the text...and in cascadingly context-savy circumstances wherein you might think you hadn't a clue what the hell he meant unless you'd read chapter 1 word for word. Still, he's very good with the prose. And his definitions aren't too hard to deduce. From his anecdote about Wild Brain's production M.O, the flat world looks to be the connected world - able to support simultaneous collaboration and offer access and input to multiple participants. All on the same plane, I suppose, which is perhaps why Friedman chose the visual analogy that he did. In his covering of the 'flows of revolution', that he highlights the 'grassroots' dynamics of connectivity as the primary molder of web innovation. Subscriber demand cast Netscape into new roles that it certainly hadn't originated for. The hallmarks he notes are of the ones involving major steps away from physical necessity. The integration of the PC and email, editable digital content, and standardized digital protocols - all burgeoners of multilateral innovation. Ultimately, Friedman's FLATNESS is digital SEAMLESSNESS.

"Once a standard takes hold, people start to focus on the quality of WHAT they are doing as opposed to HOW they are doing it," Friedman prescribes. TOO TRUE! I'd never really taken the same realization before. Digital innovation seems to come around in such cycles : development, competition, standardization, innovation, saturation, development, compe-... etc, etc. Of course, the ultimate is to have a proprietary standard, owing much to the examples of eBay's acquisition of PayPal and Mac's iTunes among others.

The flattened world is the geek's heyday. Shareware, digital art, blogs, wikipedia...with no commercial intermediaries, the digital ether now offers art for art's sake and logic for logic's sake via the UPLOAD, which seems to be sufficing as the ultimate market equalizer now that the market is digital. Cultivated by communities, uploading spurs a tremendously positive force for creative multiplicity and allows a higher degree of conceptual diversity than ever would have been offered in a top-down-only medium. But he goes on to follow open source software, Wikipedia, and blogging/podcasting, and each of the three have their share of things to apologize for.

It seems self defeating to employ open source as a standard. I don't know enough about programming languages to anticipate the difficulties, but if independent parties are augumenting original open source code and releasing it into the market for free in return, doesn't the standard deviate from itself? The regulation of open source software seems to be the patch system (almost viral sounding from Friedman's Behlendorf | Apache story).

I think the bottom-up approach to innovation works best with his account of Wikipedia. Viral information sharing. And the standard being balanced as a reflection of content edits. I hadn't really realized that anyone can edit any Wikipedia entry. And I'm surprised that more entries aren't radically changed on a continuing basis, what with all the connected anarchists out there. What else interested me was his description of uploading as a means of intercultural communication. A sort of digital play pen where we are all happy to share each other's toys and it would be considered rude to charge our friends to use them. Is the Internet's inherently community-based design at eternal conflict with the top-down mode of control? Top-down excludes participation. It relies on passivity. And Friedman seems to think that day is nearing an end. The new user is interactive and expects the digital liberties to do so.

2006-10-24T00:20:00.000-07:00

Week 4 - One of Bush's keenest apologies for science and technology is that information is now to be passed on through the life of a race rather than an individual human being. It is the vastness of available information and the task to review it in a manner befitting any legitimate benefit that he proposes as the ultimate challenge. Is the Internet Bush's ideal solution? Or his worst nightmare? All the vast amounts of data Bush describes is readily accessible. But it is precisely because of the Internet that there is now far more than even Bush seemed to have anticipated.

The obstructions Bush addresses are refined to the physical, particularly in his descriptions of the progression of photography, calculating machines, typewriters. And in terms of cost, he didn't correctly anticipate that this would be passed onto the consumer regardless of material production. The market has evolved to assign majority value to the cognitive and less to the physical necessity of access, as there is barely any anymore.

I saw a video interview on cnn the other day with steve wozniak. he had a small black box and pressed a button and a laser - projected, fully functioning keyboard appeared on the desk in front of him. I'd heard they were working on this for screens as well. I think ICT, or at least the access to it, will become more and more removed from the dependence on physical access - something Bush prognosticated as imaging/compression/storage increase in efficiency and decrease in size. With the more availability of information, information itself will become less valuable though.

In terms of long range technology, society gravitates toward uniform formats and diverse technologies. As a rule, we do not like proprietary formats (although Apple and others have proven that wrong on several occasions). And as interactivity becomes even more of a defining measure of ICT in the future, it will be necessary for survival. But it will also become the most challenging. Innovation for next gen technology looks to be pursuing points of divergency.

2006-10-17T15:48:00.000-07:00

Week 3 - It's rather amazing to read the bit-by-bit innovations regarding the ultimate development of the telephone and how both one-upsmanship, collaboration, and exploratory integration of existing discoveries on the part of the tech-savvy "illuminati" of that day moved things forward. The propellant of transmitting sound electrically seemed to stem from the raw concept that speech is vibration - what can be oscillated naturally could be reproduced electrically. It seems science of the day regarded the possibility as mythical - Bell was working against both the challenge of telephony but also industry-wide downlooking. Also interesting is the notion that Bell's patent was based off of an undeveloped model : a gamble off of the guarantee that superior technology would inevitably be produced along those lines later. Is the race for technological innovation still following the same trends today? The race to control the industry between National Bell, Edison, Western Union followed invention faster than I ever realized...with that the quickness through which the telephone sufficed as an entertainment and news 'broadcast' medium, i.e. the technology allowed user to message reception for special events. Once released, the exploratory stage of the market plays a powerful motivator in the direction technology is to proceed.

'Supervening necessity' comes across as a recognized industrial, social, or consumer need for an alterier application of a technology other than was originally intended. The Internet itself suffices as a prime example of this, originating as a military communications and file access network, later broadened and augmented to the average user's whims. The concept alludes that technological success (in terms of widespread integration and use) is beholden to the needs of the market far more than the wants of the inventor.

U&G
The concept of uses and gratifications sounds very much derived from the microeconomist's standpoint: if you can predict the habits of ISP users and understand what they respond to, you can tailor your branding to their needs. U&G explains motivations and continued use and is thus very useful for tech developers seeking long term consumership, brand loyalty, etc. Because of the multitude of user interests and uses for the Internet itself, methodology as such is an absolute necessity. ISP users who log onto cnn.com every day may not necessarily visit ebay.com. The variancies of the Internet's audience, as a digital forum, necessitate U&G if you are to enter the market via the medium. In regards to U&G for our research projects, I have a difficult time imagining how it might relate to my topic of ICTs for Development, considering my area of focus is the most barren areas of the digital divide and do not approach the Internet in nearly the same capacity (if they approach it at all). But in the areas where supporting Internet infrastructures do exist and it claims some part of daily life, it may hold true in these areas as well.

2006-10-09T22:00:00.000-07:00

Winston - Hmm, the first couple pages have me a little skeptical, I have to admit. So far, Winston is out to suggest that we are NOT in the middle of an Information Revolution, and it comes across as shock-value academics rather than sincere scholarship. He also uses words that my English professor expressly told me to avoid, lest I give the reader the impression I'm trying to impress them with style and not substance. Hopefully I'm wrong here.

What is good to note is the development of digital communication potential in direct development with the understanding of electricity itself. It's odd to consider the telegraph wasn't the first exploration of remote electric communication. I'd never even heard of the 'galvanometer' until this reading.

Necessity prompts invention. The railways, and the danger involved in sending communication, prompted the telegraph? Maybe this section sets the precedent for patterns of invention. Widespread need + available technology + existing infrastructure = invention.

Little innovations can affect for drastic format changes. The technology involved in Morse

Interesting to note the perception of electric communication being presented on such a raw spectrum of 'good & evil', by the US Postal Office no less. But strange to note that the telegram's potential wasn't instantly recognized on a widespread level.

2006-07-18T09:45:00.000-07:00

Class 8-DRM ah-ha : I've been thinking about it since Thursday, and I honestly I can't really remember an instance where I've run into a DRM/incompatibility problem myself. At least with streaming media...Hmm, makes me wonder if I heard the blog assignment correctly or not. I donno. I've run into the Regional coding issue for DVD, when I've come back from Thailand a few times and it's coded on Region 3(?) I think. In terms of paying for streaming material, the only problem I've had is when I paid for a Charlie Rose interview on Google Video, and its encoded in a non-standard format, it looks like. Didn't play on my home computer. But still, for the most part, most everything I've experienced works as expected.

I know there are incompatabilities out there. It's a fine line: to allow your product to play on the competition's platform verses strictly on your own. Basically, if companies want to allow easier access to their product, they're going to have to give up some control. It gets more complicated the more 'digital and ethereal' audio & video get. They're no longer 'tangible' products anymore, really. But people are starting to expect fluidity between systems as a given this day in age. The BluRay HDDVD war is sure to have a winner. Uniformity in IT is becoming more and more of a necessity.

2006-07-13T10:07:00.000-07:00

Class 7, Thu July 13 - Maybe pointing out the obvious is actually helpful from time to time. When Wootten noted a handicap of embedded players being that it prevents you from browsing to other pages, it occurred to me that this had never occurred to me. I donno. For whatever, reason I like the embedded player...probably for aesthetic reasons. It makes the page more fluid and if you WANT your audience to not stray from the video, it probably is the best way to go. But I thought it was helpful that Wootten outlined the advantages/disadvantages of embedded vs. separate.

Gosh, I think I would go insane being a coder. I'd probably have to be insane to be a coder, for that matter. -Probably appreciate RealNetworks' metafiling system the most, as it's a straightforward playlist of URLs. All the little details between media player library commands are nuts, and I can see how it would be somewhat tempting to stick with one media player format and get accustomed to it if you do a great deal of code-level work. I wonder if anyone else is noticing that the text in Wootten is starting to look like one long HTML string. But the embedding command distinctions are helpful, insofar as I always wondered how that is achieved.

I really enjoyed the chapter on mobile video. It's going to be really interesting to see how that takes off and how it changes the design of 3G units. Leaps and bounds are gonna have to be made, probably, to get it to be perceived as anything other than a "cool extra feature". Internet access has been available on phones for a few years now, but I don't know of anybody who actively uses the web browser on their Nokia. The functionality of BlackBerries are hugely popular, so I wonder if mobile video is going to pursue a similar approach in the professional world...maybe self-recorded video clips will replace text mssgs. Seems like you won't have to worry about maximizing compression with mobile players until ppl start using them as a primary entertainment/information device.

2006-07-11T09:56:00.000-07:00

Class 6, July 11 Reading - "Windows Media Player"

Wootten seems like he's going through the motions of presenting the pluses and minuses of WMP in the unbiased manner he tries to. But it still seems like Quicktime is the standard that he's comparing everything to. The aspect of digital rights management being superior in WMP seems to benefit only a small portion of the industry, i.e. music/film artists and producers. There's really no incentive for the average consumer, and if WMP would prevent ventures like Youtube from offering streaming content, Microsoft is going to lose out on a big portion of the marketshare that is interested in non-copyrighted material. To be fair, he was an apologist for Microsoft's elimination of support for former RealNetworks file extensions.

Is VC-1 competing directly with H264 for market share? I guess I had the impression that H264 was an accepted industry standard, and that even MS was going to be exploring this codec. But if VC-1 is proprietary, then Microsoft doesn't have much of an incentive to go with H264.

In the end, Wootten is really saying if you have a Mac system and Mac affiliates, use Quicktime. If you have a PC system and PC affiliates, use WMP. Hmm, doesn't leave much room for Real.

2006-07-11T09:26:00.000-07:00

Brightcove Ah-ha -- I took a look at Barrio 305, which is a Latino urban music site, showcasing Latin-American celebrities, musical artists, and models. It seems set up in the vein of MTV.com's "Overdrive", though the embedded media player and video thumb catalogue are part of the homepage and not extra features, which I think is a great idea. Makes it easy, and that's what people go there to see. I think the authoring of the page is a response to a much more i-savvy audience, and it presents the site as more of a video resource than an "information" resource, which is necessary if it's competing with TV. It also provides video codecs for distribution across myspace accounts, which seems like the new business card.

The next was the Indy Food Channel site, which showcases trendy hot spots, clubs, restaurants, and foods. Its set up very similar to Barrio, with an embedded media player serving as the mainstay of the homepage along with a thumbnail catalogue of other videos. Indy Food doesn't play content automatically, which to me, somewhat defeats the purpose of offering video so prominently on the homepage. But I like the simple use of Flash animation in the video inventory, and the video navigation is pretty straightforward. There's not much else to the site other than videos on-demand, which I suspect is the way that most major corporate websites are heading...

2006-07-06T09:26:00.000-07:00

Wooten Class 5, July 6 -

Still having a hard time understanding for sure WHY Quicktime might be superior to other media players. It supports a variety of codecs, but so do its competition. Image quality and ease of use seem restricted to a Mac platform-I wonder if the only reason it's so popular is because Hollywood loves it so much. In terms of editing benefits, the avg consumer buys a Mac far less than a PC, so the benefits don't seem to crossover to the broadest market. Wooten seems to think its a big deal that you can rotate the image around and play it in non-rectangular skins, but I don't really understand how those features are practical. The ability to map video onto an alternate environment I suppose is becoming more of a benefit the more video serves as an extra feature rather than a primary draw to a webcast/broadcast.

I'm really interested to learn more about Quicktime VR. I'd never even heard of it until the reading. "Panarama" formats sound like maybe the direction video is going to be heading, as partially 3D flat screens are already developed. Quicktime seems to offer the most user friendly coding/editing formats for music and special FX. I didn't realize the codes for effects and music were supplied on individual codecs. The "busier" video and audio progress, I'd imagine that means more distinct codes within the stream. How will that complicate things? Will the codes degrade faster?

2006-06-28T16:19:00.000-07:00

Wooten Reading Class 4

It seems that the leaps and bounds made in streaming applications and playability are dependent on straying from the original design/intent of the Internet as a simple user-to-user site/email interface. This isn't saying anything profound. However, one wonders what the repercussions are when we abandon the original architecture so much and if whatever legacy coding we're dependent on, even in limited forms, is equipped to take us where we need to go.

It's still a bit difficult to discern the individual functions of UDP and TCP vs. HTML within a given coding stream. My impression is that the main purpose of HTML within a coding stream is to keep the page available for viewing during the stream and that audio/video are handled mainly by better-fitted coding languages. Another thought, one of my friends is planning for his wedding this summer, and one of his choices was between offering a buffet or catering individual plates to the guests. The choice seemed analogous to the predicament of delivery management in a given bandwidth for large audiences. Unicasting offers an individual bitstream (an individual plate) however seems to require a more robust server capacity (is more expensive and takes more time to prepare). Multicasting provides the same content to a wide range of people (the banquet-style buffet) however the quality may be slightly lower and there is more competitition.

RealNetworks -- Performance 'superiority' of Real Player 10 is that it maximizes its compression tool. Should this be the most important meter to evaluate all media players on the market? Playable on a wide range of OS's and content formattable on a wide range of systems. But each operating system has its own more favored player (Windows favors WMP, Mac OS favors Quicktime) so it seems that its OS share is spread too thin. Maybe if it aggressively pursues the anticipated Google OS, RealPlayer will get a better market share. The Helix project seemed like RealNetworks took the Linux approach in making it open source in order to try to capture more market share. Doesn't sound like it worked. Users prefer uniformity, and offering variability inevitably leads to incapatibility between systems. Furthermore, I don't believe RealPlayer is bundled with any operating system. So the performance benefits of RealPlayer vs. WMP or QuickTime, theoretically, should be enough of an incentive to warrant the time/energy it takes to simply download it to your computer and NOT use the provided media player. It sounds as if the difference between the three is not great enough for RealPlayer to succeed at that.

2006-06-20T18:44:00.000-07:00

I selected NPR.com for my first analysis, as I use it on a nearly daily basis. (It's one of a few streaming media sites that help to keep me sane at my desk job during the day!!) In regards to our class discussion about accessibility, speed, and general ease of use, NPR offers one of the best streaming services I've seen. National Public Radio maintains a large online audience and seems to have embraced its web presence on a comparable level to its traditional radio broadcast. What I enjoy most is its audio archives. An extremely wide range of catalogued news stories, interviews, and various monologues are offered in both RealPlayer and Windows Media Player formats. In terms of hinderances, older audio files seem to be limited to RealPlayer, and there are occasionally issues in trying to access them with an incompatible codec. Access to the live broadcast is also available. NPR also does a great job of incorporating video and other visual media when news stories incorporate them as an integral part of the story. Audio pieces are usually uploaded to the website in a short matter of hours from original broadcast.

One of the better sites I've used in terms of streaming video is MTV.com, surprisingly. The site is dynamically designed-using Flash animation almost shamelessly and is very generous with well-placed hyperlinks. The organization of the video/audio files is very easy to understand and accessible through multiple links. Streaming video programs are offered via a web program called "Overdrive", which organizes its content in genres of "Television", "Movies", "Music", "News", and occasional promotional titles. Some programs are available to watch almost in their entirety online. Users can cycle through video programs easily. Downsides are that users, I believe, must download MTV's own codec and are often required to download security upgrades to have access to these videos. However, the video/audio library is quite extensive, is accessible, and offered in an energetic format.