Streaming My Consciousness

I’m looking to put together a live map for seeing where people are coming from on our live stream. One format of this map would be a full-screen display at the ops console, the other would be a small map on the website itself. If you’re using this kind of technology, Id love to know how you are doing it, whether it’s with a monthly service, or you rolled your own code.What I’ve looked at so far:

Google Analytics: Doesn’t come anywhere close to realtime. Looks like about a 24-hour waiting period for your data. Looking at the historical data for the live site, it doesn’t seem to be all that accurate either. Numbers, locations, and durations of visits seem to be way off what we’re seeing in our feedback and in our logs.

W3Counter: Seems interesting, but their site performance/availability is a major problem. I smell scalability issues.

VisiStat: Very nice product, but a little spendy for what I’m after, considering its shortcomings. Live map doesn’t appear to have the ability to specify a timeframe. Either you refresh the page and it adds new visits to a blank map, or you leave it up and nothing falls off the back.

Feedjit: I use this for my blog, and it’s great for that (see widget in the sidebar). But I can’t see using this for a “real” site. I greatly dislike the inability to customize the widget beyond text color (I really don’t want it showing the geoblogosphere link, it’s completely irrelevant and a distraction). It too seems to lack the ability to restrict the map by timeframe.

None of these products appeared to have the ability to customize the map display, most of them had a map that was ridiculously small and didn’t scale with the browser window.

If you rolled your own, how complex was it? What was the cost for the geolocation data?

EDIT: Forgot about Woopra… Looks awesome, but it’s still vaporware.

EDIT^2: OK, so Woopra isn’t technically vaporware, apparently real people are using it, but it’s been in “beta” for a very long time.

…to bring you this important public service announcement regarding child car seat safety.

My friend Christine asked our state troopers about carseat safety rules here in Kansas. Here is his reply:

Hi Christine,
my name is Trooper Tim McCool. I’m the Troop B (Topeka) Public Resource Officer. I’m also a Child Passenger Safety Technician/Instructor. I can appreciate your question, our current law is somewhat confusing. The origins of our current law start back in the 1980’s and the law has been revised several times over the years. Our legislators have tried to keep up with the current recommendations but have not always been successful.  As law enforcement officers we try to look at what is recommended nationally and try to apply that to our local law. Our law doesn’t say you have to use a forward facing seat at one year of age it says that you must be using a seat properly, and if you follow the national recommendations then you should be using a rear facing convertible to its upper weight limit rear facing. What also leads to confusion is that the AAP currently recommends that the minimum you should turn a child around forward facing is now at 18 months and 25 pounds in weight. As you see, lots of information. Best rule of thumb, that will keep you  out of trouble is to always secure your child in a CPS seat and follow the national recommendations. If you meet a law enforcement officer, most of the officers will defer to one of us that is a CPS Tech. and will support the national recommendations. Again, we law enforcement officers don’t make the laws here in Kansas, we only enforce them. If you or anyone else would like to see our law changed then I would suggest that you contact your local legislator and make your feelings known to them. If they don’t hear from their constituents, they won’t know that there is an issue. Please feel free to contact me if you have any further questions.

Tech. Trooper Timothy I. McCool
Public Resource Officer
Kansas Highway Patrol – Troop B

So, there you have it. 12 months and 20 pounds is now outdated information. Remember that 18 months and 25 lbs is a minimum, the reality is that you should keep them rear-facing as long as they are within height and weight limits of the seat (which for most is 33 lbs). We had to turn F around at 12 months on the dot because she was 34 lbs. C is still under 33 lbs, but she’s a lot taller than a rear-facing seat can handle. We didn’t flip her around until she was about 2.

Naturally, make sure the seat is properly installed in the car, and your child in the seat. If in doubt, get it checked. 95% of all carseats are improperly installed.

Web video is clearly here to stay. Heck, I currently have 40% of my time dedicated to producing and delivering web video of our weekend worship services. I think this is tremendously cool stuff, and traditional one-way RF-based video delivery (a.k.a. TV) is pretty lame. My kids have no concept of a broadcast schedule. Their content world is one that is immersive, interactive, and on-demand.

We’re now coming up on that season that we network admins have begun to dread over the last few years: March Madness. With networks advertising live web video of every. single. game., those of us charged with the care and feeding of our WAN pipes are blanched in abject terror. We know that 95% of our staff is going to want to watch them while they work. It doesn’t take much math skill to figure out that multiplied by a couple hundred people, even viewing one event means that the remaining 3 people in the organization that don’t really give a hoot about hoops aren’t going to be able to get any work done and pick up the slack the rest of us are leaving.

When you do internet video on the scale of the NCAA tournament, or a news network during a major news event, you’re relying on the performance of your CDN. Naturally, you want to accurately count eyeballs so that the advertisers pay you appropriately. A lot of time and effort goes into engineering thse things, and it’s quite remarkable how well this works.

CNN’s approach using Octoshape is a creative one, that really pushes P2P technology into the mainstream of legitimacy. I was present at the creation nearly ten years ago [+] [++]when Gnutella was leaked to the world, and changed the rules of the multimedia distribution game, and recall thinking how interesting things were going to become. Out of the Gnutella proof-of-concept came LimeWire and others, and then BitTorrent figured out how to dial the concept to a global scale. Now the same idea is being integrated into mainstream CDNs with Octoshape and other “cloud” applications.

It seems to me that the CDN operators should be able to find a way to engineer their networks such that a corporate network admin (such as myself) could download a piece of software onto a spare piece of gear and run a node of the CDN, internal to the corporate network (or, for that matter, run it as a VMWare virtual appliance). This not only softens the blow to my WAN pipes, but also lightens the load on the public parts of the CDN. The only thing then going across the WAN connection is a single instance of each stream being requested by clients internal to the company. Then it simply phones home with the proper client count for advertiser tracking, and bingo, people can get work done, as well as watch their favourite team make a run at the Final Four.

…Or we network admins can simply block the CDN in their content filters and tell their users that we’re mean party poopers, depriving them of their hoops and depriving the webcasters of their revenue.