On July 21, 2008, Friendfeed hit Flickr 2.9 million times to get the latest photos of 45,754 users, of which 6,721 visited Flickr in that 24-hour period, and could have potentially uploaded a photo.
Three million requests for 6,000 updates. Clearly, polling isn't ideal. Don't miss the rest of the slides.
(Also, at its peak, Flickr is currently receiving 60 uploaded photos a second, "roughly 10 times the number of people born on Earth per second.")
With its vibrant oversized photographs and minimalist design, the Boston Globe'sThe Big Picture weblog launched on June 1 to instant global acclaim. It's designed, programmed, and written by Alan Taylor, an old-school web programmer and blogger, in his spare time while working on community features at Boston.com. (You might know Alan from his popular MegaPenny Project, Amazon Light, or his other projects.)
The idea's simple, but extremely effective. Spend a few minutes with the Iowa floods, the faces of Sudan, or the daily life in Sadr City, and you feel like you've opened a window to another world.
I interviewed Alan about the inspiration for the site, his methodology, and what it's like being a programmer in a journalist's world.
The Big Picture's become an essential read for me, and I totally agree with Jason Kottke when he called it "the best new blog of the year." What inspired it?
Alan Taylor: Lots of things — my parents used to always have Life and National Geographic magazines around the house, I fell in love with the visual storytelling way back then. When I was getting my feet wet in the online journalism world as a developer at msnbc.com, I had the good fortune of working alongside Brian Storm and a few others in MSNBC's photo department, who were just phenomenal as far as selection, editing and presentation.
I wondered why other sites didn't reach that level. Many have by now, but I was still frustrated by the presentation — either far too small, or trapped in click-after-click interfaces that were in Flash or just acted as ad farms.
In honor of the release of Firefox 3.0, I'm offering up a video that documented its very beginning in 1998 — the first open-source release of Netscape's browser and the foundation of the Mozilla project.
Independent filmmakers followed the Mozilla team from March 1998 to April 1999, as they worked to open Netscape Communicator's source code to the world, in a last-ditch effort to save the company. The result is an amazing snapshot of computer history, capturing the people that worked on it, the first internal beta test, the moment Jamie Zawinski uploaded the first builds publicly, the launch party, the all-hands meeting announcing the AOL acquisition, and so much more. It aired on PBS nationally in March 2000, the same month as the beginning of the dot-com collapse.
Out-of-print and never released on DVD, the used VHS copies start at $50 on Amazon. Like all the videos I release on Waxy.org, this material is commercially unavailable. If they ever come back into print, or the copyright holders contact me, I'll take them down immediately.
I've done my best to annotate the video, but many people in the film aren't identified. I've left Viddler annotations open to everyone, so if you want to identify the people, places, or notable objects/events/trivia in the film, then please add your inline comments the video! (Or IM/email me and I'll take care of it.)
Here's the fifth and final episode of The Machine That Changed the World, this one focusing on global information networks including the Internet, and the communication benefits and privacy risks they create. This is the most familiar material of the documentary, so I'm going to skip the notes and annotations this time. I hope you enjoyed the documentary as much as I did.
And, as promised, here's the BitTorrent file for high-resolution copies of all five videos. It's a 3.1GB download with five H.264 encoded MP4 files. (If you only want a single video, use your BitTorrent client to select only the videos you need.) Enjoy!
Interviews: Robert Lucky (AT&T Bell Labs), Dave Hughes, Kathleen Bonner (Trader, Fidelity), George Hayter (Former Head of Trading, London Stock Exchange), Ben Bagdikian (UC Berkeley), Arthur Miller (Harvard Law School), Forman Brown (songwriter, died in 1996), Tan Chin Nam (Chairman, National Computer Board of Singapore), B.G. Lee (Minister of Trade and Industry, Singapore), Lee Fook Wah, (Assistant Traffic Manager, MRT Singapore), David Assouline (French Activist, now a senator), Mitch Kapor (founder, Lotus), Michael Drennan (Air traffic controller, Dallas-Fort Worth)
The fourth episode of The Machine That Changed the World covers the history of artificial intelligence and the challenges that come from trying to teach computers to think and learn like us.
Science
