Planet Vquence

Silvia Pfeiffer: Top 10 commercials for 2008 on YouTube

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 11:42:23 +0000

I spent the last few days doing some nice research for Vquence, where I was able to watch lots of videos on YouTube. Fun job this is! The full article is on the Vquence metrics blog.

One of the key things that I’ve put together is a list of top 10 commercials for 2008:

Rank	Video	Views	Added
1	Cadbury - Gorilla	3,338,011	August 31, 2007
2	Nike - Take it to the NEXT LEVEL	3,184,329	April 28, 2008
3	Macbook Air	2,648,717	January 15, 2008
4	Centraal Beheer Insurance - Gay Adam	2,512,425	May 30, 2008
5	Vodafone - Beatbox	2,380,237	March 17, 2008
6	E*Trade - Trading Baby	2,061,818	February 01, 2008
7	Guitar Hero - Heidi Klum	1,068,055	November 03, 2008
8	Bridgestone - Scream	980,406	January 30, 2008
9	Bud Light- Will Ferrell	966,177	February 04, 2008
10	Careerbuilder - Follow your heart	605,465	February 03, 2008
Favorable mention	OLPC - John Lennon	527,953	December 25, 2008
Favorable mention	Blendtec - iPhone 3G	2,711,195	July 11, 2008
Favorable mention	Stide Gum - Where the hell is Matt?	15,859,204	June 20, 2008

Enjoy! And let me know in the comments if you know of any other video ad released in 2008 in the same ballpark number of views that is an actual tv-style commercial.

Silvia Pfeiffer: OSDC 2008 talks

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 11:15:06 +0000

The “Open Source Developer Conference” 2008 took place in Sydney between 2nd-5th December. I gave two talks at it:

As requested by the organisers, I just uploaded the slides to Slideshare, which incidentally can now also synchronise audio recordings of your talk to your slides. Here are my slides - even if they don’t actually give you much without the demo:

| Get your Presentation Pack

I had lots of fun giving the talks. The “YouTube” one talks about the Fedora Commons document repository and how we turned it into a video transcoding, keyframing, publication and sharing system. The one on Metavidwiki shows off the Annodex-technology using video wiki that is in use by Wikipedia. Most certainly, I also mentioned that open source CMS systems now have video extensions. However, they are not video-centric sites in general.

Of all the open source Web video technology, I find Fedora Commons and MetaVidWiki the most exciting ones. The former is exciting for its ability to archive and publish video and their metadata in a way that integrates with document management. The latter is even more exciting for using Ogg and the open Annodex technologies to create a completely open source system using open codecs, and for being the world’s second video wiki (just after CMMLwiki), but the first one to achieve wide uptake.

John Ferlito: Mac OS X L2TP VPN to Cisco IOS

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 07:45:46 +0000

Just spent a couple of hours trying to get a Mac OS X laptop connected to a Cisco IOS IPSEC/L2TP server. The existing configuration worked fine for windows and linux servers but the Mac just refused to establish a connection. The Cisco logs contained the usual cryptic message.

Dec 16 16:53:47.955: IPSEC(validate_proposal_request): proposal part #1,
  (key eng. msg.) INBOUND local= 117.53.171.241, remote= 124.171.30.131,.
    local_proxy= 117.53.171.241/255.255.255.255/17/1701 (type=1),.
    remote_proxy= 124.171.30.131/255.255.255.255/17/1701 (type=1),
    protocol= ESP, transform= esp-3des esp-sha-hmac  (Transport-UDP),.
    lifedur= 0s and 0kb,.
    spi= 0x0(0), conn_id= 0, keysize= 0, flags= 0x800
Dec 16 16:53:47.955: Crypto mapdb : proxy_match
    src addr     : 117.53.171.241
    dst addr     : 124.171.30.131
    protocol     : 17
    src port     : 1701
    dst port     : 49561
Dec 16 16:53:47.955: map_db_find_best did not find matching map
Dec 16 16:53:47.955: IPSEC(validate_transform_proposal): no IPSEC cryptomap exists for local address A.B.C.D

After much googling I discovered that the problem was dst port: 49561 . Unlike most other L2TP clients the Mac uses a random source port for the L2TP part of the connection. Most others use 1701 for source and destination.

So relaxing this

ip access-list extended L2TP
 permit udp host 117.53.171.241 eq 1701 any eq 1701

to this

ip access-list extended L2TP
 permit udp host 117.53.171.241 eq 1701 any

solved the problem.

It would now normally be the time for me to rant about how IPSEC has to be one of the most badly implemented protocols by all vendors and how getting two different implementations to talk to each other always takes a minimum of 2 hours even if you’ve done it before but it would just be too exhausting.

Silvia Pfeiffer: Attaching subtitles to HTML5 video

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 23:38:37 +0000

During the last week, I made a proposal to the HTML5 working group about how to support out-of-band time-aligned text in HTML5. What I mean by that is basically: how to link a subtitle file to a video tag in HTML5. This would mirror the way in which in desktop-players you can load separate subtitle files by hand to go alongside a video.

My suggestion is best explained by an example:

<video src="http://example.com/video.ogv" controls> <text category="CC" lang="en" type="text/x-srt" src="caption.srt"></text> <text category="SUB" lang="de" type="application/ttaf+xml" src="german.dfxp"></text> <text category="SUB" lang="jp" type="application/smil" src="japanese.smil"></text> <text category="SUB" lang="fr" type="text/x-srt" src="translation_webservice/fr/caption.srt"></text> </video>

“text” elements are subelements of the “video” element and therefore clearly related to one video (even if it comes in different formats).
the “category” tag allows us to specify what text category we are dealing with and allows the web browser to determine how to display it. The idea is that there would be default display for the different categories and css would allow to override these.
the “lang” tag allows the specification of alternative resources based on language, which allows the browser to select one by default based on browser preferences, and also to turn those tracks on by default that a particular user requires (e.g. because they are blind and have preset the browser accordingly).
the “type” tag allows specification of what actual time-aligned text format is being used in this instance; again, it will allow the browser to determine whether it is able to decode the file and thus make it available through an interface or not.
the “src” attribute obviously points to the time-aligned text resource. This could be a file, a script that extracts data from a database, or even a web service that dynamically creates the data
based on some input.

This proposal provides for a lot of flexibility and is somewhat independent of the media file format, while still enabling the Web browser to deal with the text (as long as it can decode it). Also note that this is not meant as the only way in which time-aligned text would be delivered to the Web browser - we are continuing to investigate how to embed text inside Ogg as a more persistent means of keeping your text with your media.

Of course you are now aching to see this in action - and this is where the awesomeness starts. There are already three implementations.

First, Jan Gerber independently thought out a way to provide support for srt files that would be conformant with the existing HTML5 tags. His solution is at http://v2v.cc/~j/jquery.srt/. He is using javascript to load and parse the srt file and map it into HTML and thus onto the screen. Jan’s syntax looks like this:

<script type="text/javascript" src="jquery.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="jquery.srt.js"></script>

Then, Michael Dale decided to use my suggested HTML5 syntax and add it to mv_embed. The example can be seen here - it’s the bottom of the two videos. You will need to click on the “CC” button on the player and click on “select transcripts” to see the different subtitles in English and Spanish. If you click onto a text element, the video will play from that offset. Michael’s syntax looks like this:

<video src="sample_fish.ogg" poster="sample_fish.jpg" duration="26"> <text category="SUB" lang="en" type="text/x-srt" default="true" title="english SRT subtitles" src="sample_fish_text_en.srt"> </text> <text category="SUB" lang="es" type="text/x-srt" title="spanish SRT subtitles" src="sample_fish_text_es.srt"> </text> </video>

Then, after a little conversation with the W3C Timed Text working group, Philippe Le Hegaret extended the current DFXP test suite to demonstrate use of the proposed syntax with DFXP and Ogg video inside the browser. To see the result, you’ll need Firefox 3.1. If you select the “HTML5 DFXP player prototype” as test player, you can click on the tests on the left and it will load the DFXP content. Philippe actually adapted Jan’s javascript file for this. And his syntax looks like this:

<video src="example.ogv" id="video" controls> <text lang='en' type="application/ttaf+xml" src="testsuite/Content/Br001.xml"></text> </video>

The cool thing about these implementations is that they all work by mapping the time-aligned text to HTML - and for DFXP the styling attributes are mapped to CSS. In this way, the data can be made part of the browser window and displayed through traditional means.

For time-aligned text that is multiplexed into a media file, we just have to do the same and we will be able to achieve the same functionality. Video accessibility in HTML5 - we’re getting there!

Silvia Pfeiffer: OLPC rollout volunteering

Sat, 29 Nov 2008 04:41:05 +0000

Pia posted details about a OLPC rollout to PNG for February 2009. If you are interested in volunteering for this and other OLPC rollout projects you should hop on over to OLPC Friends wiki page and leave your details. It’s an amazing opportunity to make a difference.

John Ferlito: OLPC Wireless packet loss

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 01:34:16 +0000

Last week Pia asked me to help her out with her yet to be name Australian OLPC deployment. The deployment involves two remote sites connected by an ADSL WAN and one of the key applications across this LAN is the use of the VideoChat activity.

The children at the site were experiencing audio blips and video artefacts, a sure sign of some sort of network related packet loss. With Pia at one site and myself at the other we did some testing to try and rule out the WAN itself as the problem and determine what the issue was.

It became quickly obvious that the WAN wasn’t at fault. We setup some pings with an interval of 1/10 of a second from the XO’s to their respective default gateways and between the default gateways themselves. Pia and I then started counting out loud, which got us a couple of strange looks from children playing around us :). During the audio blips there was no loss across the WAN but there was loss to the default gateways.

Now here comes the interesting part, the packet loss to the default gateways seemed to be syncronised. Now remember these are totally independant wireless networks sitting a couple of 100 kilometers apart. At this stage I was cooking up crazy theories about difficult to decode/encode video packets hitting both XOs at the same time but I was fairly dubious.

We did a little testing on XOs at the same site and while the problem didn’t seem to manifest in as obvious a manner it was still there (I think the latency involved across the WAN exacerbated the symptoms).

Back at home I did some further testing for a few days, trying all manner of different loads and writing various script to watch tcpdump output. To cut a long story short eventually while glancing at the XO during packet loss I noticed the antennae light was flashing which would indicate the XO is disassociating from the network.

A few minutes later I was able to verify that wireless scans were causing the problem and that it is easily reproducible by doing

ping -i 0.1 GATEWAY_IP &

iwlist eth0 scan

You should notice the drop of about 4 packets.

I’ve filed the bug on the OLPC bug tracker

Ticket #9048 - Wireless scanning causes network pauses

A temporary work around is to get Network Manager to stop performing scans, although I assume this means the network view probably won’t get updated. You can do this using wpa_cli.

wpa_cli

> ap_scan 0

Silvia Pfeiffer: Whatever happened to the Innovation Review?

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 09:01:32 +0000

In September, as reported, Terry Cutler delivered an extensive review on the Australian innovation system and what should be done. But then, the worldwide economic downturn hit us, and nobody seems to think about creating incentives for Australian innovation any longer.

Where did it go? Nothing is happening on the innovation website.

In particular as a small business owner, I ask: what happened to incentives to innovate for SMEs? Before the review, the government as a precaution scrapped the existing Australian grant system for innovation - in particular the Commercial Ready grants. The idea was to have some leeway with building a new system. That seemed fair enough at the time - but it seems more and more that there will be no replacement for this scrapped funding. Is the government simply forgetting what they promised in view of other, more pressing needs? Do we need to remind them?

Terry Cutler in a recent interview with SmartCompany paints a dark picture for the Australian future. He is aware that commercial innovation originates from SMEs and is fearful that by dropping all support for SMEs, the whole SME technology sector will be wiped out, with a negative influence also on larger companies and Australia will fall so far behind in innovation that it may be hard to ever catch up (remember what we did with our advantage in creating computer hardware at the time of CSIRAC?).

The Commercial Ready grants and other innovation funding were abruptly scrapped in May 2008. It is now more than 6 months later and we haven’t seen an indication of anything new to replace them. In the midst of the global crisis, how can we make this important cause heard?

John Ferlito: Melbourne Cup Dip2

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 07:08:11 +0000

To quote Justaan:

This is what we call the Melbourne Cup Network Effect

It seems it really is the race that stops the nation. This is a graph of Bulletproof’s outbound web traffic for today. That’s a 37% drop in outbound traffic just after 3pm.

Make sure you take note of my l33t gimp skills!

John Ferlito: Disabling “Subscribe to feed” in firefox

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 03:45:40 +0000

At Vquence we do a lot of crawling of various video hosting sites and where possible we like to use APIs or RSS feeds instead of page scraping. A semi-recent features of firefox is that when you click on an RSS link you get a “Subscribe to this feed in your favourite reader” header and then the formatted contents of the feed.

This is really annoying if what you really want to see is the raw XML. Sure I could hit CTRL-U to see the source but thats an extra step and a whole other window I now have open. I couldn’t find any way to disable this functionality so I ended up writing a greasemonkey script called disable_subscribe_feed.js.

The meat of the script looks like

// Pick three element ids that appear in the "Subscribe to page" and probably
var tag1 = document.getElementById('feedHeaderContainer');
var tag2 = document.getElementById('feedSubscriptionInfo2');
var tag3 = document.getElementById('feedSubscribeLine');

// Show the source
if (tag1 && tag2 && tag3) {
    location.href = 'view-source:' + document.location.href;
}

Basically it tries to detect the “subscribe to feed” page based on a couple of tag ids that exist on it and then performs a redirect to view-source: for that page. Which gives us nicely formatted XML.

John Ferlito: Getting your key into debian-maintainers using jetring

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 05:05:41 +0000

I’m currently going through the process of becoming a Debian Maintainer so that I can upload Annodex packages without bugging one of the DDs I know. Thanks to horms and jaq for their help thus far.

As part of this process you need to file a bug against the debian-maintainers package to get your key added. You need to do this using a piece of software called jetring. jetring allows you to create changesets for a gpg keyring, a binary format, to make it easy for the maintainers to add and remove keys and know exactly whats being added and removed. I couldn’t find very much information on how you actually do this and hence the reason for this post.

To start with you need to grab the latest copy of the debian-maintainers keyring and extract the actual keyring from it. You can find the link to the latest version at debian-maintainers, just click on all to download it.

Here is the process I followed with comments along the way

# Download the latest debian-maintainers keyring
wget http://http.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/d/\
debian-maintainers/debian-maintainers_1.38_all.deb
dpkg-deb -x *.deb keyring
mv keyring/usr/share/keyrings/debian-maintainers.gpg .
rm -rf keyring *.deb

# Create a copy of it and add your key to it
cp debian-maintainers.gpg debian-maintainers.gpg.orig
gpg --export johnf@inodes.org | \
    gpg --import --no-default-keyring --keyring `pwd`/debian-maintainers.gpg

# Create the changset with jetring
jetring-gen debian-maintainers.gpg.orig debian-maintainers.gpg \
    "Add John Ferlito <johnf @inodes.org> as a Debian Maintainer"

# Check the changeset
jetring-review -d debian-maintainers.gpg.orig add-*

Once you have completed the above you should have a file with something like the following contents

Comment: Add John Ferlito <johnf @inodes.org> as a Debian Maintainer
Date: Sat, 05 Jul 2008 14:26:31 +1000
Action: import
Data:
  -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
  Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux)

  mQGiBEd6MmQRBADF+BLVChN/AqKVXkrJFU2LtJoiCdYJ
  <snip>
  =SSNk
  -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

You should now add something along the lines of the below to the top of the file.

Recommended-By:
  Simon Horman <horms @verge,net.au>,
  Jamie Wilkinson <jaq @spacepants.org>
Agreement: http://lists.debian.org/debian-newmaint/2008/07/msg00010.html
Advocates:
  http://lists.debian.org/debian-newmaint/2008/07/msg00011.html,
  http://lists.debian.org/debian-newmaint/2008/07/msg00012.html

The agreement line should be a URL to your signed email applying to become a DM and the advocates should be the URLs for the signed emails from your advocates.

Once you’ve done that, submit a bug with the file attached and hopefully sometime later you will have become a DM.

Chris Gilbey: Copyright and Copywrong

Sat, 01 Sep 2007 00:42:31 +0000

What a mess is being made of copyright in the online world.

People steal works from others. People borrow stuff. Some people rely on what they think is the "fair use" provisions of the copyright act. People in Australia think that because they have read an article online about how Google appears to be fighting the Viacom lawsuit that they can use similar arguments in Australia, where copyright law is different to the US.... and on it goes.

And then you see this kind of story appear and you realize that the whole thing is a rats nest of infinite proportions. (And thanks to Laurel Papworth and her blog for pointing to this story).

Seems like Viacom has muscled YouTube into pulling down a piece of content that was part of a program on VH1. Only problem is that the program on VH1 used the material that they have forced YT to pull without permission in the first place. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black!

We have to realize that copyright in the digital age doesn't work in the way that pre-digital legislators and rights owners contemplated (and the rights owners were the people who lobbied for the laws in the first place, and essentially wrote th first drafts of the statutes anyway).

It is a really interesting time for this discussion too because we are moving rapidly to a point where the amount of time spent consuming media online will be greater than the amount of time spent consuming traditional electronic media. I read the following in a report from Strategic News Service that came out last month:

Video will drive a 21% CAGR in IP traffic across WANs through 2011.

Consumer traffic will surpass business in 2008, causing overall IP traffic to nearly double yearly through 2011. Est. CAGRs: consumer is 58%, business is 23%.

Total IP traffic will nearly quintuple between 2006 and 2011.

Business IP traffic will grow most quickly in developing markets and Asia- Pacific.

Consumer IP traffic will exceed 17 exabytes per month by 2011; business, 10.

40% of consumer IP traffic will be Internet (non-video) traffic, 60% will be “traffic generated by the delivery of traditional commercial video services over IP within a single operator’s network.”

So you can see with this sort of growth infrastructure will grow apace. And content will then have the air to also grow at a phenomenal rate. And at the same time the dirty little secret of the long tail will be there biting us on the bum. That secret of course is the corollary of the millions of markets scenario. This is the fact that content in the digital realm never goes away and continues to propagate at an ever increasing rate.

Which means that copyright owners (copywrong, I prefer to call them now) are going to find that the instances of their works are going to keep on appearing somewhere...

And unless they start by measuring the number of uses or number of occurrences they will never know how much money is leaking out of the system, how much revenue they are foregoing.

And of course this applies perhaps more strongly to new and emerging copyright creators and authors than it does to the incumbents. The incumbents already tend to be paid more than their due, because of the existing policies of the various societies. The rules of the societies are to pay the black box monies on a follow the dollar basis (of course they always deny the existence of a 'black box' but it is there under a variety of names).

So where does all this lead?

You have to have measurement, metrics, analytics. Not just so that advertisers can figure where the best spot is to place an ad, but so that a proper system of reward can be instituted for the creatives in the community.

This is really an imperative for collections societies, I believe. Whether we move to a Larry Lessig vision for the adoption of Creative Commons licenses or some other model, you need to start first with measuring the market. (Full disclosure: This is the vision for Vquence now, which I am a director of, to measure every aspect of social media online).

Chris Gilbey: Vquence

Thu, 16 Aug 2007 20:47:05 +0000

Well, after a long haul, yesterday we finally got our first 'real' deal done at Vquence.

We are supplying a quite complex set of video solutions to an about to be launched web site that is focusing on the forthcoming federal election. More on this once we are green lit to be able to talk about it.

But we think that the set of solutions that we are providing are going to be very cool for people who are interested in following all the video activity of both the pollies and the public.

Chris Gilbey: The YouTube Election

Tue, 07 Aug 2007 21:07:23 +0000

There is now no doubt that we are in the early part of a massive shift in the culture of Australia.

We are about to become a fully integrated YouTube society.

For a lot of people this will not be apparent for possibly several years. By that time the momentum will be sufficient that many marketers and PR people will not be able to get their clients and employers onto the bandwagon.

The amazing thing is that this revolution is being led by the mainstream political parties in Australia. First the Liberals with 4 major policy statements being announced by our Prime Minister, John Howard, on YouTube.

Then, the launch yesterday of the Kevin07 website. Laden with video - that is also on YouTube - it, together with the PM, is setting the pace for communications this spring in Australia as we head into a Federal Election.

At the same time there are new websites in the process of coming onstream like www.federalelection.com.au. The goal of this one is to provide the total forum for debate in the coming months. A site where all parties and candidates can be presented side by side. Great idea. Not sure if they are going to be able to make it the commercially viable success they would like as rapidly as they would like. We shall see.

What I find amazing is that this sea change to our culture. Because this is as big as when TV became the debating platform in the US. And Richard Nixon became 'Tricky Dicky' because under the powerful TV lights his 12 0'clock shadow made it look like he wasn't clean. Or prior to that when Eisenhower used TV to advertise in his presidential campaign. These were firsts.

Now in Australia we will have the first true YouTube election anywhere in the world. It stands to be a bell weather that campaigners in the US and UK will watch and use to avoid mistakes. And it should also set some examples for how we can expect corporations to get their marketing messages through to us in coming years.

(By the way, at Vquence we are starting to realize that the tools that we have been developing that enable us to rapidly crawl video hosting sites and monitor changes in near real time also provide us with a huge amount of raw data that can be massively valuable to companies that want to play in this space.)

Chris Gilbey: Inserting advertisements into video games holds much promise

Fri, 20 Jul 2007 14:15:11 +0000

Advertising

Got game

Jun 7th 2007
From The Economist print edition

Inserting advertisements into video games holds much promise

Welcome to the future

THEY are known to television executives as the “Lost Boys”—the generation of video-gaming young men who are watching less television and, thanks to ad-skipping technologies such as TiVo, even fewer advertisements. The obvious response is to start putting advertisements into games instead, by incorporating billboards into the game environment, for example. But incorporating static advertisements into games is unsatisfactory. Now that most PCs and a growing number of games consoles are connected to the internet, however, it is possible to update advertisements when required. As a result, static in-game advertisements are now giving way to dynamic adverts, which accounted for $26m of the $76m spent on in-game advertising last year, and will account for 55% of the $182m spent this year, says the Yankee Group, a consultancy.

Chris Gilbey: ARE you a generalist or a specialist?

Fri, 20 Jul 2007 13:47:30 +0000

Vertical search-engines

Know your subject

Jul 12th 2007
From The Economist print edition

Topic-specific search-engines hope to challenge Google, at least in some areas

ARE you a generalist or a specialist? The question can be asked of people, but it is increasingly being asked about internet search-engines, as specialist or “vertical” sites take on generalists such as Yahoo! and Google. Some are already prospering: GlobalSpec.com, for example, a profitable search-engine for engineers, has 3.5m registered users and signs up another 20,000 each week. “They own that market,” says Charlene Li of Forrester, a consultancy.

This is due in large part to GlobalSpec's definable customer base. Its knowledge about the needs of its users sets it apart from the generalist search-engines, says Angela Hribar of GlobalSpec. Vertical sites, which serve up search results from a carefully selected group of topic-specific websites, can also target advertising at particular audiences more precisely...