Why Are They Doing This?

There are different ideas, but these are the two most popular (and likely).

1) They’re doing it for the money. We’re in a world of broadband and they are quite aware that the last couple of generations (and likely all to come after) will be nearly literally connected to their computing devices at all times. If they begin implementation now, it gives them a chance to get younger generations used to the idea of pay-for-use so that by the time the next generation is growing up, it seems quite normal.

We use the internet to play games (World of Warcraft bandwidth anyone?), blog, twitter, instant message, email … everything. Think about YouTube and other video broadcasting we watch? Hulu anyone? Ah, but that gets us into #2.

2) They’re doing it to reduce the competition of the internet. Oh sure, Time Warner separated it’s internet service by creating a spinoff branch called Time Warner Cable Inc., but do you really think there’s still no connected interest between TWC Inc. and Time Warner Inc.?

Time Warner Inc. owns 2 of the major avenues hit hardest by the internet: Print and Television media. In print, they run magazines like Time, Life, Money, and Essence. For television they’re not only the ones behind shows like ‘The Closer,’ they also own HBO and Warner Brothers.

Of course they’ve got their foray into Internet, America Online (AOL), which was such a headache back in the day and now has become only relevant because of their instant messaging service: AIM. Overall, Time Warner is like many large corporations these days — struggling with too many old concepts to successfully market itself in the current era of internet-by-preference.

So, what’s possibility #2 people are accusing Time Warner Inc. of? That Time Warner wants to make using and accessing the Internet more expensive so that people during economic downtime will choose a less expensive path of watching their TV and reading their magazines. This will target their online video competition because online video uses so much bandwidth.

How Much Is This Going To Cost?

To give you an idea of how much bandwidth online video uses, I’m going to pull a quote from the Business Week article on Time Warner’s new tiered pricing:

Time Warner Cable offers four cap levels of 5, 10, 20, and 40 GB. A download of a high-definition movie typically eats up about 8 GB. A recent report from Sanford C. Bernstein suggests that a family on the 40 GB plan that streams 7.25 hours of online video a week (a fraction of the 60 hours Americans spend watching TV in a week) could end up spending $200 per month on broadband usage fees. And that’s just for video viewing, before factoring in such Internet activities as music downloads and photo sharing.

Can’t I Just Switch Providers?

So, a lot of the people who commented on the above article from Business Week said they’ll just drop Time Warner’s service and switch to AT&T. People, don’t forget that AT&T has been trying to get permission to restrict and own internet access control on their networks so that they can have the right to block access to any site they want that goes through their network (for instance, say.. their competitors). So should it be any surprise that AT&T is ALSO testing their own similar concept in Beaumont.

Which really leads me to wonder about that city and why it’s drawing all this testing. I was on the phone with a friend ranting about this earlier, and wondering why these big companies are both choosing to do testing in that city. Wouldn’t that, by the mere nature of scientific research, skew the results? Eh, in the long run, do I really think either company cares so long as they have justification for what they’ve already decided to do? Not so much. I was telling my friend that doing something like this in a smaller city like Beaumont isn’t really a good indicator (yes, I consider 100,000 people a small city – I live in one of the top 10 cities in the country – plus I also live in Texas and am allowed to pick on other Texas cities because of it.). This all led to an interesting conversation.

What About Free WiFi?

I said something to the effect of “A test here would’ve been more interesting. We have WiFi all over the place, businesses completely networked as complexes, and more coming online all the time.”

At which point, he brought up a really good question.

“What, I wonder, will happen to all the places that offer WiFi to their customers. You know, restaurants, coffee shops, book stores, hotels and such. I have a hard time seeing any business just willing to shell out tens of thousands of dollars in overage just to keep offering free WiFi.”

A really good point.

I think the obvious answer is: They won’t. Why would any business decide to just drop that kind of money to keep free WiFi for their customers? It would be a ridiculous choice to make.

Could This Happen To Mobile?

Of course, he was on his iPhone during this conversation (obviously with service through AT&T, and on an unlimited plan) and that lead into the discussion of how far this would go. Time Warner plans to go to pay-for-use. AT&T is doing the same testing, but as soon as Time Warner starts rolling in the money the overages bring them, you know the other providers are going to jump on board with this new ‘pricing model’ and leave us with no options. I have a hard time seeing that, with the booming growth of mobile, that companies would not do the same exact things for their mobile users. In fact, they may even have an easier road with mobile people who have been used to the concept of overages and additional use fees for a long time.

What About This Rumor of TW’s Bad Hardware?

There’s been some ideas passed around that Time Warner is doing this based on some infrastructure problems and not being able to handle bandwidth. Well, first off – if that were the case, then they simply need to improve. Do what local governments do when they need to rebuild roads or schools – a short term tax. How bout.. a few extra bucks on the bill each month for one year. They’ve got around 15 million customers, that should add up pretty fast. Aside from that, if their hardware is bad, how were they able to just recently roll out the new and fastest high speed internet available? But, in the long run, it’s just nonsensical for them to say on one hand that only a small portion of their users consume the most bandwidth, and then say this is somehow a more balanced way of handling their load. Really? I mean, I’m a programmer, but let’s pretend I don’t know a thing about math beyond the basics.

Here’s an example:

So let’s take their study that said 17% of users in Beaumont had overage charges. Why not (it’s a huge percent already) just round it up to 20% to make it simple. Now let’s say 1 out of every 5 people uses 250 gigs of bandwidth per month (just a random number that’s not possibly related to the fact that it’s the current bandwidth cap for Comcast customers). Let’s say the other 4 each use 20 gigs a month. Between them all, that’s 330 gigs per month of use. Each pays $44.95 a month for a total of $224.75 among the 5 of them (before a ton of fees, but who’s counting?). So, the new plan for 20 gigs is supposed to be in the same price range, so let’s just pretend for now that it’s the same. So in our scenario, all these customers have the 20 gig plan except.. let’s say the one who uses 250 gigs gets the 40 gig plan instead to try and save money (cost at $54.90). The Time Warner ‘infrastructure’ is still transmitting 330 gigs among all 5 customers, but now.. they’re making: 179.80 off 4 customers, and $264.90 off one customer for a total of $444.70.

Gee. So the same exact amount of data is getting processed on their ‘infrastructure’ and yet they are now making $444.70 instead of $224.75. Go figure. Apparently it’s good for business to have crappy hardware.

The Big Issues

To summarize my dislike of the topic, I’ll say the following:

1. It is unethical to limit access to information on the Internet based on an ability to pay. We can pay for access, but don’t limit how much information we can learn.
2. Limiting access to competitors only shows a fear of what people will find when they see them. Improve and evolve your own service instead.
3. It will cause a waterfall effect throughout the industry and limit or eliminate alternative options.
4. It will stifle those who use the most bandwidth – those who develop and work in technology oriented fields creating all the new and amazing things out there these companies are so afraid of.
5. It will hinder free web applications and services that provide something just for the sake of giving something free to the Internet (Twitter is, for example, still not monetized).
6. It will cause an eventual hike in hosting bandwidth costs for websites in general.
7. It will reduce the ability for people in the US to learn, use, and create on the web. Do we really need to be -less- competition to other countries than we are already?

What Now?

So.. Mr. President, are you ready to go to bat for all the Internet users that raised you up on their shoulders? Get us some rulings on Net Neutrality to ensure that we do not become corporate victims and keep us able to explore the unlimited information available to us online.

Readers: If you found this as upsetting as I do, check out sites like Stop The Cap, learn about Net Neutrality, as well as read and comment on articles and news sites online. Be active. Let them know you don’t want it. Write to people who can make changes.

~Nicole

For those web developers who have been too busy to check their feed readers lately – here’s the short version of what’s been going on:

Microsoft let us know that they were planning to implement a ‘new’ method of … well, let’s just say they wanted to give the browser an identity crisis. The decision they came to was that IE8, although it would be much more standards compliant than IE7, wouldn’t act like IE8 by default. It was decided that IE8 would act like IE7 unless you specifically told it to act like IE8. This decision was backwards, illogical, potentially a huge issue for developers, and really just a waste of all those new ‘bells and whistles’ the IE8 is supposed to have in terms of how well it renders website code.

The way they had planned to make this work was to have developers add a meta tag to all pages that they wanted IE8 to actually read using IE8, instead of IE7. Aka: Modern browser sniffing comes into IE8.

These aren’t the only issues, but I think that Robert O’Callahan has already summed them up quite nicely for you to read, so I’ll point you his direction for a good summary. If you’d like more information, and responses to how we reacted to this first bit of news, please check out the links compiled over at Digital Web.

Anyway, that was a little over a month ago. Yesterday, we got a pleasant surprise.

Microsoft released notices on their press site and the IEBlog saying that they have reversed their decision.

To quote the IEBlog:

Now, IE8 will show pages requesting “Standards” mode in IE8′s Standards mode. Developers who want their pages shown using IE8′s “IE7 Standards mode” will need to request that explicitly (using the http header/meta tag approach described here).

I think that Eric Meyer sums it up nicely in his post where he indicates that not all issues with the meta tag are gone (which will still exist but not be required to make IE8 work as the new browser), but that this is a huge difference for the better.

There is also some curiosity about whether or not this change was made due to current legal issues affecting Microsoft, as in their press release the following is found:

“While we do not believe there are currently any legal requirements that would dictate which rendering mode must be chosen as the default for a given browser, this step clearly removes this question as a potential legal and regulatory issue,” said Brad Smith, Microsoft senior vice president and general counsel.

In any event, the new IE8 will now act like IE8 by default (what a concept!). It is a sound, logical decision. I do have some concern as to how they will respond if the beta comes out and there are many complaints (as there have been with past browser versions) from web developers who didn’t prepare themselves and their sites for the change. I hope that MS won’t be easily swayed later toward reversing this decision again going back to the previous one just to appease developers who were lazy in their preparation, because this change will help developers who work with modern technologies – and those developers are the ones making the real innovation these days.

~Nicole

Along with getting a major visual overhaul in the coming days/weeks, one thing has been added and is working now – new domains!

New: WebsiteStyle.mobi

Instead of only being able to access the mobile version of websitestyle.com from mobi.websitestyle.com, you can now access from either mobi.websitestyle.com or websitestyle.mobi

New: WebsiteStyle.net

Just for fun and monopolizing of my domain name. http://WebsiteStyle.net points to WebsiteStyle.com

New: WebsiteStyle.org

For now the new WebsiteStyle.org domain name is simply going to point to WebsiteStyle.com, however, expect great things to be found at that domain in the coming year as a new project of mine comes about!

Have a great day!

~Nicole

I am like the pack-rat who collects stuff and holds on to things for a while just to see what it’s like, but then periodically need to clean it out. I have reached that point where I think my blog is starting to resemble a cluttered basement.

To clean it up, I will be trimming down things that add to loading time, tweaking a few elements, removing others all together. This won’t affect the article content, but it will significantly affect the junk that has built up in the sidebar. Time to trim the fat off the sides, so to speak.

So the word of warning is this – you might see things disappear, or work slightly differently over the next weeks. This is just to increase loading time and just generally look less cluttered. Don’t panic – it’s all for the best

~Nicole

The new Moveable Type 4 (MT4) comes complete with a fresh graphical overhaul that really makes it look slick. It looks like they’ve taken a page from the WordPress guys and added a Dashboard that gives summaries and news headlines. They also added the ability to create stand-alone pages – sound familiar? In any case, it looks like an improvement. If you want to know all the changes, go ahead and take a look at the list.

If you are the more hands-on sort, you can test drive MT4 via download.

The Open Source project is a separate announcement, but all out on the same day. They’re calling it MTOS (Moveable Type Open Source Project). The download of the Open Source version won’t be ready until later in the summer this year. The license will be GPL, and it will be a version of the MT4 just released – so if you want to take a peek at what you can expect, you should be able to get a good idea by downloading and trying out the new MT4 beta. Right now, the MTOS project has a developer list you can join, or an announcement and news list you can sign up for.

Overall, plenty of news from the MT guys today.

~Nicole

You may recognize this familiar style of AddThis widget from your favorite blogs:
(not clickable, merely an example)

If you are not familiar with what happens when you click on an AddThis button, you can take a look at this screenshot to see what it does normally:

In a nutshell, it allows you to give your users the ability to bookmark the page/post they found with virtually any method they want. As sharing and bookmarking networks pop up regularly, it is nice to have a one-stop-service that keeps this list up to date automatically for you.

AddThis is now letting users unlock a new service in their account which will track what their users actually do when they click on the AddThis widgets.

The new service will allow users to monitor what method their users are choosing when it comes to bookmarking. This can be incredibly helpful in being able to see what happens once a user decides to bookmark your site. Do they bookmark locally? Do they bookmark to Furl or Facebook? What do they do?

This new service aims to answer these questions – but there is a catch. The catch is that you have to have an entry code to use it. So here is the code:

Go to AddThis, then go to Unlock the feature. The code to unlock is: addthis-stats

Taking it a step further, the new stats can be viewed for all sites using the service so that you can view the ‘trends’ versus how your site is performing.

This new service definitely seems promising.

~Nicole

I’d love to find out how many people are searching their mailboxes for this new feature or contacting tech support to find out how to do it

Gotta love Google.

Speaking of things like this… did WordPress miss the day or did I miss what they did? Last year they came out with the highly entertaining WordPattern.

~Nicole

When? Well according to the post, Yahoo! “will begin offering everyone unlimited email storage starting in May 2007.” However, you may not have your Yahoo! account updated in May specifically. They are going to be “rolling this out over a few months” so you might have a short wait.

I have a Yahoo! email account that I never use, but I logged in to take a look at the Yahoo! beta, just to see how it’s coming along. Slow still, it seems. Maybe if they decreased the enormous size of those ads it might help improve loading time. Who knows. I’m happy for all the Yahooligans out there who love to use the service. Personally, it would take a lot more for me to go back to using Yahoo! for email.

I’m an addicted Gmail user now – it has everything I could want. I like the fact that Yahoo! has gone unlimited in email – primarily because it will likely make Gmail step up its storage also to keep up the competition. Yahoo!, in my view, lacks too many of the features I use regularly in Gmail. But hey, overall, it’s good news for anyone who likes to Yahoo!

~Nicole

BegForPost doesn’t pull any punches when it states baldly on the homepage:

“BegForPost will allow you to keep your burnrate low while maintaining high ethical standards”

It seems to be clear reference to the controversy raised by PayForPost (and similar services) about whether or not such services are ethical.

I don’t know how long this new ‘begging’ site will be around, but they definitely made their opinion about those other sites quite clear.

~Nicole

My first order of business was to make a backup of my database (which I had somehow neglected to do for a couple of years).

So, it’s good news, and everything is back the way it should be.

~Nicole