For my professional peers

Wired Magazine: Really? The Web Is Dead?

The Web Is Dead.

Or so says and article in Wired Magazine: The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet

They include a fancy graph at the top of the article as proof of the authors statements.

However, that graph seems to be misleading if I'm interpreting it correctly. Lets take a look.

Sources: Wired Magazine per Cisco estimates based on CAIDA publications, Andrew Odlyzko

Notice that DNS and Web are down relative to video and peer-to-peer however we know that they are not down; DNS alone still happens every time your computer needs to translate a name to a number and it happens a lot more in your computer and on more devices than it ever has... it's just a very small amount of data. If the values are a proportion of traffic, then even if Web (http) usage was increasing, the volume of a movie or p2p file transfer (also most likely a movie) would dilute the figures so that it looked like "the web" was dead as the author claimed.

In fact all this is really showing is that the proportion of data attributed to video is rising, which we know to be true as more and more people get their content via streams (Netflix, iTunes, Youtube, etc). It shows that more data is video, and possibly the web has become more efficient... in no way does it actually indicate that "the web is dead".

I am very surprised that Wired would make this kind of mistake, let alone that others pass it along without actually understanding what they are looking at.

It's one of those inaccurate mumbo jumo articles that can actually define the attitudes that make it come to pass, although I very much doubt that it will in the next 15 years at least.

It actually unfortunate that the authors (Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff) made this mistake, because even though they did have some interesting things to say, they caused themselves to be taken les seriously using that data as a basis of their article.

It really makes you wonder how many people are going to read that article and not actually look at the graph.

I can see it now; I'll be talking to some customer and he/she will tell me "The Web Is Dead"... at which point I'll likely apply palm to face.

iPod Nano: new version is missing the features I want!

Apple has just updated the iPod Nano line.

The trouble is that they have taken out the video camera.

Now I don't need an iPod, I have a phone that plays music just fine and gives me a whole lot of other features as well, however I would like to get an iPods for my kids.

To the kids, the music is important, but to me the camera is important. I want the video camera, because it give a passive device and active feature.

When you think of what sort of gadgetry you want your kids to have, a camera should be right up there with anything else, what better way to give them a tool so they can start building their own life record early on? What better way to encourage them to go outside and see what they can see?

Since apple has changed the line and removed the camera from the Nano, I've looked around and managed to find a few left in a local Apple retailer. I'll be buying the old iPod Nano instead of the new one this week, while I can still get them, even though I had not planned to give them to the kids for another year.

Now I can't believe I'm the only one disappointed that the camera is gone... so I have to wonder once again is Apple actually listening to their customers?

If I wanted an iPod that small, I could have purchased an iPod Shuffle instead... the new Nano is just a tad larger than the Shuffle... it's not the size I want, it's the features and removing a feature like the camera was a silly move.