Observations of MacWorld Blogging

Today was the keynote address at MacWorld 2008.  I observed quite a few things this year that didn't happen in years past.

For instance this year seemed like everyone was live blogging the event. From Fake Steve to Valleywag to the normal web information outlets for MacWorld Keynotes: Engadget, MacRumors and Gizmodo.

But it seemed the first timers didn't have much luck with keeping their servers up.  Fake Steve was using a third party web app to stream the live blogging directly to his blog.  Unfortunately the app crashed almost as soon as the keynote started.

Fake Steve then went to the back up plan of using Twitter. Valleywag had also planned on live blogging via Twitter.  MacRumorsLive had planned on also posting it's updates to twitter as well as on their website and IRC channel.

Ok so with these big names live blogging on Twitter as well as countless others at the keynote and with millions of people trying to refresh to get the latest from twitter on what was happening....well let's just say Twitter buckled.  It went down hard for at least an hour. Even now they are rate limiting the API calls to less then the normal 70 an hour to try to take the pressure off.

With all the live blogging, I found a few who tried to stream video from the Keynote. We watched this stream until someone asked the guy to lower his Camera/phone.  The picture was crappy and the sound quality wasn't the greatest but at least you could sort of make out what was going on and related back to the MacRumorsLive notes.  We observed at the peak the stream had over 9000 concurrent viewers.  The most surprising thing heard in that stream?  A baby crying in the audience, seriously who brings a baby to an event like this?

I heard iJustine tried to Stream as well.  Seems like she suffered the same fate as above.

But that brings me to my next point live video streaming seemed to be big during CES but it was really noticable today.  I caught Scoble recording most of this evening with his Nokia N95.  Here he is with Leo Laporte at MacWorld.  Here Scoble interviews Qik founder when a Video streaming orgy breaks out by four different people one being iJustine.


So who had the best info this year. Engadget had the best write ups but their server were starting to buckle from people constantly reloading.  Their page took forever to come back up.  MacRumorsLive had an awesome AJAX solution that didn't require you to do anything photos and updates "magically" appeared on your screen when updates occured.  In my opinion MacRumorsLive won the bragging rights.

It's fun to see how the new technology made today a much more interesting event to watch from a far.  It was also fun to see how the old technology players struggled as they are the now go to outlets for this event.

Either way with everyone sharing information it makes it easy for everyone to experience the keynote as closely as they do.  Thanks to you all for your hard work.

A look at my most popular posts of 2007

I switched the focus on my blog to be more informational about problems I solved and to help others find that information a little easier because of my high ranking in Google.

Here are the top five posts from 2007:

1. Case sensitivity, SVN and Windows is a recipe for disaster - this was a problem I encountered while working with Subversion and a repository on a linux server and that had created two versions of the same file but with different cases.  My client tools would error because it didn't know which file to grab.
2. Uninstalling Cisco VPN client kills internet access - This was a huge problem I encountered when I uninstalled my VPN client on my laptop.  After trying all weekend and letting the System Admins at work look at it and give up I finally found a solution hidden in a forum buried way low on the page.  This was one of those problems I really wanted to bring the solution to the forefront for other users as fast as possible.  In October something must of happened and I started to get really heavy traffic for this page from search engines.  Every comment I get from someone I helped with this solution brings a smile to my face.
3. Pulling twitter updates with JSON and jQuery - I posted the code to my solution to pulling in Twitter updates via JSON and jQuery.  I use this code on the right to display my last three Twitter updates.  I like using Twitter and have limited the number of posts on my blog in favor of just posting my personal tid bits to twitter and letting them display that way and leaving more of the professional posts to the blog.
4. Sushi Nirvana - This post details my starting out with making sushi.
5. Monroe County to get Wireless Internet - This was a post to shed light on the news about a wireless internet network in the city.  I was able to connect to the network in November on a flight I took to NYC.  Unfortunately you need to be a Frontier telephone customer to connect, which I am not (Vonage) or you need to pay the daily fee to get access.  I opted for the free airport wifi instead.

So there is a look at the most popular story pages from the year.