All the bandwidth you'll ever need!!
By Hiawatha Bray July 18, 2005
It's the Internet's favorite price point: zero. From software to movie trailers, the freebies just keep coming. Usually they're come-ons, designed to focus our eyeballs on digital advertisements. But some online giveaways are utterly devoid of strings, and utterly compelling.
Information is often free; storing and transmitting it never is. Luckily these online services are dirt-cheap for most of us. Your Internet service provider probably throws in free website hosting as part of your monthly subscription fee. People who want to set up their own Internet domains subscribe to independent hosting services. Some of these outfits will give you half a gigabyte of online storage for a mere $10 a month. That's ample for most personal websites and blogs.
Then there are companies like Blogger.com, which will host your blog for free. Blogger.com is owned by Google. With its billions of dollars in ad revenues, the huge search company can afford to be generous, especially with disk drive prices so low. Even at retail, a gigabyte of data storage now costs about 75 cents; bought in bulk it's cheaper yet. And remember that most websites are mainly text, which takes up very little space.
But although a good-size website, complete with pictures, might use up 10 megabytes, a single podcast can easily devour that much storage space. If you upload new podcasts on a regular basis, and maintain an archive of your older shows, you'll have hundreds of megabytes in need of a good home. It gets worse for video bloggers -- that small but growing band who use camcorders to chronicle their lives and times. Not many people are publishing their personal movies yet, but those who do must figure out how to store files that can easily hit 50 or 100 megabytes.
Then there's a problem most Web page hobbyists never consider -- the bandwidth factor. Web hosting services spend lots of money on their connections to the Internet. As usage increases, the hosting companies must buy faster, larger Internet connections. To cover the cost of all of this bandwidth, the companies set data-transfer limits on each account. Text-based sites rarely bump up against these limits. But any podcaster or video blogger with a sizable audience will soon hit his data-transfer limit, and receive a bill for excess bandwidth use.
So it's surprising to learn that only 28,000 Internet users have signed up at ourmedia.org, a new Internet service that's giving away both storage and bandwidth, for personal use, at no charge. Any podcaster, text blogger, or video blogger can sign up for a free account at ourmedia.org, and publish as much as he wants, for as long as he wants.
It sounds like a classic Internet come-on: free bandwidth in exchange for a flood of on-screen advertisements. But ourmedia.org's not driven by a quest for profit. It's the latest venture of the Internet Archive, an ongoing effort to catalog and preserve every document posted online. Brewster Kahle, a veteran of the long-gone Cambridge supercomputer firm Thinking Machines, launched the archive in 1996, with money earned from a successful Internet business venture. Today, the archive, located online at www.archive.org, gets funding from multiple sources, including the National Science Foundation and the Library of Congress. It contains about 40 billion pages spanning most of the Web's history.
The Internet Archive is, alas, a mess. Its crude search tool is lousy for looking up files on specific topics. On the other hand, if you want to review past postings at a specific site -- say, CNN.com's coverage of the Sept. 11 attacks -- you'll find it here.
For all of its flaws, the archive has made an excellent start at preserving our online history. It could do an even better job if more Internet users published their files here in the first place. Enter ourmedia.org, an idea conceived by a couple of the archive's biggest fans.
Journalist J.D. Lasica, author of the new book ''Darknet," cooked up the plan along with Marc Canter, cofounder of software company Macromedia Inc.
''We both saw that digital media had become so pervasive that people can pretty easily create this stuff," said Lasica, ''but it's still pretty hard to share this stuff."
So Lasica and Canter drew up a proposal for an eternal free hosting service. They successfully pitched it to Kahle as a way to enhance the archive, at lower cost than the current method, which uses ''spider" software to search for new Web pages.
''We can bring you contemporary culture," Lasica told Kahle, ''and we'll put it up on your servers."
Pornography is banned from ourmedia.org; so are files that violate copyright laws. Otherwise, anything goes.
Despite the Internet Archive's vast size, it had plenty of unused disk space. Which is why Internet publishers can publish their biggest, fattest multimedia files on the ourmedia.org servers for free -- a price that Lasica said will never increase.
That's easy to say with just 28,000 users. But after reading this, legions of Boston Globe readers will no doubt sign up, then tell their friends. Next thing you know, ourmedia.org has several million users and a massive bill for storage and bandwidth. How can the company keep giving it away?
''We're going to look for different additional partnerships," said Lasica. ''We're already in discussions with Yahoo about that."
They don't just want money from the huge Internet company. Lasica and Canter want Yahoo and other companies to host portions of ourmedia.org on their own computers. They hope to transform Ourmedia into a distributed storage system, housed in servers worldwide. Companies could donate unused server space and bandwidth, allowing the ourmedia.org service to expand without limit.
As for the indexing problem, Lasica is also talking to Blinkx.com, the company that recently launched a podcast search engine. Blinkx.com uses speech-recognition software to identify the words used in audio and video files. Then it indexes those words so you can look up podcasts and videos on any topic.
With corporate financial and technical support, ourmedia.org could become the Internet's richest and most user-friendly multimedia site -- and for publishers, definitely the cheapest. It's such an appealing vision that it's sure to enrich someone. Not Lasica, Canter, and Kahle, perhaps. But certainly the rest of us.
Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@globe.com.
-posted by Kimberly Brown @ 10/16/2005 03:26:00 PM
It's the Internet's favorite price point: zero. From software to movie trailers, the freebies just keep coming. Usually they're come-ons, designed to focus our eyeballs on digital advertisements. But some online giveaways are utterly devoid of strings, and utterly compelling.
Information is often free; storing and transmitting it never is. Luckily these online services are dirt-cheap for most of us. Your Internet service provider probably throws in free website hosting as part of your monthly subscription fee. People who want to set up their own Internet domains subscribe to independent hosting services. Some of these outfits will give you half a gigabyte of online storage for a mere $10 a month. That's ample for most personal websites and blogs.
Then there are companies like Blogger.com, which will host your blog for free. Blogger.com is owned by Google. With its billions of dollars in ad revenues, the huge search company can afford to be generous, especially with disk drive prices so low. Even at retail, a gigabyte of data storage now costs about 75 cents; bought in bulk it's cheaper yet. And remember that most websites are mainly text, which takes up very little space.
But although a good-size website, complete with pictures, might use up 10 megabytes, a single podcast can easily devour that much storage space. If you upload new podcasts on a regular basis, and maintain an archive of your older shows, you'll have hundreds of megabytes in need of a good home. It gets worse for video bloggers -- that small but growing band who use camcorders to chronicle their lives and times. Not many people are publishing their personal movies yet, but those who do must figure out how to store files that can easily hit 50 or 100 megabytes.
Then there's a problem most Web page hobbyists never consider -- the bandwidth factor. Web hosting services spend lots of money on their connections to the Internet. As usage increases, the hosting companies must buy faster, larger Internet connections. To cover the cost of all of this bandwidth, the companies set data-transfer limits on each account. Text-based sites rarely bump up against these limits. But any podcaster or video blogger with a sizable audience will soon hit his data-transfer limit, and receive a bill for excess bandwidth use.
So it's surprising to learn that only 28,000 Internet users have signed up at ourmedia.org, a new Internet service that's giving away both storage and bandwidth, for personal use, at no charge. Any podcaster, text blogger, or video blogger can sign up for a free account at ourmedia.org, and publish as much as he wants, for as long as he wants.
It sounds like a classic Internet come-on: free bandwidth in exchange for a flood of on-screen advertisements. But ourmedia.org's not driven by a quest for profit. It's the latest venture of the Internet Archive, an ongoing effort to catalog and preserve every document posted online. Brewster Kahle, a veteran of the long-gone Cambridge supercomputer firm Thinking Machines, launched the archive in 1996, with money earned from a successful Internet business venture. Today, the archive, located online at www.archive.org, gets funding from multiple sources, including the National Science Foundation and the Library of Congress. It contains about 40 billion pages spanning most of the Web's history.
The Internet Archive is, alas, a mess. Its crude search tool is lousy for looking up files on specific topics. On the other hand, if you want to review past postings at a specific site -- say, CNN.com's coverage of the Sept. 11 attacks -- you'll find it here.
For all of its flaws, the archive has made an excellent start at preserving our online history. It could do an even better job if more Internet users published their files here in the first place. Enter ourmedia.org, an idea conceived by a couple of the archive's biggest fans.
Journalist J.D. Lasica, author of the new book ''Darknet," cooked up the plan along with Marc Canter, cofounder of software company Macromedia Inc.
''We both saw that digital media had become so pervasive that people can pretty easily create this stuff," said Lasica, ''but it's still pretty hard to share this stuff."
So Lasica and Canter drew up a proposal for an eternal free hosting service. They successfully pitched it to Kahle as a way to enhance the archive, at lower cost than the current method, which uses ''spider" software to search for new Web pages.
''We can bring you contemporary culture," Lasica told Kahle, ''and we'll put it up on your servers."
Pornography is banned from ourmedia.org; so are files that violate copyright laws. Otherwise, anything goes.
Despite the Internet Archive's vast size, it had plenty of unused disk space. Which is why Internet publishers can publish their biggest, fattest multimedia files on the ourmedia.org servers for free -- a price that Lasica said will never increase.
That's easy to say with just 28,000 users. But after reading this, legions of Boston Globe readers will no doubt sign up, then tell their friends. Next thing you know, ourmedia.org has several million users and a massive bill for storage and bandwidth. How can the company keep giving it away?
''We're going to look for different additional partnerships," said Lasica. ''We're already in discussions with Yahoo about that."
They don't just want money from the huge Internet company. Lasica and Canter want Yahoo and other companies to host portions of ourmedia.org on their own computers. They hope to transform Ourmedia into a distributed storage system, housed in servers worldwide. Companies could donate unused server space and bandwidth, allowing the ourmedia.org service to expand without limit.
As for the indexing problem, Lasica is also talking to Blinkx.com, the company that recently launched a podcast search engine. Blinkx.com uses speech-recognition software to identify the words used in audio and video files. Then it indexes those words so you can look up podcasts and videos on any topic.
With corporate financial and technical support, ourmedia.org could become the Internet's richest and most user-friendly multimedia site -- and for publishers, definitely the cheapest. It's such an appealing vision that it's sure to enrich someone. Not Lasica, Canter, and Kahle, perhaps. But certainly the rest of us.
Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@globe.com.
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