NYCPHP Meetup

[Peter Sawczynec]

I just wanted to take a moment to compliment the NY Times for their
apparently ceaseless commitment to getting the NY Times content online
and then tirelessly ramping in new media delivery styles (slideshows,
inline videos, interactive multilayered charts, flash movies and
presentations, RSS, My Times, etc.), so that the reading of the NY Times
online has actually become a noteworthy and meaningful experience.

For what it is worth, I stopped reading the paper NY Times probably 7
years ago. I get almost all my news from the web and secondly TV. My
radio consumption is also pretty much zero. I do still glance at several
print magazines that I like, but consistently turn to their online
presence as much as possible to actually get some reading done. I don't
have a Kindle, but my personal consumption of downloadable PDFs (maps
and guides, advertising, educational material, user manuals, forms) and
other eBooks has climbed hugely in the last two years.  

But, I must admit that the vast and teeming sprawl of the NY Times
online has, it seems, now even exceeded the sprawl of the Sunday NY
Times print edition (the NY Times online Home Page is 2 feet deep every
single day). Personally, I did not think that would ever happen (and I
got to admit, I stopped reading papers because of their ungainly sprawl
and was lured to web news portals for the better, faster, stronger [<<<
see Kanye West http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZd1Js0QaOI] info
consumption online offered). For expediency, I find myself turning to
other news sites that deliver actually less news but they are somehow
more rapidly, even more literally optically scan-able and digestible.
The evolving triple, quadruple and quintuple sets of intermeshed
vertical and horizontal menu layers at the NY Times online have left me
somewhat put off.

I believe that the NY Times online is one of many elegant living
laboratories of the evolving transfer of serious information
distribution to the web paradigm and it is disclosing that intricacy and
complexity is the norm not the exception. 

But I do think that an as yet unharnessed technique for
compressing/organizing/speeding delivery of online news presentation
(tags, clouds, etc) is yet to come to the fore. 

Personally, I think if before starting any web delivery
task/project/site we first thought how can we optimize this delivery as
if this info was only going to appear in a mobile or ultracompact
format, then we might have a fighting chance of improvising and
reconforming the now totally normal, sprawling, high-bandwidth info wall
of web and presenting it more ingeniously with a smaller faster tighter
delivery format. 

Reflecting on this further, I note that I feel real comfortable and in
control on Amazon.com (despite that they are also retrieving and
presenting millions of units of data) and feel much less in control on
the NY Times site.  

That is all, of course, for what it is worth. 


Warmest regards, 
 
Hombre sin Nombre 
Technology Dir.
Sun-code Interactive
Sun-code.com 
646.316.3678 
ps at sun-code.com







-----Original Message-----
From: talk-bounces at lists.nyphp.org [mailto:talk-bounces at lists.nyphp.org]
On Behalf Of Rob Marscher
Sent: Saturday, June 07, 2008 1:42 AM
To: NYPHP Talk
Subject: Re: [nycphp-talk] amazon aws

> On Jun 6, 2008, at 1:14 PM, Max Gribov wrote:

>>   does anyone have any experience with amazon ec2 cloud?..
>>   It sounds cheap and like the next best thing since sliced bread..  
>> Has anyone tried this beyond a dev environment?

On Jun 6, 2008, at 9:21 PM, Larry Ludwig wrote:
> A few customers have asked this same question to our service.  Hans  
> Z brings up all great issues:  I have posted a blog discussing some  
> of their deficiencies:
http://www.empoweringmedia.com/blog/archives/21

Yeah... I was just talking about this with Larry.  I'm also not  
convinced EC2 is the best thing for hosting pubic web applications at  
this time.  There are hosting companies out there like Larry's that  
provide Xen virtual servers which have a lot of the same advantages as  
EC2 instances, but at a lower monthly cost.

EC2 seems a bit more appropriate for batch and parallel computing in  
short bursts.  For example, anytime you upload a video to S3... you  
could fire up an EC2 instance with an image that has software to  
convert the video into multiple formats/sizes and then place the  
results back on S3 (there's the Amazon SQS service to assist with  
batch processing).  If you don't upload any videos for 10 days, you  
don't have to pay anything.  If you upload 20 videos at once, you  
could potentially start 20 EC2 instances and get the whole job done  
very quickly (20 is the default max for an account... you can raise  
your limit via a special request).

Then there's the stuff that NYTimes has been doing with EC2.  Pretty  
cool:
http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/01/self-service-prorated-super-com
puting-fun/
http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/21/the-new-york-times-archives-ama
zon-web-services-timesmachine/

-Rob

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