April 2009 Archives

During the Olympics last year I postulated that one might beat the IP restrictions on streams at the awesome NBC Olympics site using SSH to a US web host.

This weekend the Formula 1 is on in Malaysia and some of my friends are big F1 fans so they want to watch the pre-race and qualifying coverage which isn't shown on free-to-air in Australia. They go looking online and it turns out the fine folks at the BBC will be streaming it live. Unfortunately, the streams are restricted to UK IPs.

In searching for suitable UK web hosts (suitable meaning of reasonable bandwidth & price) one of them stumbled upon pc-streaming.com. To save you a click I'll paste the relevant bits here:

NEW: PC-Streaming is proud to announce there new 1 Month UK PPTP VPN Holiday/Business account. Going abroad for that long awaited break in the sun? Yet another business trip abroad? Laptop in hand, broadband connection in your room. Then our 1 month Holiday/Business account is for you!

This category is for our Virtual Private Network (VPN) accounts. When you need a total solution for the security of your computer and all of your programs, chat clients, email, and web browsing/surfing, this is the account to get. With multiple country locations, there is plenty to choose from here.

Our UK VPN account is required to view `live´BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5 plus many more channels through the Zattoo media application.

Yes, you read that right. Their VPN & SSH services are marketed for the specific purpose of bypassing IP restrictions. :)

FWIW their service is fairly pricey and you can definitely find cheaper UK web hosts - its just interesting that a business has been setup specifically to help consumers beat IP restrictions. Content providers might just listen to the market and stop making their consumers jump through hoops.

Finally, its also a light jab at the remarkably ignorant Senator Conroy's Grand Internet Filtering Plan. Apart from helping users to view IP restricted content the above can also be used by citizens to bust past the inane attempts to filter The Interwebs.

Time for an anti-Digg?

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One of the common patterns of behaviour amongst my friends is the sharing of links for ridicule. The current theme is Twitter articles, particularly on news.com.au. One of the top stories of the day is nothing more than a single sentence linking to another blog post. An inane link, to an inane post, about inane chatter.

(What has humanity come to?)

The problem with sharing content in a negative context is that it provides the opposite feedback to the site's owner. Even the most primitive of webmasters is likely to be running some basic analytics software, and in sharing links to news.com.au's plethora of Twitter stories to highlight how dumb News is becoming they in effect encourage news.com.au to write further Twitter stories.

I'm not sure what the solution is but there are two facts that I've observed.

The first is that the number of positive feedback mechanisms far outweighs the negatives. For example news.com.au presents no less than 6 links - to Digg, Reddit, Facebook, StumbleUpon etc, and The Australian offers 15!

The Australian's "Share This Article" box with 15 link sharing services
The Australian's "Share This Article" box


The second is that judging by the number of links I receive where the sender aims to ridicule the content originator there appears to be a need for a negative feedback mechanism. People aren't just reading web pages and thinking "whatever", they're going out of their way to highlight how retarded some sites are in order to discourage their friends from visiting those sites in future.

It seems like a negative feedback mechanism would help both users and site owners. Site owners get active feedback that users dislike their content (as opposed to the passive feedback of dropping page views which isn't terribly specific), and can make efforts to avoid doing things that annoy their users.

I wonder if there is some sort of generalised negative feedback service, an "anti-Digg" perhaps. In the same way that a news site might pay attention which stories are getting getting Dugg they may also want to pay attention to stories copping negative feedback around the web.

Does such a service exist?



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About this Archive

This page is an archive of entries from April 2009 listed from newest to oldest.

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