Jeremiah Owyang has a great think piece on the idea of embedded content. [here]

The piece sums up the foundational idea that has been driving the debate I dropped my self into with regards to the NBC (or any old-tyme media network’s) coverage of the Olympics. The concept of content-management by the leaders online has moved beyond the idea of control, and towards attributed sharing.

It should no longer be a world where national media entries control what you see, but rather the best media gets the highest rating. Would people in the US like to see how other nations treasure their athletes? Maybe another network will focus on Football, Swimming, Diving, etc. more than your network does, so you will chose that content, and share that with your friends/followers/groupies.

If NBC allowed people to embed the content on their own site, they still get the eyeballs (How 1999! But I heard someone use it on NPR yesterday), and the cred that goes with “Joe/Susie says this is the best content and has decided to put it up on their site”.

Embedded content goes to the idea that the best content/presentation will always be the most successful. Controlling the content, as the NBC monopoly on the Olympics has pointed out, just motivates people to find ways to get other perspectives.

My system has a daily job to collect and aggregate the IP Blocks distributed by the five registrars into a single database, and then provide high-level WHOIS information for this data. If you want to try this yourself, the interface here.

On an extremely irregular basis, I aggregate the statistics from this data, and present it to the masses for the examination. I might actually automate this data someday!

So, for August 2007 (as of August 21, 2007), here are the aggregated IP distribution statistics broken down by registrar and country.

Starting with the country data, I figured that a sane cutoff for values would be 1,000,000 IP addresses. The list here is mostly unchanged, except for the addition of the European Union (EU). The EU is a recent addition, as it was not listed in the Country Code lookup table I had been using, and had to be added manually on August 20, 2007.

COUNTRY
IPS


UNITED STATES
1394044928


JAPAN
156239616


CHINA
127511296


EUROPEAN UNION
120433884


UNITED KINGDOM
82641530


CANADA
73318912


GERMANY
69600688


FRANCE
65257760


KOREA, REPUBLIC OF
57733376


AUSTRALIA
32543744


ITALY
24079040


BRAZIL
21366272


SPAIN
20058528


MEXICO
19406848


NETHERLANDS
19265064


TAIWAN, PROVINCE OF CHINA
18736896


SWEDEN
16378336


RUSSIAN FEDERATION
15920408


INDIA
13495040


POLAND
12080076


SOUTH AFRICA
10817792


FINLAND
8577920


TURKEY
8287680


DENMARK
7872864


SWITZERLAND
7311136


HONG KONG
6909952


AUSTRIA
6634208


NORWAY
6611232


ROMANIA
5997696


BELGIUM
5419904


NEW ZEALAND
4971008


CZECH REPUBLIC
4791168


ARGENTINA
4749056


ISRAEL
4042176


CHILE
4041728


IRELAND
3851776


SINGAPORE
3821568


VIETNAM
3795712


THAILAND
3629568


VENEZUELA
3457536


PORTUGAL
3371840


HUNGARY
3312768


MALAYSIA
3133440


GREECE
2941440


COLOMBIA
2817280


UKRAINE
2446144


BULGARIA
2395648


PHILIPPINES
2328832


INDONESIA
2221056


EGYPT
2105088


LITHUANIA
1920384


SAUDI ARABIA
1572608


SLOVAKIA
1358080


IRAN, ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF
1331712


COSTA RICA
1303296


UNITED ARAB EMIRATES
1230848


LATVIA
1161536


SLOVENIA
1060890


PERU
1023744

The next data is the IP addresses by registrar. Again, the order of this list is not surprising, except for the continued overwhelming dominance of ARIN.

REGISTRY
IPS


arin
1552509952


ripencc
497148492


apnic
406221568


lacnic
61819136


afrinic
16387328

I hope that this information is helpful and informative.

Technorati Tags: ARIN, RIPE, LACNIC, AFRINIC, APNIC, registrar, IP bloks, internet dominance, internet geography, statistics

A few years ago, I wrote an article ablout how to best set up Web server cache-control messages to take advantage of this free form of content distribution. Until now, it has only existed as a PDF file.

Last night, I sent a copy to Kevin Burton of TailRank in response to some of his recent musings around making TailRank faster by sending explicit caching messages in his server responses. His response to the PDF was “make it an HTML file”.

You can now find the Caching for Performance article at Webperformance.org, in the Caching Library.

Use it. Live it.

Technorati Tags: Web+performance, Caching, Cache-control, Apache, Performance+tuning

Chuck Cadman, a man and a politician I highly respected, passed away Saturday. [here]

Chuck was a man who was moved into action by a single, life-changing event: the murder of his son in a random attack by a group of boys in 1992. Propelled onto the national stage, Chuck drove his agenda, and his passion, at everyone and anyone who would listen.

He beat the odds when his party tried to throw him out due to political expediency, winning his last election to the Canadian Parliament standing as an independent. In a previous life, I noted that due to the distribution of seats in the last parliament, Chuck held the deciding vote that could sink or save the Liberal Government.

He used that power on May 19, in the last act of his career, flying to Ottawa, full of chemotherapy poison, to cast his vote with the government, and allow the budget to pass.

I will miss you Chuck.

Technorati: Chuck Cadman, canadian politics, Canada

Geek News Central is reporting that their server is getting crushed with all the new iTunes 4.9 users. You had to know this would happen. People have heard the buzz and want to hear what it’s all about.

From a Web performance perspective, podcasts are hellish: large, uncompressible binary files. At least they are able to come along a single TCP connection. But at 10MB+ per file, iTunes is going to fill a lot of pipes, and max a number of bandwith caps.

Multicast streaming was supposed to alleviate this issue; podcasting is just going to make Web performance worse…or at least more noisy.

Now, how will the content distribution networks react? They are likely the only source that can help people relieve their load. The CORAL CDN Project is one source for open-source content distribution.

All in all, Web 2.0 is shaping up to be a bandwidth hog.

Technorati: web performance, podcasting, iTunes 4.9, iTunes

Johnnie Moore posts a great quote from Jeff Tweedy of Wilco, made in an interview with Wired.

A piece of art is not a loaf of bread. When someone steals a loaf of bread from the store, that’s it. The loaf of bread is gone. When someone downloads a piece of music, it’s just data until the listener puts that music back together with their own ears, their mind, their subjective experience. How they perceive your work changes your work.

Treating your audience like thieves is absurd. Anyone who chooses to listen to our music becomes a collaborator.

People who look at music as commerce don’t understand that. They are talking about pieces of plastic they want to sell, packages of intellectual property.

I’m not interested in selling pieces of plastic.

A really big message here. JM asks if you treat your customers like collaborators. I ask the opposite question: Are you selling pieces of plastic? If you are, how up-to-date is your resume?

The folks at NYU Secure Computing Services have developed a really cool open-source content distribution network (CDN) called CORAL.

This looks as though it has potential for us low-bandwidth hosters who get blasted when our content gets Scobelized or Slashdotted.

Via Jon Udell.

I found a great example of a Heavy-Tailed Frequency distribution in my performance data today.

This clearly shows how data in the wild can be distributed in a non-normal fashion. In this case, there is a very heavy weight on the end of the tail, not simply a few straggling outliers.

It has become very unusual to find sites that exihibit this degree of heavy-tailed behaviour  over the last year. When I started in this industry, this was more the norm than the exception.

Ok, in a weird little way, the subtext of the browser wars has started to re-surface in the blogosphere. Everyone is getting into the browser distribution mix.

Including me.

Check out the Browser Percentage Stats for this blog and for the GrabPERF Server.

Thanks to Tim Bray for re-starting this mess.