Implix recommended that to embed video, include a thumbnail in the email with a clear play button, which invites people to click over to the website to view the video.

But Twitter has had tremendous growth amongst the non-white population. According to Pew Research, “Twitter Update 2011“, while only 9% of White Internet users use Twitter, 25% of Black Internet users and 19% of Hispanic Internet users use TWitter, and half of all Twitter users use Twitter on their phone.

If your product/service needs to reach minority Internet users or young Internet users, you need to have a Twitter strategy.

So a little over 5% of the American population speaks Spanish and very little English, and a little over 5% of the American population speaks Spanish natively.

When Apple was < 5% of the market, people worried about losing 5% market share by not accommodating them. By not offering your website in Spanish, you are losing 5% of the potential market that doesn't speak English well AND 5% of the potential market that speaks Spanish better. As a result of neglect, the keywords are substantially less competitive in both paid and free search, yet they are still neglected.

What are you doing to accommodate this portion of America?

The solution?  An holding table without triggers.

Another table for transmissions was created, that lacks any of the counter code that causes the deadlock.  When a transmission is logged, it is immediately recorded in this simple table, which returns control back to the system.  A background daemon runs that calls a single stored procedure to migrate the data:

1. Record the id of all transmission records in this table (obviously, the database should handle this so changes in other transactions don’t interfere, but doing this explicitly makes it more portable and has a negligible impact on the process.
2. As a single insert, bring all these records from the holding table to the permanent table.
3. Delete these records from the holding table.

As a result of this process, the deadlock condition is resolved, and this procedure takes a fraction of the time because all the updates can be processed in the transaction without conflict.

The only drawback, the system’s counters and transmission log is only accurate to the last time it ran.  To make this as minimal as possible an intrusion, a daemon was written in bash, see this tutorial for a starting point, to simply run the stored procedure, sleep, and run again.  To protect yourself from potential race conditions, which result in deadlocking, do three things to avoid trouble:

1. Use the same sequence for the primary key field in the temp table as the real one.  That way, if you attempt to copy it a second time, it will fail because the ids are in use (this also lets me to bulk adds to the table from a data pull without wasting time in the temp table).
2. Run the function as a dedicated user.  Have the function run with definer permissions, and create a dedicated user to run the script, capped at a single login.
3. Run the daemon, not a cron job.  If something delays the scripts, and you cron job it every minute, then you could start a second copy before the first is completed.  If you write the daemon, then the second job doesn’t run until the first is done.

When using a holding table, make certain that you are simply trying to let the triggers run after control has returned to the client function.  In a less high performance task, a simple LISTEN/NOTIFY structure instead of triggers will get the job done with less complexity.

Caveat, referential integrity can be compromised here if you are not careful.  If things are dependent on this table, this approach will not work, as the records will be recorded in the system, but not passed to the table where foreign keys reference.  Engineering around that limitation may create tremendous complexity.

Alternative Approach to explore: partial replication to a second server.  In that scenario, all the control code (meta code) could replicate from the repository to the secondary server(s).  Each of those could hold temporary insert tables.  In that case, as you add servers, make the sequences on each server count by multiples (two servers, one uses evens for ids, one uses odds).  Then you can replicate those tables back to the main database with the LISTEN/NOTIFY system, not worried about multiple calls in short order.

However, the process of making a website fast is pretty straight forward:

1. Home Page and other enterances: VERY fast and simple
2. Limit third party items that might cause delays via DNS or download
3. Prevent things that can get VERY slow from being on these pages

One and two are the ones most often paid attention to, but #3 is potentially the biggest impact and most ignored.  For example, adding gzip to your server cuts file transmission size, that saves time, and is nice, and can get 80 ms loads to 20 ms loads, but #3 is where page loads can move from 100 ms to 10-15 seconds.  For example, if you query the database to build your navigation, it’s easier to manage your navigation, but a hiccup at the database level (that locks that table), and your site hangs loading.  A solution like Memcached moves your “read only” data out of the database and into RAM.  You can still manage it in the database, and the site will update relatively quickly, but there is no reason to consult the database multiple times for information that changes infrequently.

Third party servers often get ignored, but you have no control of when they have problems.  Serving Javascript from a third party has the advantage that you don’t have to maintain it, but puts you at risk of the user’s experience massively degrading.  Consider removing as many third party elements as possible.  Solutions like Google’s Javascript based tracking for Google Analytics has the advantage of having near-zero impact on page load (except the transmission of the text – and the download of the Javascript library), but unlike images, tends to not have performance problems, and the site will load even if it is having trouble obtaining the Javascript library at the bottom of your page.

Getting the 50% – 200% improvements are great, but a real focus on the few things that can explode out of control will serve you better in the long run.

Facebook Open Graph allows one to connect their site to Facebook without full integration, simply using new Facebook Meta Tags and the Like Button (a snipped of Javascript code).  Facebook is tracking these likes and building a “graph” of the Internet based upon the recommendations of your social network, and now they are including relevant results when you search Facebook for something.

This creates an opportunity for companies that are bringing their brand to Facebook to get additional exposure through Open Graph, which creates an incentive to use the technology.  This is exciting, as the move to the “walled garden” of social media threatened to disrupt the open world of search.  In the past, users could recommend a page on their blog, creating a “link graph” for the search engines to use, but now it’s easier to just click “share” and send the link out to your friends that way.  Without this part of the link graph, the search engines are missing out on the recommendations that they build their systems upon.

Open Graph brings out the ability to restore this, even if Facebook is the only company taking advantage of it for now.

Our notion of copyright, the exclusive right of an author/creator to control distribution, makes less and less sense as the technology evolves.  Copyright, at it’s core, protected the author from exploitation from the owners of the printing press.  Without copyright, the owner of the printing press would be able to create multiple copies of a book, article, etc., without compensation to the original author.

Consider as a thought exercise, a novel writer, who brings a sample to a press owner, who agrees to share the revenues with the author.  Without copyright, that author would be able to collect from that press owner, but had no protection from dozens of other press owners taking that work and making copies without compensation.  Copyright protected the author.  Our founding fathers established limited protection, 14 years for registered copyrights, with another 14 year renewal available, which made the protection a limited time.  With extensions and treaty obligations, Congress has extended the protection to around 100 years, give or take, depending upon whether it is published, (70 years after the death of author, or for corporate works, 95 years from publication or 120 years from creation, whichever expires first).  This has insured that all works are protected seemingly forever.

However, in a digital realm, we are no longer worrying about the press owners, but everyone.  Everyone with a computer is capable of duplicating any work, so copyright attempts to regulate everyone.  In addition, the terms have been extended beyond anything reasonable, making the “public domain” trade-off merely theoretical.  For a television show released in 2010, it will be in the public domain in 2105, when nobody will have the ability to duplicate the product.  As culture speeds up, the lifespan of these works is measured in months or years, yet the copyright will last nearly 100 years.

In the computer space, we see the blatantly illegal Abandonware issue, where enthusiasts have archives of no longer available products available for download and possible emulation.  While one might question the literary importance of early computer games, they certainly played a role in American and global culture, and the copyright regime makes it likely that these works will never be available.  Publishers from the 1980s and 1990s are long gone, the copyright holders defunct or swallowed into larger companies, all with no interest in preserving the works of that time period.  For every game like Civilization with endless sequels (and presumably originals maintained and later republished as Flash games or equivalent), there are plenty of games that were exciting but the company went defunct, and changing architecture makes it impossible to maintain.

If I want to show my son the games of my youth, the laws of copyright may not apply (the disks/cartridges may be in a box at my parents house), but with no way to play them, the laws of code render them gone.  The copyright system simply has no way of maintaining preservation of our digital past.  Websites go up and down, articles disappear or are archived, and the only record may be a print out that someone grabbed at the time, threw in a box, and has no legal right to republish.

The intersection of law and code is interesting, because the code permits saving the file and ANYONE republishing it, while the law prohbits anyone from doing so.  Alternative, in the case of abandon ware, the law permits me to own and play my purchased copy, but doesn’t permit any reasonable way of actually doing so without the works of those flaunting the laws.

Napster may be long gone, but for over 10 years, nobody assumes an obligation to pay for anything, just choosing to for convenience.  Copyright is increasing a blunt instrument, simply at odds with how people publish and consume content.  Youtube lets anyone with an interest parody something, but leaves the enforcement of fair use to the increasing lawsuit nervous companies to simply take down something that uses a few seconds of clips.  The meaning of copyright needs to be reconsidered when everyone can duplicate, creating of content may be increasingly expensive, and our culture may simply be at the mercy of technology.

Decades of movies that will never be released in a digital format may exist in people’s VHS collection, but without a way to play them, they’ll simply be lost.  Culture is important, and who knows what future historians will be interested in when researching culture of the 20th and 21st century.  Some of our early writing samples are of mundane things, simply because they survived, and it is tragic if we simply litigate our creative history out of existence.  Current copyright is obsolete, and a new line needs to be drawn to preserve our culture and our rights.

Disney may not be interested in re-releasing Song of the South, but should they be allowed to keep it out of the nation’s cultural archive?

The idea of a non-pornographic gentleman’s lifestyle magazine being promoted by Playboy is intriguing, and definitely capitalizes on an extremely well known brand.  In recent years, Playboy’s iconic magazine has been a money loser, with the value from the brand in royalties and merchandising, plus the pay per view movie channels being the dominant areas of growth.  With the collapse of well known magazines in recent years, it will be interesting in Playboy can extend their brand to the non-adult fare.

In middle school, our science teacher brought in an interview conducted by Playboy, which was an extremely good interview, with much amusement from the class about the source.  She told us she sent her poor embarrassed husband in to purchase the magazine for her to run off copies of the article for us to read.

While I’m certain that the school district had a copyrighted materials policy, I’m pretty sure that a purchase order for 50 – 100 copies of Playboy magazine would have raised red flags, even if they were able to cut out the pages of the interview without the “dirty bits.”

The administrations has decided to crack down on this practice, which will drastically affect the career prospects of current college students.  By eliminating this practice, firms will dramatically decrease the numbers of positions that they offer, which will result in more college graduates leaving school with a pile of student loans and no work experience.  The administration feels that internships are volunteers, and only the government and non-profits can have volunteers.  The affect of this on the media is the subject of this rant by John Stossel, which illustrates part of the problem.

Given the high unemployment rate, teenagers and students are struggling to find summer employment, because they are competing with out of work people that can work year round without restrictions.  This leaves internships as one of the prime sources for job experience for students, a position being targeted by the administration.  We already know that graduating in a recession hurts your income for ten years compared to graduating in good times.  A 22 college graduate without an internship on their resume is not only competing against those that were able to get a paying internship, but against the 23 year old that graduated the previous year, has the internship, and a year of experience.

My resume coming out of college was filled with internships from high school and college, albeit paid because computer internships were normally paid in the dot-com era, without those experiences, I would have had tremendous difficulty my first years out of school, a decision being laid upon today’s college students.  Given that the administration received two-thirds the votes of the 18-30 crowd, I do not understand why they are taking a position that will have a huge negative affect on those young professionals starting their careers.

What makes this interesting is that Labour’s 13 year run included the entire Internet revolution.  When the Conservative Party last held power, 1997, the Internet was in its infancy, and primarily in America.  Now 70% of UK Households have broadband, an entire new industry has cropped up.  In 1997, Windows 95 was still new at bundling Internet Explorer, Netscape was the dominant platform, and plenty of homes lacked a personal computer.

The Internet world is dominated by issues of privacy, security, and taxation.  How will a center-right government approach issues of International trade for services and virtual products.  A young Internet marketer was in middle school when the Tories last held power, making the UK a fixed entity for most of their life.

The International Media is focused on Foreign Policy and issues regarding EU integration, but nobody is talking about any of the areas that might affect our area of the economy.  With the Conservatives pull back from the EU, resulting in less onerous privacy issues, will tax reform make doing business in the UK more interesting?  When we were expanding Creditcards.com, we hosted a UK site (uk.creditcards.com) in the UK, and dealing with issues of payment and legalities were onerous, and issue that a new Conservative government make seek to change.

Labour’s base was “working class” men and women in the cities, the knowledge economy wasn’t a blip on their radar.  Does a new legal environment open up exciting opportunities, or will this area of the economy be ignored.  A hung parliament with a minority or coalition government usually doesn’t last long in the UK’s system, so minor changes and a “snap poll” within a year is possible, or will the Conservatives try to make major changes fast before their government falls and they return to the polls?