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 [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Rob Marscher Sent: Saturday, June 07, 2008 1:42 AM To: NYPHP Talk Subject: Re: [nyphp-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 _______________________________________________ New York PHP Community Talk Mailing List http://lists.nyphp.org/mailman/listinfo/talk NYPHPCon 2006 Presentations Online http://www.nyphpcon.com Show Your Participation in New York PHP http://www.nyphp.org/show_participation.php _______________________________________________ New York PHP Community Talk Mailing List http://lists.nyphp.org/mailman/listinfo/talk NYPHPCon 2006 Presentations Online http://www.nyphpcon.com Show Your Participation in New York PHP http://www.nyphp.org/show_participation.php
