blackrimglasses

I periodically will take a dive into our statistics to check out trends I see. This doesn’t happen as often as I’d like, as we have 100+ sites and its time I don’t necessarily have. This week though I did and found something interesting. Typically I take a look at browser stats to find trends in the growth of “alternative” browsers.

As you know, IE6 is deprecated, a piece of shit and a pain in the ass. It costs us a lot of money to support it, and in general I wish for its speedy death. Every few weeks I take a look at browser stats in the hope that we’ve passed 50% in the IE7, Firefox and Safari realm. Good news is, IE7 has overtaken IE6 by a considerable margin. But I digress.

One of the more interesting things I’ve found is what is happening in the bottom 1.5 to .5% of the browsers that are hitting our sites. I’m starting to see devices appear en masse which are not PC’s.

• Playstation 3 - 0.03- 0.15%
• iPhone /iPod Touch- 0.52% - 1%
• SymbianOS - 0.02- 0.05%
• Playstation Portable - 0.02% - 0.02%
• Nintendo Wii - 0.01% - 0.06%
• Danger Hiptop - 0.05%

The specific percentages vary a lot toward what the demographic of the artist is, except in the case of the iPod/iPhone, where its pretty consistent. Bands with higher “gamer” audience types (18-24 yr old males) have more video game usage, while brands like Nonesuch Records are mostly entirely iPhone and iPod. Interestingly enough, Nonesuch is also 35% Mac usage. Artists like Michael Buble have mostly iPhone based smartphones and nearly zero video game consoles. Nashville audiences show PalmOS usage, almost entirely Windows PC based browsers and some iPhone. Tween girls? PC users, but lots of Firefox.

Interestingly enough, very few Blackberry’s.

Other devices which are starting to see emergence as “non-traditional” browsing methods:

• HTC devices, including P3700, P4350, P5000 and S730
• Samsung Blackjack

All told, its fascinating to see how quickly nascent browsing experiences are creeping up there in terms of adoption and usage. A year and a half ago, we never saw an iPhone or iPod on our charts, and the PS3 was non existent as a browser platform. The Wii as well.

But its hard to think that we shouldn’t have seen this coming. 1080P television sets run at a resolution that makes them usable at 10 feet as a computer platform. I run my MacMini through our 52″ LCD as much as I run DirectTV through it, and on the weekends I use it as my second screen via the Synergy keyboard/mouse sharing program. With living rooms, dorm suites, apartments and lofts more and more coming standard with huge LCD’s hanging on walls, its no wonder that people don’t see them as an extension of the computing experience.

Like it or not, television has become an interactive experience, but not because the broadcasters did anything to curate that. If anything, broadcasters have been sitting on their hands in terms of the possibilities of the bandwidth and platforms they helped put in our homes!

The interactive experience on Tivo, Moxi’s, DirectTV’s and Cisco set-tops is terrible. Its non-intuitive, input methods are difficult, and the interfaces are super slow. The DirectTV is a joke. You’d think they’d at least optimize graphics! Its a small computer they have in there, with the heat dissipation of one too.

People make their own interactive experiences via the use of laptops, iPhones and handhelds. Amy and I spend half the time we are watching television looking up information on what we’re looking at on our iPhones or MacBook pro’s. Is it any wonder that television based sites we have like Nashville Star see significant spikes during the broadcast, but not after or between?

With the settop boxes not providing meaningful interactive experiences, people are turning to PS3’s and even Wii’s, which at their most basic core have the capability of connecting to and showing content via web browsers. To date, they are not as tied to the gaming platforms as they should be, but I can see that changing.

The question is now not whether or not the 10 foot viewing experience, and the 4 inch (iPhone) is viable for the Internet, but whether or not those that are synergistically tied to the television and handheld will adopt, capitalize and make experiences tailored for both the 10 foot and the 4 inch experiences. And more importantly, how will the traditional monetization platforms (Adsense, CPM based display ads) adapt to a landscape where spectatorship is so skewed to the onus of the viewer rather than the onus of those driving the content?

The use of the television, handheld and other devices as Internet platforms subverts the devices purposes to such a degree that the economic platforms that govern their respective ecosystems are equally subverted and rendered nearly irrelevant. Display advertising, temporal advertising (commercials), usage based charges and other economic systems aren’t in tune with nascent usage and thus we have not only an uncapitalized usage system, but also a rather anarchic one.

I for one welcome the anarchy.

Right now I sit in my living room with a laptop on my lap, my 52″ LCD displaying a dashboard of traffic on all WBR sites, my iPhone next to me with a browser view of my houses lighting system, RSS feeds running on the television and the Sonos streaming audio through the house from Rhapsody.

12 years ago I wished for the day when the Internet followed me rather than me having to seek it out. That day is here. And the thing is: there is no better time to be making content than the present. 10 years ago, or even 5, people had to invent the platforms of transmission for every new idea of content representation. VHS begot DVD begot BluRay, etc. Quality necessitated different modalities. Even artistic expression as dictated by platform adoption (see the current debate about Neil Young’s archives and BluRay).

We’re now entering into a system where the modality of representation is not dependent on format, but connectivity. Super exciting times.

The real question is though: how will the producers of content adapt? And how will the relationship between producer/consumer change and adapt?

So after my latest bitchy post decrying the ridiculousness of parties such as Mashable’s, etc, as well as the concept of Tech Scenesters and professional conference attendees who actually don’t do anything technical, I’ve decided that I want to do a gathering that is focused on the following:

• Intellectual and technological discourse around problems with solutions born of and through technology
• No scenesters, no trendy topics, no discussion of emerging technology without implementable details (ie, no “Attention Economy” shit, this is not the Web 2.0 conference). If you’re discussing The Attention Economy, prepare some equations.
• Technology born of necessity should also be born of and through historical situations that arise its need. For instance, no fair talking about “the social graph” without first discussing connectionism, complexity and graph theory. Bonus points for talking about stimergy and Actor Network Theory.
• Philosophical discussion about technology is encouraged, including connectionism, AI and emergence, ramifications of future-tech, graph theory, data-analyses and collective intelligence
• Fringe tech needs to be grounded in reason. No freetardism without an understanding of market economics. No “down with ____ industry” without fundamentally understanding how that industry works. This is not a place for ideology, but rather pedagogy and discussion.
• No startup pitches. This is about what YOU do, not what an analog of you does

To be encouraged:

• Futurism and speculative technology discussion
• Discussion of analogs and grounding philosophies behind technology (mind/body -> emergence)
• Totally geeky CS / ECE talk, ie: algorithms, protocols
• Interdisciplinary parallels to technology, ie: conceptual art, music, comparative literature, medicine, biology, theoretical physics
• Hacking and playing with technology in real time. Nothing is better than geeks playing.
• Interdisciplinary technology - I’d love to see MaxMSP/Jitter, Maya, micro-controllers, ambient technology, retro-technology, non-representational art, algorithmic art, MATLAB, etc. Musicians, artists, engineers, theoretical physicists, nerdy record executives (ahem) and scientists.

I don’t have a venue, or a date. Yet. I have support from some.

I have a name:

The Octet - one from eight, eight to many, four to connect the world.

Coming soon Stay tuned.