HTML version 5 is coming. One of the more talked about aspects of the long-awaited update is the new <video> tag - and if this clip demonstrating Firefox 3.5 support is any indication, the technology will make for some exciting interactive web video possibilities.  While this would imply a challenge to the preeminence of Adobe’s Flash video technology, I feel that for passive web video viewing at least, Flash will be around for a while.

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Just in case you were wondering - no! d i g i t a l m i s s i v e has not gone into hibernation or is contemplating early retirement. Far from it actually. 

It’s just we’ve all been rather busy with jobs, projects, plus some vacation time here and there, which has caused us to post less than we have since we started this blog in August of last year.

Which brings me to the topic of my (long overdue) post: What happens if a blogger doesn’t blog each and every day? 
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2005:  YouTube loses $271 million

2006:  YouTube loses $276 million

2007:  Google buys YouTube for $1.7 billion

Google doesn’t break out how much YouTube is losing.  However, the pesky problem of just how to monetize user-generated video clips remains unsolved while the dramatic growth in YouTube viewership continues unabated - with nothing to offset the costs of scaling up bandwidth and hardware to meet the increasing demand,  is it unreasonable to estimate that YouTube may be losing somewhere upwards of $1 million per day by now?

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I have to admit I’ve been more than a bit skeptical of recent reports touting mobile video as The Next Big Thing.  Yes, it’s something a lot of people (especially younger people) seem to want, it’s a great use case for us mass-transit users, and with Moore’s Law apparently still in effect, current hardware can now support an excellent user experience.

My issue, though, is with the network.

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As we await the naming of our new “Cyber Czar,”  it’s worth noting just what a jungle it is out there on the internet, and how much we need one.

While working in networking , I had the opportunity to see firsthand the level of garden-variety denial of service attacks a typical DNS server exposed to the public internet faces (DNS, in many ways the soft white underbelly of the internet, is discussed a bit here).

While impressive, though, my experience was limited to small business networks - imagine what it’s like when entire governments go at it: in 2008, the Department of Defense reported almost 360 million attempted attacks - that’s close to a million every day (up from ‘only’ about 6 million in 2006).

Here then, a short list of recent cyber-spying activity…
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We’ve seen great and strange uses of the iPhone before (the experimental show car at left is actually controlled by one), but the $4.99  “Brushes” iPhone App (by Steve Sprang) may be the overall coolest yet.  The cover of this week’s New Yorker Magazine was done by NY-based graphic artist Jorge Colombo using the app, which allows you to paint on you iPhone screen - with its 800x magnification, your fingers are all you need.   Even cooler, the app allows you to record your “brush strokes” -  check out the time-lapse version of Columbo’s work below (there’s even a Flicker group for Brushes iPhone art).

            

All in all, a  great app - and like remixes and mashups, another case of technology encouraging play and creativity.  We like that. A few thoughts, though:

• Since you can record strokes,  this would be a cool tool for animators - could there be an animator-optimized version of Brushes coming soon?
• Imagine this app on the much-anticipated iTouch/netbook/tablet rumored to be launched next year.
• At $4.99, a bit of a landfall for Steve Sprang - and a bit less expensive than Adobe Illustrator!