David Sifry, who developed the leading blog tracking software, Technorati, has a three part series; The State of the Blogosphere.

He and the team at Technorati put together some high level information on the growth of the blogosphere, both in the number of bloggers as well as the growth of new blogs per day.

Sifry says, “MSN Spaces, Blogger, LiveJournal, AOL Journals, as well as a number of international hosted services are growing quickly, and use of software like WordPress and Movable Type to provide blogs continue to grow significantly”.

Summary:

• Technorati was tracking over 14.2 Million weblogs, and over 1.3 billion links in July 2005
• The blogosphere continues to double about every 5.5 months
• A new blog is created about every second, there are over 80,000 created daily
• About 55% of all blogs are active, and that has remained a consistent statistic for at least a year
• About 13% of all blogs are updated at least weekly

Part 2 covers Posting Volume

“As you can see by the black trend line, posting volume has followed a strong upward trend”.

There’s also been a significant jump in tools making it easy to post to weblogs, including Flickr, TextAmerica, Buzznet, del.icio.us, and others, so posting can be as easy as tagging an interesting link or snapping a photo on your cameraphone.

I’d like to point out as well that Technorati’s median time from post to index has now dropped to under 5 minutes. That means that on average, public blog posts are indexed by Technorati in less than 5 minutes after they are created or modified, and are thus available in our search and tag results.

In Part 3: Tags and Tagging, Sifry says;

First a look at the total number of blog posts with tags. The pickup rate has been nothing short of remarkable, over 25 Million blog posts with categories or tags, as shown in the chart below:

I can honestly say that no one at Technorati was expecting an adoption rate of that magnitude.

Oh, and one more thing: Thanks to our the computer visualization whizzes at the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University, we came up with a video that shows the growth of tags in the blogosphere. You can see the most popular tags tracked each day as time goes from January (when things were still on a workbench) to late June 2005, when Technorati had tracked a total of about 20 Million tagged posts.

This is the video that was shown at the AlwaysOn conference last month, and we’ve had numerous requests to put it up on the internet. Thanks to a very generous donation of storage and bandwith from our friends at Ourmedia.org and The Internet Archive who have put the video up on their servers. You can watch the 320×160 version or the full size video (coming soon!).

As Om Malik puts it:

Tags are the new black. Everyone seems to be doing it. People are investing in them, companies are promoting them. They even have their own event,Tag Tuesday. So when I finally got around to upgrading Ecto to its latest release, I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to insert tags into the posts. Except for one little catch - the tags were linked to the Technorati site.

Technorati is one of those new open media start-ups that is always making news, for its ground breaking work, or for some not so great reasons.

Podcasting | No Comments »

As senators and representatives stake out their ground, tech companies need to weigh in to offset the telecom industry’s considerable influence, say’s eWeek’s Chris Nolan.

She explains cities and towns see free wireless as a way to keep and attract residents and businesses while phone and cable companies see these moves as competition.

A look at a fight that just ended in Texas provides some clues about how tech can win this one when it goes up against the phone guys.

The Community Broadband Act of 2005, is sponsored by Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D- N.J.) and Sen. John McCain (R-Ari.), head of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee. It would let cities, towns and counties build their own wireless networks.

A rival piece of legislation, the Preserving Innovation in Telecommunications Act of 2005,” would ban that activity. It is sponsored by U.S. Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas), who is a former employee of SBC, the phone company that serves the nation’s Western and Southwestern states.

Widespread interest certainly helped Austin Wireless City the free municipal service provided to Austin, Texas, residents win its battle in the Texas legislature against SBC.

It wasn’t an easy fight. “They have more lobbyists than we have representatives in the capitol,” says Rich MacKinnon, president of Austin Wireless. Like a lot of other municipal providers, he’s worried about what might happen in Washington. “The rewrite on the federal level could even be more important,” he says.

In Texas, Dell also based in the state and Intel lobbied against the phone companies. So did TechNet, the tech industry’s lobbying group. The Consumers Union, as well as the state’s municipal leagues, also joined in. So Austin Wireless had widespread support when it went to talk to state legislators.

Those circumstances need to be recreated at the federal level. The fight, as MacKinnon indicates, is an important one for many cities and towns anxious to keep jobs and encourage innovation.

The 1996 Telecom Act won’t be rewritten this year work in earnest probably won’t start until after the 2006 elections but change is coming. The phone companies are all ready. Tech should be ready, too.

This piece in The Oregonian offers details of Intel sending advisors to US communities attempting to set up municipal networks. Intel believes that WiMAX promotion and municipal needs align.

DailyWireless has more on Duopoly Laws and FCC To Lock Out DSL Competitors.

Municipal Wireless, Radio Policy News, Society & Telecom | No Comments »

Both the FCC and the Justice Department approved Sprint’s $35 billion merger with Nextel yesterday, creating the third largest wireless company in the United States with more than 40 million wireless subscribers and $40 billion in annual revenue.

“This action will ensure that consumers continue to receive the benefits of wireless competition, such as reduced prices and increased coverage,” said the commission’s chairman, Republican Kevin Martin. “In addition, consumers can expect improved service quality and more advanced services.”

Consumer advocates worried that the deal may leave just three major players.

“The good news is that the merged companies should be able to better compete against Verizon and Cingular,” said Gene Kimmelma, senior policy director at Consumer Union, the publisher of Consumer Reports magazine. “The bad news is that we may have lost the opportunity to also preserve enough spectrum for a fourth strong competitor in this market,” Kimmelman added.

Sprint gets access to Nextel’s 15.3 million subscribers and Nextel avoids a costly upgrade of its own network. The two companies will own and control most of the licensed 2.5GHz frequencies available for WiMax in the United States. Craig McCaw’s Clearwire owns a majority of the remaining frequencies.

The new Sprint Nextel Corp. plans to spin off Sprint’s local telephone service as its own business early next year. That would form what would be the fifth-largest local telecommunications company in the U.S., with 7.6 million access lines in 18 states.

Meanwhile, the FCC wants to allow telephone companies to stop competition from independent ISPs.

Under the Supreme Court’s “Brand X” decision in June, cable companies can bar rival Internet providers from their networks. The FCC wants to extend that right to telephone companies.

Martin has said it is a priority to relieve the “Baby Bells” from the 1984 breakup of AT&T, of their historical obligation to allow others to lease access to their networks.

Among the issues on the table are whether to continue the old rules of guaranteed access and regulated prices for some period, giving ISPs such as EarthLink Inc. and America Online Inc. time to adjust. Others include guaranteeing “net neutrality” so that the regional phone companies could not bar access to any Web sites and ensuring law enforcement’s ability to wiretap Internet phone services.

The approval also bodes well for other pending telecom mergers. Verizon is seeking to buy MCI for $6.7 billion while SBC has a deal for AT&T at $16 billion.

Eliminate the FCC? It will never happen. Who else can prop up and maintain monopoly interests?

As Dana Blankenhorn says:

When you buy from iTunes, the only folks involved in the sale are the store and the supplier. The ISP isn’t sitting there demanding a cut. When you buy over a phone, the cellular carrier is demanding a cut. A big cut. They’re also laying on a heavy DRM that won’t let you take that song and put it, say, on your PC, or on your iPod.

So where are you going to buy your music from?

Welcome to the new world order.

Capitalistic countries with open competition and broadband wireless everywhere — like Japan and South Korea — are about to soar.

Cellular News, Commentary, FCC Actions, Radio Policy News | No Comments »

News4Neighbors has good coverage of the Open Source Convention in Portland this week:

“This week marks a noticable uptick in the level of open source software activity in the city of Portland. With the kick off of the 2005 Open Source Convention, an assortment of activities have been scheduled around the conference in an effort to provide options for people who can’t afford the $1000 plus price tag. On Tuesday, Portland State University hosted free sessions by PHP legend Rasmus Lerdorf. Rasmus was the original coder who launched the PHP language, and is still very involved in the project. At a well attended meeting, Rasmus confided that unlike for most conventions, he had to pay his own expenses to travel from Europe for this event.

PSU also hosted an entire contingent from the Drupal/Civic Space project. Dries Buytaert was on hand for the event, which will be repeated on Saturday.

Tuesday night, a new Firefox based “Social Browser” sponsored a coming out party at the Doug Fir. Definately the coolest of the OSS parties so far… The exhibit hall floor is the scene for mingling between local OSS folks and international stars…

Here’s an OSCON news aggregator.

Conferences, Open Source | No Comments »

SYWARE empowers mobile users to collect data and create feature-rich database applications that can be deployed on any Windows Mobile Pocket PC or Windows CE device- wherever they need to work. The software is a database and forms development tool for Windows Mobile and Windows CE handhelds and was awarded the Best Database Software by Pocket PC Magazine Germany.

Dell Axim X50v users can run SYWARE s Visual CE 9 software on their Pocket PCs. It can:

• Mobilize information between the enterprise and the field.
• Build applications 10x faster.
• Download, collect, display, modify and automatically sync data.
• Create feature-rich, easy-to-use database applications without programming.
• No need to expand IT departments to manage software and data between desktops and servers to devices.
• Rapidly convert PC or paper-based processes into fully mobile applications that can be deployed on any Microsoft Windows Mobile Pocket PC or Windows CE device.
• Share data seamlessly over wireless, LAN, WAN or Internet connections-real-time, or occasionally connected.

As “city clouds” proliferate, and “seats” grow from hundreds or thousands to millions, open source tools and applications may become increasingly important. It might be an opportunity for organizations like Portland OSS Entrepreneurs (POSSE). The ability of open-source software and the Linux operating system to scale and to meet mission-critical enterprise needs got a resounding endorsement from Jeremy Zawodny, who works for Yahoo Inc.’s technical team, reports e-Week.

Imagine “situational awareness” for personal, professional or municipal applications. Real-time traffic info might be incorporated into programable “orbs”, mood rings or kinetic bike sculpture. Listen with your feet.

Applications | No Comments »

Wireless Philadelphia could select a vendor this Friday and start construction of a city-wide fixed broadband wireless network that will, within in a year, offer every citizen high-speed data connectivity.

The public-private non-profit agency has solicited bids and will have the network built. Only three bids remain. They are:

1. AT&T partnered with Lucent Technologies and BelAir Networks.
2. Earthlink with Motorola Canopy and Tropos.
3. Hewlett-Packard with Aptilo Networks, Alvarion, Business Information Group and Tropos.

According to Telecom Magazine, it hopes to select a winner at this Friday s board meeting and immediately begin construction of the network which will, in the end, be run by private companies, said Dianah Neff, Philadelphia s CTO.

There s some more information and due diligence we wanted to check on, she explained. We got three very quality proposals and the decision is tough.

Many of the proposals are hybrids, said Neff, combining WiFi and WiMax.

Philadelphia fought off challenges from giant incumbents Verizon and Comcast and set up Wireless Philadelphia as a non-profit agency to drive the construction of the high-speed network into disadvantaged neighborhoods being ignored by the large incumbents.

Pilot programs have already been launched using some of the technology in the bids in several disadvantaged neighborhoods and along a two-mile downtown expanse. Those neighborhoods will offer trial service free for a year and the vendors have agreed to cover the costs and the service during that time, Neff said.

Once the bids are accepted and the network constructed, Digital Philadelphia will step into a role as network wholesaler to four to seven ISPs who will then deliver at least 1 Mbps symmetrical data speeds for around $20 a month per subscriber, Neff said.

Municipal Wireless | No Comments »

Following the introduction of version 2.0 of the firmware for Japanese versions of Sony’s PlayStation Portable in July, the company has announced that US owners can upgrade on August 12.

Similar to the Japanese upgrade, the 2.0 firmware will feature a dedicated web browser, personalization options for the interface, photo sharing options, broader network connectivity and improvements to media playback.

PSPupdates.com currently has the download, while Dave’s iPaq has a video.

WARNING: HOMEBREWS/LOADERS CAN’T BE EXECUTED ON PSP WITH SYSTEM VERSION 1.51 OR ABOVE, AND THERE IS NO SOLUTION TO DOWNGRADE THE SYSTEM VERSION YET. Make sure you REALLY know this fact and WANT to upgrade to Version 2.0!!!

The PSP has built-in WiFi, memory stick and a tiny playback-only disk for movies. The 4.3 inch, 16:9 Wide screen features a TFT LCD with 480 x 272 pixels, in 16.77 million colors. PSP Video 9 is a free PSP video conversion application that can convert regular PC video files (avi, mpeg, etc) into PSP video files. Here’s how to encode videos for the Pocket PC.

Here’s a summary of the new features:

• H.264-encoded video playback (in addition to MPEG4)
• Ability to download video clips over WiFi (but the service is currently limited to Japan)
• Use any image stored on a Memory Stick Pro Duo as a desktop image
• Web browser using built-in 802.11b WiFi capability
• WPA-PSK security (in addition to WEP)
• Transfer images (but not video or audio files) wirelessly to another PSP

It would be even better if Sony dumped the UMD Drive for a micro hard disk and dumped the Memorystick in favor of an SD slot. Oh, well — even your (broke) local library could afford a dozen of these babies for checkout (or “virtual tours” around town).

Gadgets | No Comments »

Unstrung reports that Airspan Networks has delivered WiMAX base station and customer premises equipment (CPE) to Cetecom, the WiMAX Forum Certification Laboratory, for standards compatibility testing.

The Airspan products to be tested by Cetecom were announced in March this year, when the Company unveiled its AS.MAX portfolio of products.

The test products include the high-performance, carrier-class MacroMAX base station, which is based on the SDR (Software Defined Radio) technology from PicoChip, the outdoor ProST and the indoor, self-installable EasyST, which are based on Intel s ProWireless 5116 silicon. Airspan last December bought Nortel Networks broadband wireless division for $12.9 million.

PicoChip acquired its 802.16 PHY-layer expertise from Lucent and a team from Conexant’s OFDM Center of Excellence. “That team was focused on DVB-T [Digital Video Broadcast-Terrestrial] which is almost the same PHY [as 802.16],” said Baines. It will be in Airspan’s basestations (right). Intel will also incorportate PicoChip in their large WiMax basestations.

Bellevue, Washington-based Adaptix is also going after the mobile WiMax market using a Software Defined Radio for 802.16e processing.

TeleCIS and Sequans have been promoting mobilized versions of WiBro/WiMax, using gate arrays and signal processing chips. Their second generation WiMAX chips, incorporate elements of mobility. Sequans sent their chips and devices in for testing at the WiMax Lab this week.

Meanwhile, SR Telecom, said it is collaborating with Analog Devices for signal processing chips for its 802.16 (WiMAX) base station solutions. SR Telecom’s WiMAX base station will incorporate ADI’s TS201 TigerSHARC processor for the execution of the 802.16 physical layer (PHY). Analog Devices is working with SIWORKS (now CYGNUS), a wireless intellectual property (IP) company, to develop the physical layer (PHY) of the chip.

SR Telecom says the ADI TS201 fits the signal processing demands of both 802.16-2004 and 802.16e base stations. SR Telecom’s Symmetry line (specs) is said to be able to migrate smoothly to 802.16-2004 or 802.16e.

Corporate News, WiMAX News | No Comments »

Imagine being arrested for yelling “fire” in a theater while the theater was on fire.
- John C. Dvorak

David Strom explains a journalistic fracas at Tom’s Hardware this week involving coverage of the Black Hat and Defcon shows in Vegas last week. They stepped into a messy situation involving Cisco, ISS, and divulging information about Cisco’s IOS router operating system:

For those of you that haven’t been following the issue, a security researcher by the name of Mike Lynn was scheduled to give a talk at the Black Hat hacker conference about how he could gain ownership of a random Cisco router by exploiting a buffer overflow condition. Lynn figured this out several months ago, and tried but failed to gain the support of both his now-former employer ISS and also within Cisco. He quit ISS moments before going on stage and presenting how he did it, to a packed audience that included our reporter, along with reporters of several other sites and news organizations.

We posted a story on our sister Tom’s Networking site on Thursday, the day after Lynn gave his talk. The story included photographs of Lynn giving his talk along with photos we took during the talk of several of his presentation slides. In the meantime, down in Vegas the printed copies of his presentation were removed from the show proceedings and new CDs were pressed that didn’t include the electronic copy. Lynn also negotiated an agreement with Cisco and ISS to no longer disseminate this information. And a day after Lynn gave his talk, Cisco announced a patch to work around the exploit.

We received over the weekend a letter from a lawyer representing ISS that asked us to remove the article. Based on the advice of our own counsel, we left the article on our site, and removed the photos from the article and from our web servers….

Commentary, Corporate News | No Comments »

Motorola Ventures, the strategic equity investment arm of Motorola Inc., has made a strategic investment in Trapeze Networks, a WiFi switch vendor that supplies a roaming solution.

Trapeze Networks allows users to roam securely anywhere in a network and over any topology. Trapeze also leads the Open Access Point Initiative (OAPI), which allows customers to add value to their installed base of third-party access points. The technology alliance allows 3rd party vendors like D-Link to be incorporated into the “smart switch” environment.

“Trapeze’s product offering complements Motorola’s existing wide-area cellular and Mesh-enabled technology solutions and enlarges our ecosystem around this key developing market space,” said Warren Holtsberg, corporate vice president, equity investments and director of Motorola Ventures, in a statement.

Holtsberg added the new capital will help fund further development of Trapeze’s Mobility System Software by adding features that extend enterprise mobility, improve video and multimedia capability and provide location services.

Motorola’s dual-system CN620 Wi-Fi/cellphone, for example, can be used in both enterprise WiFi networks or cellular environments, though direct handoff of service is still in the future. Trapeze CEO Jim Vogt said Trapeze is interested in exploring Layer 3 switching that allows voice-over-Wi-Fi to co-exist with public cellular services. He added that voice handsets for in-building Wi-Fi duties may prove to only have limited market acceptance.

Motorola is also in partnership with Proxim, Avaya and Cisco. Motorola is adaptating their CN620, an 802.11a-only phone, to a new platform to be named the CN622, which will work with the Cisco technology, and Motorola’s Wireless Services Manager, which manages the handoff. Cisco will provide both the IP PBX its popular CallManager and the network infrastructure the Wi-Fi access points.

Cisco’s access points will be “the next generation of the traditional [Aironet] infrastructure line”, rather than it’s Airespace “smart switches”. The CN622 phone will work with both 802.11a and 802.11g (5.8 GHz and 2.4 GHz) flavors of Wi-Fi and use Session Initialization Protocol (SIP) rather than Cisco’s Skinny Call Control Protocol (SCCP).

Motorola could help meld enterprise WiFi networks with wide area cellular networks.

Centrally managed wireless LANs have gained popularity in the past few years among customers who need to support large campuses with limited staff. But standardization between vendors has been an issue. After Cisco bought Airespace, both Trapeze and Aruba decided to strengthen their offerings by opening up to other vendors’ access points.

They developed a WLAN switch protocol that promises at least some interoperability between vendors.

The Secure Light Access Point Protocol (SLAPP) was developed by Aruba and Trapeze and submitted to the Internet Engineering Task Force known as CAPWAP (Control and Provisioning of Wireless Access Points) [see SLAPP Dash for CAPWAP?].

WiFi “switch” competitors include Cisco’s Airespace, Aruba, Trapeze Networks, AirFlow, Bandspeed, Extreme Networks, Legra Systems, Symbol, and Juniper.

Recent entries into the “switch” market include; Meru, which packs up to eight APs in a single enclosure using an advanced antenna design to get all those APs communicating on multiple channels concurrently, and Extricom, which introduced its own single-channel enterprise Wi-Fi system. Another newbie is Xirrus which won the Best of Interop Startup award with its WLAN array packing up to 12 APs in a single fire detector-like enclosure for dual-band 802.11 a/g networks.

Some industry observers feel WiFi switch vendors, without a strong partner, could be left up the creek without a paddle when it comes to WiFi/Cellular integration.

Related DailyWireless articles include; Aruba & Trapeze APs, Aruba Opens Up, Trapeze + Commodity APs, SLAPP Dash for CAPWAP?, Cisco + Airespace, WiFi Switch Adds IPV6, MobileAccess Smart Hub, Cable Zones and Smart Switches Get New Standard.

Corporate News, Enterprise, Wi-Fi News | No Comments »