**Edit**

It looks like Iran has limited news networks to one story per day and banned them from the country. The #CNNFail hashtag on twitter and my own comments below criticizing the network for their near complete lack of coverage, even in that one story per day that they're currently allowed, may not be fair.

In CNN's defence if they did report more on the issue than asked by the Iranian higher-ups, it would only validate their claims that western media and interests are puppeting the Iranian people to protest and fuel the propaganda. That's the only rationalle I can conceive of for their odd behavior but then again back on the other hand there have been world events like geonocide, political turmoil, widespread disease, and mass refugee camps in recent history that CNN didn't cover that much either instead favouring things like planes landing successfully and celebrity deaths.

**Edit**

originally posted june 19, 2009 @ 2:35am

It's phenomenal to see that when reporters are banned, cell phones and internet disconnected, the two places to get news of Iran is the Comedy Network's Daily Show with John Stewart who 'accidentally' left one of their correspondents in Iran(episodes available online) and the internet ie: Twitter, Blogs, Youtube, etc., where are the news agencies? Where are the field agents broadcasting from a secure location?

So to compare, you have a news blog The Huffington Post, it's updated by the minute, all of what must be hundreds of thousands of readers are helping submit material and scour the internet for the voices of Iranians, it's full of video content, with deep and meaningful commentary. Then you have CNN who post an article about once a day on the subject, it's shorter than one of the Huffingtons liveblog updates which are happening constantly, they link to some of the Youtube videos as well, they link to images taken from other sites as well, and at the bottom there's a button to load blogs posts that linked to or talked about the article which tells you after clicking "hold on, while we get the good stuff".

The 20 blog posts it fetches aren't even organized and may have nothing to do with the elections. Judge for yourself, TV news is a dead horse, and they're incapable of keeping up with the evolution of the social web. As they try to they loose credibility. There aren't news anchors even, everyone on TV news is a pundit. You can't be a pundit and do what the Huffington Post is doing, you can't be an elitist character pundit and have your finger on the pulse without breaking character. They don't get that the internet isn't about the face of the person presenting the information it's about the meeting place. They don't get that it's organic and untied from Nielson ratings. TV news is like the Microsoft of news. They're trying to do a weird mix and compromise between their old business model and faking their participance in this internet revolution thing. This open sourcing of everything. A world where it's not the familiar names, or business deals, it's the quality that gets you viewers. Just because you're CNN doesn't mean you're anything special here on the web.

This is the reason why Net Neutrality is SO important. It levels the playing field. If Net Neutrality was not enforced, then even though a site like The Huffington Post was better at reporting on Iran they would have a slower connection and CNN would have a better connection just because they're CNN. Support Net Neutrality the future of the web depends on it, this is just one of many examples of it's necessity.

Here are the links to the latest from CNN: http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/06/18/iran.mourning.protest/index.html

and The Huffington Post liveblog which is already about 20 posts ahead and updating every 10 minutes: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/13/iran-demonstrations-viole_n_215189.html

Here's a couple of excerpts on the same topic for comparison:

CNN (One sentance)

Voices shouted "God is great!" from rooftops, from faces hidden in the dark.

Huffington (One update)

3:40 PM ET -- Allah o Akbar! It's just past 11PM in Iran right now, so one can imagine the chorus of chanting that's being sent through the night air. Take a listen, and then read the email I received last night from reader Nicholas.

I cannot in any way claim to know what people are thinking or meaning on the ground, but for centuries, 'Allahu Akbar' has been in the Muslim world a battlefield of meaning and ultimately of political legitimacy. They are five syllables pregnant in meaning, mutability and richness, not simply a ritualistic or fundamentalist dogmatic trope. Nor is 'Allahu Akbar' simply a prayer. In fact, despite all its negative, violent connotations in the West, 'Allahu Akbar' has been uttered by Muslims throughout history as a cry against oppression, against kings and monarchs, against tyrannical and despotic rule, reminding people that in the end, the disposer of affairs and ultimate holder of legitimacy is not any man, not any king or queen, not even any supreme leader, but ultimately a divine force out and above directing, caring and fighting for a more peaceful, rule-based, just and free world for people to live in. God is the one who is greatest, above each and every mortal human being whose station it is to pass away.

The fact that 'Allahu Akbar' is echoing through the Iranian night is not only an indication of the longing of people there to find a peaceful and just solution to this crisis. It also points to how deep the erosion of legitimacy is in whosoever acts against the will of the people, in whosoever claims to act on God's behalf to oppress his fellow human, including in this case some of the 'supreme' Islamic jurists themselves. This all goes to show that Islam, far from being merely an abode of repression and retrogression, has the capacity of being a fundamentally restorative and democratic force in human affairs. In the end, so it seems, at least in the Iranian context, 'Allahu Akbar', God is greatest, is a most profoundly democratic of political slogans. So deep is this call, that what is determined out of this liminal moment may very well set the terms for (or against) a lived, democratic Islamic reality for decades to come.

If you've been waiting for the latest Jailbreak[http://blog.iphone-dev.org/post/124232620/big-week] you might want to check out their Twitter[http://twitter.com/iphone_dev] where they just posted their analytics showing the burst in traffic since the os release. It's not a sample of the general population, but of the kind of people who would camp out in front of stores when a new phone comes out if they weren't so lazy. Also really cool is seeing Intense Debate in action on their blog, the comment system made by Automattic(the same people behind Wordpress). Earlier today the comment system went down for a while probably from the extra 3.5 million pageviews. Anyway here's the screencaps that were posted, notice 990,000 windows users and only 340,000 IE users. Also that 200,000 of the Safari users are on their iphone, so Firefox is the dominant browser here.. Over the last day or two I've been there a bunch of times, in Firefox, Safari, and Opera.. I don't know why, I just happened to have them open and using them for different things. I wonder if I'm the only one though.

Firefox has silently uploaded a release candidate for their upcoming version. Get it here: http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/3.5rc1/

I thought I'd run a few tests to see if it's faster than Safari 4 which from all the hype, it's supposed to be. Here are the results, if you wanna run the tests on your own systems let me know what kind of scores you get.

Sunspider is a Javascript benchmark created by WebKit, so Safari 4's Squirrelfish should be designed for the most part to do really well on this benchmark, with that said, the results I got suggest that apart from any possible bias Safari 4 is still quite a bit faster than the Firefox RC. Run the SunSpider benchmark yourself here: http://www2.webkit.org/perf/sunspider-0.9/sunspider.html Check out my results below.

Firefox RC - score: 1788.0ms +/- 0.6%

Safari 4  1046.4ms +/- 4.2%

Next up I ran the V8 benchmark, which is what Chrome's Javascript renderer V8 is tuned to. Try it yourself here: http://v8.googlecode.com/svn/data/benchmarks/v4/run.html Every time I ran it I got different results, here are the highest for each browser, Safari again fairs much better(note a higher score on this one is better)..

Firefox 217

Safari 1215

The final benchmark I ran is the one I blogged about earlier in this post. Run it yourself here: http://people.mozilla.com/~schrep/image12.html. I got the same results, that Firefox is about 3 times faster than Safari at rendering the image contrast and brightness. So what is it that makes Safari perform so much better in the more traditional benchmarks, and Firefox perform so much better in this one?

Safari's Squirrelfish converts javascript into byte code which is interpreted by a software virtual machine, much like Adobe Flash is today. Firefox's Tracemonkey converts javascript into machine code which is interpreted by the hardware(more or less). In theory machine code runs several times faster than byte code, but machine code would take longer to compile. So traditional benchmarks which load one test after another are completed faster in Safari, on the other hand the image rendering benchmark in which the entire application is loaded before starting Firefox does better.

To put this theory to the test I loaded Google documents, I copied 500 paragraphs of Lorem Ipsum(a massive latin text designers use for general prototyping as it reflects the average word and paragraph size of typical text) into a fresh new document. I then saved it started the test by asking it to check spelling. Because it's all latin most of the words would be spelled incorrectly when using an english spell check. I used a stop watch to time it so it may be off by up to 1 second. Here are the results:

Firefox: 27.5 seconds

Safari: 13.2 seconds

The theory doesn't hold up, Safari was twice as fast at spell checking. Ok but then what is it that makes Firefox perform better than Safari in that one test? Next I tried a slightly more subjective approach by running a few chrome experiments. It's hard to get raw numbers for these, so bare with me. Also note I'm running the tests on a Macbook with integrated graphics and 2GB of memory(but all on one side, the other side is empty cause I'm an idiot).

http://www.chromeexperiments.com/detail/lorenz-84/

Firefox: Medium - jittery,  lost frames

Safari: Fast -  realtime

http://www.chromeexperiments.com/detail/js-fireworks/

Firefox: Fast - realtime, slows down when screwing with the gravity control

Safari: Faster  - realtime, no slowdowns at all

http://www.chromeexperiments.com/detail/monster/

Firefox: Slow - jittery, lost frames, too slow to sit and watch the whole thing

Safari: medium - jittery, lost frames, but watchable. not smooth but ok

Still across the board Safari is faster than Firefox in some cases a lot faster, except for that one image rendering benchmark I did the other day where Firefox excels. Why? I don't know, and the Google searches I'm  doing don't know either. Perhaps it's as simple as the tests designed for Webkit just favor Webkit and the one by Mozilla favors Mozilla. What's clear is that Javascript benchmarking isn't as straightforward as commonly thought.

I was watching some of the Google I/O stuff on YouTube and  clicked over to this Google Chrome ad. It looks incredible, I've never seen anything so cool for a piece of software.

Firefox ads look like they'll be pretty awesome too and with 3.5 scheduled to hold the fastest browser title for a while they have a lot to promote. Check out the Firefox ad below, not as cool special effects as the Chrome ad but still really really cool..

And then there's IE8, targeted at the mentally unstable. As we all know those are the only people that would actually switch to IE, anyone else that uses it does so because it came with their computer,  and they haven't seen the above two ads or tried other browsers.

Opera filed an anti-trust complaint against Microsoft saying they abuse their operating system's dominance by bundling Internet Explorer, the average user just uses Internet Explorer and never even tries Firefox, Opera, Safari, Chrome, or any of the other alternatives. Well It's official now, there will be a special version of Windows 7 available in the European Union that doesn't come with the infamous Internet Explorer browser. Over the last 6 months Microsoft has lost 5% of the browser market to Firefox, and only 5%  went from IE 7 to IE 8. There are quite a few people who still use IE 6 that are due for a new pc, and the people dying to upgrade their OS that recently got stuck with Vista will be getting Windows 7. Microsoft will lose the vast majority of its browser share in the European Union. In the rest of the world Google still has plans to trump Microsoft in OEM deals to package Chrome instead of IE with new PCs, but even if they don't more than 90% of internet users use Google for search, when Google starts seriously pushing Chrome, Internet Explorer will be obliterated. Currently half the users upgrading from IE go to Firefox, when Chrome actually enters the arena it'll surely scoop up even more. From what I've seen there are a lot more IE users asking me questions about Chrome than Firefox users. With the surge of computer sales that Windows 7 is gonna generate and Chrome betas just recently being released for Mac and Linux it looks like the race is revving up. Microsoft is leaving out native email and productivity apps for simply tying in their windows live service with the operating system. They're doing that to release sooner and beat Google to the punch. In the same vain Microsoft just launched Bing, what some say is their final attempt at competing with Google for search. Word on the internet street is people try Bing, check the search results with Google and then go back to Google. That doesn't say much about the quality, it's not about quality, it's about trust and familiarity. Google = Search. With YouTube, Gmail, Translate, and soon Google Wave Google is at the center of the vast majority of web diets. Still, Microsoft is pushing Bing really hard trying to grab a few %s market share, trying to grab some of the search market as it directly ties into browser market. Things are gonna get interesting,

I expect the w3c schools browser market share breakdown to see IE drop below 10% over the next year(by July 2010) to Firefox and Chrome where Safari and IE will be about even. As for the general population every website has different statistics for browser shares some show IE has 90% others show 60% and still others show less than 5%. So it's hard to use any of that as a measure, but IE is going to take a significant hit. With all these percentages though it's easy to loose sight of the fact that they represent more than 1.5 billion people currently on the internet, a number that grows by about 10 million new users every month.

Tracemonkey is a new addition to Firefox and it'll be in 3.5. What it does is compile Javascript into machine code, which speeds up Javascript remarkably. Now I recently tried Safari 4 and was blown away by how fast it was in the Javascript department. Well head over to http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/06/tracemonkey-demo/ and test the image rendering demo in Safari 4 compared to the current Firefox(3) and the video demo of the latest Firefox(3.5) soon to be released.

Firefox 3: ~1.2 seconds

Safari 4: ~0.3 seconds

Firefox 3.5: ~0.1 seconds

Up till now Adobe flash was faster than Javascript in the browser because Flash/Actionscript is compiled into bytecode. Bytecode is fast and is run in the flash virtual machine. Mozilla and Adobe have been collaborating on a project called Tamarin, and working toward the next version of Ecmascript, the standard both Actionscript and Javascript implement, one of the products of that collaboration aside from both technologies being able to compile into machine code(a language-set interpreted natively by the hardware) is Tracemonkey.

The good news is because All the major players are contributing to Tamarin and because it's gonna be open source. All major browsers will have it implemented in the near future. It also means that Flex/AIR apps will run faster, and that all the major players including Microsoft(what!?  :D) are intending to implement open standards. One step closer to a MUCH faster web, where you choose a browser based on features, and not whether or not your favourite site is broken in the others. Which will mean much more innovation in browser features and possibly spawning off into browser only OSs. Then again maybe it'll stop somewhere around Jolicloud http://www.jolicloud.com/

Chrome for mac and linux is also out, but it's like an alpha so there's nothing to say about it.

Safari 4 is FAST. I've been playing with the Firefox 3.5 beta 4 for about a week or two now, personas are really great and obviously I can't live without things like, session manager, Firebug, yslow, live http headers, and most importantly the Awesome Bar. But Safari 4 is so FAST. Fast as in, the Javascript on a page, even a really intense page is almost instantly interpreted and run, and the structure of the page is rendered long before images even begin to load.. over broadband.. I usually find Safari frustrating to use because you can't search from the Address bar like every other browser can. Firefox has the Awesome Bar, which among other things typing in keywords or sentences uses Google's "I'm feeling lucky" search, on Safari doing that you get an error. The debug, html/css/javascript/network monitoring tools in Safari weren't as interactive as Firebug, although they are much improved now and visually much more appealing. On top of that there's a bunch of developer extras in Safari like the Activity Monitor, the ability to change the user agent which let you impersonate other browsers (a valuable feature that Opera actually implemented years ago). You can disable various aspects of a page like cache, images, scripts, etc. easily, Debugging and Profiling Javascript built in which I guess is standard now, and the web inspector supports monitoring and debugging new stuff in html 5 like html databases.

Now that it's finally using the new Webkit builds it fully passes the Acid 3 test. Also the latest trend in browsers (started by Google Chrome) is individual threads for tabs, Firefox is implementing it in their latest beta and Safari 4 too has mechanisms for protecting other tabs from that one rogue site that burns a hole in your cpozone. Safari looks a lot better than it did in betas visually, especially when you peel tabs off a window to create a new window or do the reverse. Another cool thing about Safari on Mac is web clips. You can clip out a part of a website and stick it in the dashboard where that clips stays live. And the new top sites page gives you live previews of your favourite and most visited sites like Google Chrome and a number of Firefox plugins, and being able to search across all the text of all the web pages in my history and scroll through the history or search results in coverflow is a nice touch too.

Above everything else Safari's brute speed over any other browser out there makes me want to use it, so I went looking for some plugins to make the experience as usable as Firefox. I realize that the new Firefox is coming out soon and will be much faster than the beta but Safari is just so fast.

The first plugin is Inquisitor, super enhanced search. The latest version is even better than what I remember, and it looks like they have an iphone app and plugins for Firefox and IE. Check out Inquisitor http://www.inquisitorx.com/safari/index_en.php

The second plugin is, well there are a bunch that let you search from the address bar, but none support Safari 4 yet, soo.. what do I do now? I guess I'll just wait for the Firefox 3.5 RC to hit next week, rumoured to be ~250% faster than it was and put it in the same league as Chrome and Safari 4. Here's hoping. Actually go check out Mozilla's 'Show us your speed' campaign http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/fastest/ .

As a developer I'm familiar with staying up for 30 hours at a time, I've been known to go up to a week without sleep or longer surviving on short naps. I recognize that sometimes things look like a good idea in that state and I try not to make those statements and realizations public until I have a chance to review it in the light of full consciousness.

Reading the latest post on the Daily Motion blog [link] I'm left with the tangible warm feeling you get when you see someone else in that state of mind. DailyMotion.com for anyone that doesn't know is an alternative to YouTube. Now don't get me wrong there's a steep drop off there but they are nevertheless an alternative.

The  spec for the next version of HTML calls for a <video> tag. It means that instead of using flash to load video, or some other plugin like DivX, you can just embed the video on your website like an image and have it play natively in the browser. This requires that browsers implement the HTML 5 specification. There are a number of issues with adopting the <video> tag at this stage before any browsers even support it.

Let's face it, even though the majority of developers no longer user Internet Explorer,  and ALL of them consider it a scornful misadventure in market dominance, the majority of users still use it. With Windows 7 potentially being functional (While screenshots and beta testers are raving about it, I'm still sceptical as Vista received the same acclaim pre-release), and while Google is positioning Chrome to take a hefty piece of the pie, albeit slowly, Microsoft will still hold a significant slice themselves. Microsoft has made clear their devotion to implementing HTML 5 standards in IE8 but they haven't even started those yet and IE8 is out and available for download. They will only implement it in one scenario. That is if they find a way for it to leverage their position in the online space(not likely). It's not likely both because the <video> tag will be open source it literally means implementing it in IE8,9, or 10 would be giving up their proprietary leverage, and they're clearly interested in proprietary leverage with Silverlight(Microsoft's version of Flash). Microsoft doesn't give a shit about open standards or advancing the web and they'll continue to exploit their market share for as long as possible if it means holding onto their dominance. After all, we are reaching a point where the average user can be satisfied with linux, and once that happens Microsoft will have to actually be better than the competition to remain a player in the online space. They are definitely not going to accelerate that process.

Also to be noted is the quality of video that can be played with the <video> tag. It's simple, at this stage, the quality and formats are complete and utter shit. Jittery low-fi shit. In an age of broadband where YouTube just added an HD button Daily Motion just made a move in favour of open source technology that hasn't been implemented anywhere except a few betas. Sure if they don't need to use flash they probably don't need to use FMS and can switch to lighter cheaper hardware. Going completely open source like that will save them a lot on proprietary software. It's insane to make the switch now. In the middle of what is likely or at least close to the climax of the browser wars the guys over at DailyMotion are all idealistic walking around with peace symbols around their necks claiming that they want to implement the constitution which is not even in it's first draft and there's 4 countries that appose that very constitution and they're all armed with a full nuclear arsenal.

And the same goes for the HTML spec for canvas. Both Microsoft and Adobe stand to lose if video and canvas are implemented in Internet Explorer, but even if it was implemented tomorrow, Adobe is leaps ahead of where the open source alternatives are especially with their desktop and server products AIR and FMS and the popular flv format.

The moral?

Make critical business and tech decisions after a full nights rest. DailyMotion... you can't be fucking serious...

I don't need to explain who Tom Green is cause if you're reading this you should know. He innovated tv and he did it pretty early in his life. He created a new genre and he's doing it again. Well wait, he's been doing it again for a while now, but he's crossing a crucial barrier. Moving from original video content on the web sponsored by the same institutions as traditional television to semi-subscription based, supported by the fans, by the audience. He's hacking away at the final chains of traditional media that'll open up the internet and proving the subscription based audience supported model works. We've seen similar audience supported concepts work like Keith and The Girl however Keith and Chemda created a platform; The shows are all free, fans support the show buying merch, stand up cds, etc.. This is different. The significance of which is staggering. Here you pay for access to the library of content. In the KATG model a listener may never buy any merch and a fan on Keith's comedy or Chemda's music may never listen to the show. What Tom is doing is creating a direct cause and effect relationship where the content is the product as apposed to being a platform. This is crucial now due to the massive cost difference in offering audio vs. offering video. While storage and bandwidth costs will come down in the future you just couldn't support video as a platform. Now with the audience deciding the value of the content you only have to please them, it allows the freedom to create; as Tom says it'll "let the artists be artists" and not have to sanitize their work to please a corporate agenda.

This is a message from Tom on the subject:

HEY GANG! :)

May 25, 2009

I am up and eating a delicious pickle. A strange thing to eat for breakfast I am learning. I think pickles are definitely more of a lunch thing. I am excited about this day, this week, and this year. I think I came to some pretty good conclusions about the website here over the weekend. I really want to thank all of our members. Your continued and growing support of The Channel is really helping the creative process. We have been doing this LIVE broadcasting here at the channel for a few short years now, but the membership service is very new. Only about 2 months old. And I can say already that it is a great success. It is becoming easier to focus on shooting and goofing off frankly, now that we have control over our own destiny around here.

See the past 2 years I have essentially been making deals with broadcasters, syndicators, websites, and sponsors. And I really have to say, it has been a real hassle. Not to say that I don't believe in the old model, I do. But it has definitely taken away from the creative process. There always seemed to be too many cooks in the kitchen. And this was on a WEB SHOW!! Can you imagine how picked to death television shows get? See, so this is what we are creating here. A much more liberated and free place to make TV. And I can say, as more members sign up, the more fun and easy it is for us to produce funny shit. I don't have to worry all day anymore!

Honestly, that is what making comedy on TV amounts to sometime. Arguing about what funny is? It never really made any sense to me at all. I always felt that the networks, when producing a comedy show, should just let the artists be artists, the comics be comics, and the broadcasters broadcast.. But they don't. They more often than not insist that they be at the center of creative decisions. They apply demographics and research to the writing process. It becomes far to clinical, and sanitized. And ultimately everything on TV ends up being kind of the same. You know? Like it was all painted with the exact same brush. And that sucks. So this is why I love what we are doing here together and I really thank you for the support.

Today I am going to go hit the streets again and film something ridiculous. Whatever pops in to my head. Just because we can. I will post it tomorrow. Thanks gang!

I will be going LIVE from my living room tonight for a bit. Sign up for our Skype team and I may give you a call on video phone. It'll be good to see ya.

Tom