The New Call for Help

Now you've seen it. What do you think?

One More From Orlando

The last video report from the Photo Marketing Association show in Orlando is up now at DigitalCameraInfo.com. Let me know what you think of the coverage. It's not television - but it's better than nuttin'.

February Stats are In

Some stats from February... I've been using a superb anti-spam service called MailRoute. I route all leoville.com traffic through it, and thank goodness I do. My spam mail has tripled since I last checked stats in October. In February I received more than three-quarters of a million email messages at leoville.com:

          718,597 spam messages
            1,039 viruses
           20,504 good messages
           39,114 bad or invalid headers
     ------------
          779,254 total messages in Feb

In other words, only 2.64% of my email was good. Actually it's somewhat less than that since my local spam filter rejects about a third of the mail that gets through MailRoute (MailRoute avoids false positives by being fairly conservative). The good news is that over 26,000 spam messages and 40 viruses are filtered out of my inbox every day. If I had to look at all of those I'd stop using email entirely. I probably get more spam than almost anyone else because my address is widely known and I've had it since 1996. I'd bet it's on every spam mailing list in existence. Weirder still is the number of messages that come to random addresses at leoville. Only about 10% are addressed to leo. I got 2,329 messages addressed to leos_hair (obviously some "fan" having some fun at my expense). I also received more than 1,000 messages each to noway, nonono, alexander, bowden, coker, beltran, abernathy, and brewster at leoville.com. Hunh? I guess once spammers find a good domain they spew messages to random addresses at that domain. Of the viruses filtered out 70% were actually phishing messages. I get more than 25 phishing emails a day. At this rate I should be receiving more than a million spam messages a month before summer. The web stats are much more encouraging. February was a strong month, although as the graphs show, traffic went down for the first time since I moved the sites to Vizaweb. Leoville.tv (the radio show and the podcasts) 89,342 unique visitors, 1,523, 018 pages loaded, and 125.69 GB of bandwidth. (That's 10% of the bandwidth used in January thanks to Coral.) Internet Explorer usage is down again to 40%. Firefox is at 34%. Leoville.com (the blog and main site) 80,639 unique visitors, 1,825,346 page view, and 41.23 GB of bandwidth used. IE 41%, Firefox 37.1%, Safari 6.9%. 82% were Windows users, 11% Macintosh. 2% Linux. Leovilletownsquare.com (the message boards) 42,690 uniques, 720,755 page loads, 140.23 GB bandwidth. All three domains suffered drops in traffic from January. The graphs are from the Urchin web stats package. The number reflects monthly user sessions. A "session" is defined as a series of clicks on a site by an individual visitor during a specific period of time. Unique visitors dropped commensurately. Thanks for the clicks!

Podcast Change

I've been working with Michael Freedman at Coral to come up with a solution to the podcast issues some of you have been experiencing. As you may know I use Coral to distribute the bandwidth costs for my podcasts. To quote from the Coral site:

Coral is peer-to-peer content distribution network, comprised of a world-wide network of web proxies and nameservers. It allows a user to run a web site that offers high performance and meets huge demand, all for the price of a $50/month cable modem.

Coral is part of the IRIS peer-to-peer network project funded by the National Science Foundation, and it's an amazing community service. Essentially, Coral is a distributed network of volunteer servers that cache content for web sites. When I post a new podcast I use a modified URL: http://www.leoville.tv.nyud.net:8090/airchecks/20050306-1.mp3 for example. A request for that file goes first to nyud.net over port 8090 - that's Coral central. It will route the request to the geographically nearest Coral server. The server will check to see if it has a copy of the file. If it does not it will check with other Coral servers. If none of them have a cached copy of the file they will download it from leoville.tv and cache it for future requests. For the next 24 hours requests for that file will be served by Coral not leoville.tv.
This map of US Coral servers is from the Coral site and is, itself, Coralized. This greatly reduces the bandwidth requirements for leoville.tv and provides users with faster servers that are closer to home. Because there are many Coral servers no one server should have to do too much work, but to protect the volunteers there is a quota system in place. When any one site, like leoville.tv, draws too much bandwidth, that server can decline the Coral request with a 403 FORBIDDEN error. We have exceeded quota with every single podcast release. In fact, Mike tells me we're one of the top 5 Coral users. This has caused a problem with some podcast clients. Instead of retrying later, they give up, saying the file does not exist and you'll miss a podcast. Michael has implemented a new system that allows me to tell the Coral servers to redirect excess traffic back to leoville.tv. If I've saturated Coral's bandwidth I will serve the file directly for a while. That means my bandwidth costs go up, but it doesn't confuse podcast clients. This system has been implemented starting with the current KFI podcast (shows from March 5 and 6). Please let me know if your podcast client has any problems with these files. You shouldn't see any 403 errors. Thanks for your patience. Just so you know, you're involuntary guinea pigs in a brand new medium. But the combination of podcasting and Coral P2P makes it feasible for anyone, even with very limited bandwidth, to create programming that the whole world can download, and I think that's tremendously exciting. You're helping change the face of broadcasting!

G'day Australia!

Today's the big day. Call for Help debuts in Australia on The HOW TO Channel, channel 118 on FOXTEL Digital and Austar Digital. We're thrilled to be back! There's a nice little interview with me on the HOW-TO site.