But first What is CDN?

From WikiPedia

A content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) is a system of computers containing copies of data placed at various nodes of a network. When properly designed and implemented, a CDN can improve access to the data it caches by increasing access bandwidth and redundancy and reducing access latency. Data content types often cached in CDNs include web objects, downloadable objects (media files, software, documents), applications, live streaming media, and database queries.

When is best time to start using CDN?

It depends on what kind of content you are trying to serve in which part of world. If you have a website which serve rich multi-media contents for global audience, you should consider starting on CDN from day one. On the other hand, if you have website which serves a local community with some static pages, serving files via CDN might not be that beneficial(from ROI perspective)

Most of us would find us in the middle of the two extreme scenarios I have mentioned above, and there is no better way for you to find if you need a CDN or not than running some tests. Below are steps:

1. Run your website on http://www.webpagetest.org
2. Keep note of results.
3. Move files to CDN (you only pay for use, so couple of tests wont cost much)
4. Re-run tests and see if it made difference for you.
5. If you see good difference in the page load time, and believe that would benefit your customers (and you at the end), go for it!

BTW, there are other great recommendations you will get on http://www.webpagetest.org when you run test on it, like zipping content n stuff, which would help you reduce latency.

Know any better way to improve latency? Share with readers as comment below

NDTV streams its TV content on internet on their website www.ndtv.com of which I am a regular viewer. Surprisingly, they decided to stream their content( with the advertisement they show on the TV) to be streamed and then also choose to put video advertisements on top of it.

End results –> Internet user sees more advertisement than a TV user.

It completely makes sense to show location aware contextual video advertisements on the actual content, but it doesn’t make sense to retain and stream ‘TV advertisement’ to the internet users, even if advertisers are paying you to do so.

Reasons below:

1- Wrong target market: lets take an example of Tata DoCoMo, They are running a campaign for their services ‘Be the first one to experience 3G’. Heck, I have been using 3G ever since here in USA and even if DoCoMo have something more futuristic say 4G, I cant use it in USA.

Assuming that NDTV is charging these advertisers to show their advertisement on internet steam, advertisers are for sure looking money here.

2- Bad user experience: More you show ads less captive is your audience. Bad user experience, see I am writing this blog post.

3- Costs more money: Every extra byte streamed over internet costs money. Every extra space used to store original content with advertisement costs money.

Serving content over India is still in nascent stages for Indian market and I am sure that eventually NDTV would fix this as they understand more about internet users and the business of doing business over internet.

How do you see old media adopting to new age tools? Share your comments and thoughts below.

It’s a prompt for a potential Security issue, and I love that IE cares about security of my machine and data on it. But I really don’t like this message popping up all the time.

So I figured out a way to disable it

1. Go to Tools->Internet Options->Security

2. Select the ‘Security’ tab

3. Click the ‘Custom Level’ button

4. In the ‘Miscellaneous’ section change “Display mixed content” to ‘Enable’

I know that this makes my machine potentially vulnerable, but then, you know, I am a risk taker….

Thanks to my friend who helped with this setting.

I have my internet wireless router kept 2 rooms away from my usual working location at home here in Redmond, WA. I decided to run speedtest on my internet connectivity at home and I am surprised.

You are reading it right, these are real internet numbers and not because of some error.

My another machine which is connected over wire, shows much better numbers

Then I asked Vishwa who lives in Pune, India to run the same test on his connection and below is what he found. Ironically, he was getting this poor internet speed at Pune IT park.

Update: A friend of mine told me that, most of the internet service providers in USA do a trick so that when someone performs a speed test like i did using the site, numbers are high! Whenever you open a site, first few incoming/outgoing bytes from a new site will be marked for faster delivery and then packet speed for the later goes down slowly.  This would make most of the speed test results inaccurate which are based on the first few byte test.

Though it seems like a valid possible reason, there is no data available to support or against it.

Please take up this quick 30 sec survey- Is facebook your gateway to internet http://bit.ly/a2Mzjf  .

Please share this on your network. Results will be shared on this blog.

You can also follow me on twitter @ruchitgarg

If you seeing this message in your email box, you may want to visit http://blog.siliconverse.com and checkout some of the latest posts you might have missed.

Its a free pdf e-book, available for download, which talks about rules he created and followed for his very successful blog.

I would recommend this for anyone who is interested in expanding their influence using social media including Bloggers, writers, online artists, and anyone otherwise interested in creating a new career.

Good job Chris!