Most web operators focus on two big things when considering site performance: Network time and host time. If we’re particularly ornery, we might bring up SSL latency — the time it takes to negotiate encryption — or even service discovery delays such as DNS.

But with increasingly rich client interfaces, the time it takes for the browser to collect and display all of the content according to its style tags is an important source of delay.

Here are some examples of what a browser has to go through as it receives data (like a list of bullets) and then applies formatting (such as position, order, and alignment with other components.

These were found by DougT somewhere on Google Video. There are others (such as Wikipedia) that he shows on his blog.. He (and we) aren’t sure where they came from, although the original video references the Gecko rendering engine. Whoever you are, nice work!

Want to see a great example of monopolistic practices? It’s playing out in Browser Wars 2.0.

Most of us have by now realized that much of the web’s innovation is happening within the browser, as part of the migration from desktops to in-the-cloud computers. Adobe’s Flash already has close to 100% installation on browsers. But with AIR, the desktop version of Flash, they’re really mowing Microsoft’s lawn.

So it’s war, and Microsoft is attacking Adobe’s Flash plug-in in return. Redmond needs to own the video and Rich Internet space, and to do that, it has to defeat Adobe, replacing Flash with Silverlight.

This is a three-pronged strategy, and folks predict it’ll work.

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This September, Bitcurrent is running the first Bitnorth conference. It’s a weekend-long chance to disconnect and discuss society and technology, and will be held North of Montreal. This year, we will take a reality check and look at how the rest of the world is using the technology we have today.

Here’s what we mean. Apparently 1/5 of Americans have never used e-mail. (Forrester has more details in the Groundswell calculator.) Steve Rubel calls online denizens the Hyperconnected, and we’re a self-absorbed lot. One person at Mesh today told me that certain things were “only interesting to Arrington and his 54,000 friends.”

We spend our time speculating and prognosticating, talking about the future of technology. We’re in love with it.

Arthur C. Clarke once said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic; if so, we’re the magicians. What of the muggles (as my sister describes her non-technical self)? What are they doing with this magic, today? How have the Internet and ubiquitous computing affected the very young? Clay Shirky has one idea. How about the very old? The handicapped? Indigenous people? Non-information workers? Farmers?

In this morning’s keynote, Michael Geist commented that social protesters and activists shouldn’t try to get the word out with their own blogs or applications. Quoting Ethan Zuckerman, he suggested they should use sites full of cute cats — the Flickrs, Facebooks, and Myspaces.

Why? Because it’s easy for a government or repressive ISP to block a blog. People don’t care about your blog. But they care about lovable fluffy kittens. For every innocent cat picture, there’s a more insidious, or noble, use. So when you use Youtube to tell the world your story, the bad guys have a harder time taking you off the air because now the Muggles care: it’s unlikely they can interfere without Muggle outcry.

Technologists need to know what the muggles care about, and embrace it, to thrive. And the Muggle Internet is all cats, all the way down. Like it or not, whether you’re trying to sell to the masses, get clickthrough ads on a niche, or convince someone to invest you probably have to care about the online world’s many Cat Venues.

Hopefully we’ll learn as much from thinking about the “now” of the Internet, for the rest of the world, as we do speculating with our hyperkinetic, hyperconnected technoscenti.

We’re presenting at MeshU in a few hours. The subject is web monitoring — not just analytics, but things like synthetic testing, usability, and so on. The Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa technology community is here in force, and the lineup of presenters is impressive (and intimidating.)It’s a big deck, and Slideshare isn’t behaving well. But the presentation (in .pptx format) is available in Bitcurrent’s drop.io dropbox.

Update: Now Slideshare is working, so here’s the deck:

| View | Upload your own

The folks from Embrase are working hard on an upcoming Startupcamp in Montreal. An impressive 27 companies have signed up already for the chance to pitch, meet, and learn. And startupcamp Montreal 1 had a total of 180 attendees.

Informal events like Barcamp and Startupcamp are great; they tend to bring together the strange and sublime alongside the polished and driven. I remember watching a scruffy developer show something, half-ashamed, apologizing for the UI and mumbling uncertainly. But what he’d built was astonishing. This kind of not-realizing-how-cool-it-is happens a lot.

I talked with organizer Phil Telio about the event. “We’re excited to have this combination of seasoned speakers, eager entrepreneurs, and startup veterans in one place,” he said. “The first event was a huge success and it’s a testament to the thriving Canadian startup community.”

I’m listed as a Guru for the event, which I think means I help judge the various pitches. Or it could be I drink too much of Montreal’s immensely-superior-to-Redbull energy drink.

Certainly, it’s become easier to build a prototype to impress. Scaling is less of an issue with on-demand components; most monitoring tools are free or near to it; transaction processing through Paypal or Google Checkout is a snap; and frameworks like Ruby and Flex make interfaces that don’t suck, even for non-designers.

The companies slated to present include:

• Vencorps, a part of powered by Cambrian House applying crowdsourcing to startups. Basically Project Greenlight incubator.
• Startyourtube, which looks like Ning-meets-Youtube. Curious to see how this is different from Youtube’s existing personalized sites.
• Camwii, a screen sharing service like Webex that reduces all the complexity of what’s being shared down to a sliding window. And I thought it was a new Nintendo gadget.
• Healthivate, which while still stealthy sounds like Healtheon-redux meets Google Health (reminds me of Marissa Mayer’s famous “I’m feeling Yucky button” joke.) Hope founder Yan Simard has read The New New Thing.
• Loyaltymatch, which seeks to unite people with excess loyalty points with those who want some. Bit of a gray market there, and many loyalty programmes put specific constraints on selling things (like flights) for money. But it’ll be interesting for another, macroeconomic reason: Claim rates on many loyalty programs are low (relying on consumer laziness and unattractive offers like restricted travel times) — disintermediating this with the Internet will change the economics of prizes and loyalty programs as claim rates climb.

Looking forward to hearing their stories, and to finding out more from the other attendees. I’m sure the guys from MTW will be there recording all the goings-on, too.

Craig Balding recently launched a blog, cloudsecurity.org, looking at the intersection of cloud computing and security.

The challenges are significant: The concept of cloud computing is that you’re a tenant within someone else’s world (which is generally achieved through virtualization.) Consequently, you can’t ever see your entire environment down to the hardware; that would defeat the economics.

Being a virtual machine is like being Neo in the Matrix: You don’t know if the machines are benevolent or not.

Wonder if Craig runs his own machines?

Possibly the best roundup I’ve seen on cloud/on-demand/grid computing, Peter Laird, Kent Dickson, and Steve Bobrowski of BEA put this mindmap together.

It’s missing dozens of companies already, as a result of the growth that cloud is experiencing and the trend for virtualization vendors to blur the lines between virtual and on-demand. But it’s by far the most comprehensive map of the world right now.

A couple of weeks ago, I was lucky enough to moderate a panel on next-generation databases at Web2Expo. Having database greats Brian Aker, Dave Campbell, and Matt Domo in one place made for great dialogue. In addition to finding out whether RDBMS is dead, we looked at the big challenges of data storage (synchronization, working offline, and a shift towards specialized data models.)

We even found out how these three datascenti track their contacts (MySQL’s Aker uses scripts he wrote; Microsoft’s Campbell uses Outlook.)

Then last week at Interop, I had folks from platform companies like Google, Amazon, and Opsource together with a number of startups and virtualization tool makers. Again, great dialogue, even on the five-person panel that ran over. This time, the consensus seemed to be that on-demand computing was great for bursty capacity and highly parallel tasks, but lacked the controls, management tools, and SLAs to be a production platform for enterprises at the moment.

But Structure promises to be the most compressed discussion yet. Om Malik, the guy behind the event, says it’s about two things: Learning how the new web is built from the architects that built it; and networking with investors who “are looking to place their bets on cloud computing” and see it as a huge opportunity. “Structure 08 is about Getting Web Done,” says Malik.
I have two panels on the same day to moderate:

• Cloud Computing: Infrastructure for Entrepreneurs, featuring Geva Perry, CMO of GigaSpaces; Jason Hoffman, CTO of Joyent, Tony Lucas, CEO of XCalibre; Lew Moorman, SVP Strategy of Rackspace; Christophe Bisciglia, senior software engineer at Google; and Joseph Weinman, corporate development and strategy at AT&T.
• Scaling to Satiate Demand: Tactics from the pioneers, with Sandy Jen, co-founder and VP Engineering of Meebo; Akash Garg, CTO of Hi5, Jeremiah Robinson, CTO of Slide; and Jonathan Heiliger, VP Technical Operations of Facebook.

Each of these will be a fast-and-furious fifty-minute discussion around on-demand computing and the ability to scale. Time to come up with some pithy questions and awkward follow-ups.

Any sugggestions?

I know I’m a little late with this, considering the fact that Unconference was last Tuesday. And I already got the lecture on relevance and blog timing from Mr. Bitcurrent himself, but my current experiments on creating the 25th and 26th hours of a day are not as successful as I’d like, so this is really the first chance I’ve had to put something down.

It appears that Unconference in general was a big success at Interop. The Web Operations track was definitely interesting and included a bunch of probing discussions around our topics.

Some highlights:

During the Maximizing Web Performance session, we had good discussions around what web performance really is, how we can accelerate it, and what some of the realities of deployment are. Kent Alstad from Strangeloop Networks brought up the web performance equation which is a good way of examining all the components that go into end user performance in a web application.

One interesting point here was how the “client compute time” has become increasingly important with new web2.0 apps that have actual client processing (javascript, etc). That’s probably a component that we didn’t really take into account a few years ago.

In the Beyond Web1.0 discussion, Brian Albers from Kaazing gave us a good overview of what new technologies like Ajax and Comet were going to mean to the network and how some of the protocol behaviors that we’ve taken for granted for the last few years (particularly with HTTP) are different when it comes to these cutting edge technologies.

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I’ve been incredibly lucky this week: Awesome panelists and great discussions (several of which have run over) at Interop. The conclusion: Cloud computing is still cloudy, and if you want reliable on-demand computing, get it from a SaaS provider who can worry about the cloud on your behalf.

The Register and Infoworld, both of whom covered the events, seem to agree: There’s a lot of hype around on-demand computing, but it’s not fully grown up yet. Nice to know we’re trying to keep things honest.

While lots of folks are dabbling with cloud computing and on-demand infrastructure, it’s not really ready for business yet. Some of the cloud users we had — folks from Napera, Syntenic, and Kaazing – are using the cloud for “bursty” capacity or as a way to prototyping nascent applications. But what do the operators think?

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