Welcome to the continuing beta. Bugs reports welcome.
AOL Time Warner Disney; gzip
Looks like AOL is looking for an MSNBC killer.
A whopper of a story coming out of the L.A. Times this morning (and reworked by Reuters). The paper is reporting AOL Time Warner and Disney want to merge their news divisions (CNN and ABC News respectively) to create a company with revenues of US$1.6 billion.
Apparently, the AOL Time Warner board gave the deal a “lukewarm reception.” A similar deal, reportedly, was unsuccessfully proposed by AOL to CBS this summer.
The head of CNN has since come out to say, “At this time, CNN is not close to making a deal.”
It never ceases to amaze me how themes emerge from the premordial soup of the Net. This time it is gzip comperession. The “me-meme” first came to my attention after Steve Champeon’s CSS Art appeared, and then again when holovaty.com mentioned it (no, I’m not being paid to cite Adrian’s site regularly).
The compression rate is incredible on (in a quick test, I reduced a 227 Kb HTML document was reduced to to 23 Kb) and it’s easy to do on PHP pages. (Although it can be done on the server saila.com runs on, it has not been enabled although some pages hosted elsewhere will use it.)
Now it seems a big name financial site will be gzipping some pages as a test of what could be become a largescale implementation. This is good news for:
- you, as a visitor to the site (the files will load faster)
- the site itself (it will save on bandwidth costs)
- the Web at large (the overall traffic volume will be reduced)