Our hosting provider Rackspace had a system wide outage today starting at approximately 1:15pm PST with all their sites including their own rackspace.com being affected for some portion of it. Rackspace apparently suffered a power outage in their data center and for reasons yet unknown this took down all their sites even though all of their systems are supposedly redundant. Apture.com was down for slightly less than 20 minutes before we could reach our machines but some of our users might have slightly longer downtime as our servers caught up to the sudden burst of requests coming in.
We are working on a number of things to minimize such failures in the future. All our systems are internally redundant but we are looking into getting a backup data center as well as considering a move to a more reliable primary provider. We take downtime extremely seriously and will continue to do whatever we can to make sure that all our users have the best experience possible.
Shhh. Listen. Can you hear it? Something profound is happening right now. The way people communicate with one another and with government is changing. Some call it Governement 2.0. Micah Sifry has used the term “civic software“ to describe the tools powering the movement. And Micah should know – he’s co-host of the Personal Democracy Forum 2009 happening June 29th in New York City. PDF 2009 will be a gathering of some of the most visionary political activists, technologists, academics, and elected officials in what Tom O’Reilly calls a “two-day tech + politics brainfest.”
So we are off-the-wall excited to have Tristan Harris on a list of speakers for PDF2009 that includes amazing people such as White House CIO Vivek Kundra, Michael Bloomberg, The New York Times’ Frank Rich, and Craig Newmark. We cannot wait to tell the Apture story to this amazing group of people on the main stage at Lincoln Center on Monday. It is going to be amazing!
Profound events are unfolding right now in Iran. When the authority of one of the world’s most powerful modern-day theocracies is eroding, it is worth paying attention. But how can we make sense of what is going on half-way across the globe in a country that has been effectively closed to Western observation and exchange?
Here at Apture we talk every day about how publishers can use Apture to pull content from around the web into their stories. Grabbing rich media and adding it to your site can be an ideal way to help your readers experience what is happening in unfamiliar places and better understand hard to imagine events.
In the past few days we’ve been excited to see The New York Times using Apture in their coverage of the Iranian elections to great effect. Just yesterday, Robert Mackey at The New York Times’ The Lede blog linked to a video showing a seemingly spontaneous protest in Tehran subway station just days after the election. Another example shows addressing his supporters at a rally in Tehran.
Of course, it is not just The New York Times that is using Apture to cover the Iran elections. Other publishers have also found Apture an effective way to tell the full-story. Over the last 10 days our publisher community has found some amazing content and here is a small sample. Hope you find it as interesting as we do!
