Media

Given the highly polarised debate on healthcare reform, it is an interesting exercise to examine some of the arguments put forward.

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Our client JUST CAUSE just launched their magazine, but digitally! Back in 2007 we worked with the Seattle based team behind JustCause to create a social media and networking website for people working to make their communities and the wold a better place. From their announcement:

JUST CAUSE Magazine is now available to you in 2 formats.

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On the last day of the media sprint, Darrel and I are camped out in the Open Flows office here in the lovely Lower East Side. NYC has a fresh coating of ice and we are hard at work trying to tie up some of the loose ends- well there will be lots of loose ends, but we are trying to put some closure on a major step toward a unified resource (file) GUI and a new back end for Drupal's resource (file) handling.

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A way to rapidly push development is to prototype your ideas. Aaron Winborn and I laid out the concept of how we wanted our media browser to work on a white board and then started thinking through our data model.

After a few fast revisions and chicken scratches on the board, I sat down to code. I had a shell of functionality that was close enough to some of our ideas from a document the media sprint group had worked on several months ago.

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A few folks are gathered in the Advomatic office in NYC this week to bang out a new backend and GUI for file uploading for Drupal. Yesterday myself, Aaron Winborn and Darrel O'Pry nailed down using PHP Stream wrappers to handle storage of files and embeded objects the same way- this means that we'll be able to use and reuse content from third party providers the same way that we can use content on the local Drupal file system- a big deal.

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I had a page open from NPR in another window and forgot to mention in my previous post, but NPR also has an API as part of their Open Content Strategy. In keeping with NPR's mission of "a more informed public" allowing public access to content and allowing developers to mash up and revolutionize how people consume NPR content.

In Drupal Multimedia Aaron Winborn covers media handling in Drupal and provides information on how to embed and manipulate images, audio and video. Packt Publishing provides a dedicated page which lists the complete table of contents and where you can download all example code used in the book as well as a sample chapter. The first chapter provides an in-depth introduction to Drupal, covering nodes, regions, blocks, themes and modules in general and cck and views specifically. The advanced theming section contains information about custom regions, hooking into template.php and creating template files. Each topic comes with clean example code, plenty of comprehensive screenshots of the different configuration forms and of what the end result looks like and notes with extra clarifications, tips and tricks. The author does a great job in describing the basic Drupal concepts, making this chapter really useful for new Drupal users.

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We're proud to announce civic.mit.edu, the primary web presence for the Center for Future Civic Media, based out of MIT's Media Lab and the Comparative Media Studies program.

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More and more web publishing platforms are starting to integrate video comments. YouTube and TechCrunch use them and embedded commenting systems like Disqus make it really easy to enable them on your site. Drupal has its own ways to provide integrated video comments, although most solutions are currently only available for Drupal 5. The most popular video comment provider appears to be Seesmic. TechCrunch enabled video commenting in April 2008 using Seesmic and Disqus makes use of the Seesmic API to embed video comments. To use Seesmic on Drupal, you need two modules: Seesmic API and Seesmic Comment. The set-up is very straightforward: enable both modules, configure the permissions and you're good to go. I do consider it a big downside that each user needs a Seesmic account before they can post a video comment. There is no way to configure one account to use for all comments in the way that Disqus implements this. Also, as a small nitpick: the Views module is required by Seesmic Comments while I feel that code should go into a separate module, or a check could be implemented if the views module is enabled. An even faster way to enable video comments on your Drupal site is to install the Riffly module. Enable the module, set the permissions and you're done. Users are given the option to leave either a video or an audio-only comment and they don't need to register, which is a huge plus. Do note that both modules are only available for Drupal 5 and that they don't have the option to enable video comments per content type. With files in general and media in particular getting a lot of attention lately, it might be worth exploring what we can do with recorded media.

Via Noneck The New York Times reports that TV networks including CNN are creating one reporter bureaus to file stories, not only from far flung countries but also American cities.

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