We put together a Super RSS Feed of all the Walker Blogs through a new tool called Feed Shake. This tool lets you see the newest 15 posts to all of the Walker blogs in your RSS reader. The tool seems like its working so far but we want to make sure we test it out for a while first since Feed Shake is still in beta. If you would like the Walker Super Blog Feed point your news reader here:
http://feedshake.com/advfeed.php?code=e6csr6t8qp
Just saw a note on the Rhizome mailing list about this. Every member on Rhizome has their own RSS feed now. If you go to a member page you’ll see a link that under Member RSS feed that you can subscribe to. This is a great idea i hope it takes off. Maybe this is a possibility for mnartists.org in the future.
Also they added a feature to find users by location recently. Unfortunately it only lists people down to the country so the US listing with 400+ people is not extremely useful, but if I lived in Greece with only 3 members it sure would be nice to find the other two.
Besides broadcasting content the BBC has taken some positive steps toward defining how broadcasters and content creators can best leverage technology. Since a lot of the work they have been doing is opensource there are possibilities to add contribute to or just benefit from work that is already being done. At the very least I think their stated plans to build public value are an interesting starting place.
There are a number of established projects on the BBC R&D page . Mix TV uses similar technologies to the Dialog Table but its end product is video. It uses chromakey and shape recognition to allow on screen talent to pick up and manipulate virtual objects.
The Dirac Codec has some great potential. We are generally happy with the quality of the streams we are getting on our Channel but an open source alternative with comperable or better quality would have been nice when we were planning it out.
Not on the R&D page but also of interest is the Listen Live Widget for Tiger. It is in fact a search for “Real Player widgets” that lead me to the site in the first place.
I think more important than the specific software implementation is the general philosophy behind Backstage where they state “Build what you want using BBC content”. There is a lively set of ideas and prototypes being posted about how a content producer could distribute their content in the near future. I think it is this sort of philosophy clearly defines the advantage non-profit organizations have when they are addressing new technologies.
UPDATE: Just a few hours after I made this post I spotted this New Scientist article mentioned on the Rhizome list.
sources: freeculture.org, plasticbag.org
There have been some links to our Wiki page out there which made me realize it was kind of a mess. Of course wiki’s tend to be messy but still ours needed a clean up. I organized our front page a bit and added a couple of new development resources. We’ve talked about opening up some of our source files for a long time here, but in the rush to get projects done many files (at least my files) end up poorly commented and not of much use to someone not familiar with the code or structure. While I was debugging a problem that surfaced in the Flash on our programing department pages I had a chance to comment and clean up my source code. Since this is a more general purpose movie than most and turns out to be well commented I released it on our wiki. Hopefully this the start of a new well documented trend in Flash development here. If you do download that source and have feedback just drop me a line via the comments.
I’ve gotten a couple of emails from the folks at Zoomify about their software product for use on Arts ConnectEd. Sounds like the enterprise solution would work just fine for everything we need including the ability to hit an outside script allowing us to save coordinates and zoom levels, they provide example ASPs that save Zoomify data into XML files. I’m sure we won’t use ASP but the example of the XML format they expect to get could be helpful.
The big unknown last time was how we could get the image slicing to happen dynamically since it didn’t look like the Zope Converter on Source Forge was going to really work for us. In the last e-mail they sent over a copy of a PERL/imageMagick script that should handle the slicing server side. Great news since we do almost everything with PERL on the Walker site that should be a good fit.
One more blog up and running. Our Film Video department has a couple of posts in it and it’s off to a good start. This is also the first blog writing by our roving blog correspondant/editor Paul Schmelzer. You’ll see more of him on the various blogs on the Walker site.
Just in time for the weekend I finished publishing an update to the News Center. Now it includes the Walker Channel’s RSS feed but even better than that Nate set up an iCal feed for our calendar so you’ll never miss another Walker event (by accident). This is going to be the central access page for all things RSS and feed related so when we add more RSS feeds thats where they’ll go.
Diana from Performing Arts is starting to blog (I’m sure others in her department will join in soon). It will take us a little bit of work to tie the blog into the rest of the site but in the mean time you can visit directly and give some feedback.
I took notes and looked up some resources for my previous post that didn’t get worked in because i didn’t want that to become a link dump.
Writing for the Living Web from A List Apart is full of helpful advice for writers.
Rebecca MacKinnon has a good pdf on her blog called Blogging for Change. I wanted to especially call out a couple of quotes from the 4th and 5th pages of the PDF.
Blogs help you to build your "information community" with like-minded
individuals and organizations by cross-linking to their sites
If you enable visitors to leave comments to your entries, blogs allow you to
easily interact with the people who visit your site, enabling them to
participate in a discussion about what you do, thus encouraging their
participation or support for your activities.
You need at least one person in your organization who is
committed to updating the blog regularly with clear, interesting writing
and useful links. The material may be pre-existing, it may or may not be a
full-time job, but the blog will not succeed with out somebody's
committed efforts.
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