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I discovered this via Jeff VanDrimmelen on Lee Lefever’s blog. It’s a Web 2.0 style video of the benefits of using RSS called RSS in Plain English. Nicely done. The only thing I would emphasize is that the information is under the control of the user. If you feel overwhelmed with all the feeds you read, you can easily drop those subscriptions. It is something I should have emphasized when I did this video on setting up and using Bloglines (sorry about the last repeating video too. I need to fix that).

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There’s an interesting article in the Times today about the “coverage” of the Virginia Tech shootings on Wikipedia. You know, Wikipedia is the one that is so easy to bash for its inaccuracies. Well, read the article and you decide, but there is a great quote in the Times article from a 22-year-old student from Finland.

As the popular joke goes, The problem with Wikipedia is that it only works in practice. In theory, it can never work.

Some of you may have seen this already, but it gave me a hearty chuckle when I saw it.

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I’m all into mash-ups lately, so I’m going to present one here that crosses a media jukebox and web browser (and one based on Mozilla to boot) called Songbird. It’s still in early beta, but it has a lot going for it. It functions a lot like iTunes, with the ability to play music from the iTunes store (though you can’t buy music from there through Songbird). However, it will sync with your iPod (haven’t tried it). It also is extensible like Firefox, and when you go to add those extensions you’ll do a double take and think you were in Firefox.

You can play the music from your computer’s hard drive, and like iTunes, it’s placed in the Library. The web functionality comes in by going to a web page or blog with MP3’s on it. Songbird will list the MP3’s it finds by presenting it as a playlist. You can even subscribe and Songbird will stay up-to-date. As I mentioned you can play MP3’s and iTunes music, as well as .ogg, .flac, and .wma. Songbird works for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

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As part of a new partnership with KZO Networks, we have received not one but TWO Video Toaster workstations with custom software that will stream live broadcasts on the ‘net. The system also includes two Sony BRC300 robotic color video cameras, along with a wireless audio system. It’s time to get down to some serious play. Here are some Flickr photos of the setup.

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If you haven’t seen this site already, drop what you’re doing and go to makeinternettv.org. This is a fantastic site with soup to nuts coverage on what it takes, well, to make Internet TV. It even has a wiki (using my favorite wiki software, MediaWiki) that includes supplemental information and expert suggestions from the video community, so it will be a growing resource. The site is broken into chapters that are titled, Equipment, Shoot Video, Edit, License, Publish, and Promote. There are videos and screencasts of equipment and software that can be used in the creation process. It is certainly the most complete and well organized resource on the subject I have seen so far, and the wiki will only further the value of this material. Superb!

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In a moment reminiscent of the famous scene in The Graduate, I whispered to Jim Groom the word SimplePie. Long story short, don’t tell Jim about something new, neat, and cool, and expect him not to blog about it right away. So here is my SimplePie wiki contribution. The plugin works by making available a <feed> tag that will encompass any RSS/Atom feed URL and have it display nicely within a wiki page.

The real strength of this extension comes when used in combination with del.icio.us, especially where media files are involved. As I talked about long ago, I have a del.icio.us feed that gets ported into iTunes that is comprised of mp3 files that I mark with a “tolisten” tag. This allows me to instantly podcastify any random mp3 that I find out in cyberspace. Now, with the wiki plugin, I can share those files on a wiki page, and keep them automatically up-to-date. As Jim said, we are in the early stages of playing, but when something works this well right out of the gate, it lends itself to further exploration. SimplePie appears to be a deep cave.

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Oops! I read a comment on our Wiki/Blog mashup stating that the link to the wiki wasn’t working. Turns out the code to make the link appear as a tab at the top of the page was getting stepped on by Internet Explorer. It worked fine, of course, in Firefox. I had to specify a “class” tag when including the URL in the list item (which makes up the tab). Something like this:

<li class=”page_item”><a href=”http://umwdtlt.org/newmedia/wiki” title=”Wiki”>New Media Wiki</a></li>

Now you I.E. users can see the page in a better light. I’m still working on the footer in the Wiki displaying off-center in I.E.

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I haven’t got too much of a clue what this all means, but some of the MediaWiki Extensions (here, here, and here) that I have pointed to in recent posts now have a warning on them. So if you have your wiki wide open (where anyone can edit), you are apparently vulnerable to this type of attack. The UMW New Media Wiki is locked down so that only “sysops” can edit pages. I’ve been in contact with Jim Wilson, and he clearly knows way more about this stuff than I do. He has his own YouTube Extension that I have not tested, yet.

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Now that the blog/wiki mashup era has begun, it’s time to extend those technologies. Ever since I began using wikis, and MediaWiki specifically, I thought “that’s cool, an instantly editable page”. However, it wasn’t a media-rich technology. Inline images were about the extent of the multimedia offerings. Then, back in January, I discovered the YouTube Extension which offered a way to place YouTube (or Google) videos inline in a wiki page. That, of course, got me thinking that it must be possible to do it with any Flash Video file (FLVs). Poking around at the MediaWiki third-party extension page turned up this extension for a DreamHost Flash Player. Dreamhost has created a player that will allow its customers to embed streaming audio/video onto their web pages. This information pushed me closer to the Holy Grail. Thinking about how the existing pieces worked led me to see that it was doable in MediaWiki. The key to all this is some javascript that detects Flash and embeds Flash objects. Bobby van der Sluis has come up with a script called Unobtrusive Flash Objects (UFO) that makes the embedding possible. The last piece of this puzzle is a Flash player, and there aren’t many better than Jeroen Wijering’s Flash Video Player.

So the simple ingredients are:

Flashplayer.swf - This is what plays the embedded FLV
ufo.js - This is the javascript that assists in the embed process
dhflashplayer.php - The MediaWiki extension (gets place in the “extension” directory)

The LocalSettings.php then gets modified to point to the dhflashplayer extension and that’s it. Now you use some special code to embed your video in MediaWiki. Something like this:

You can see the demo and view some more detailed instructions on the new UMW New Media Wiki.

For even more detail, I’ve created a screencast entitled How to Embed FLV Video in MediaWiki.

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Well, apparently my MistyLook/Wiki/Blog concoction was well received, so I think it’s well worth following up with a few more bits of information, and clarification. First, thanks to all who commented, especially those who weren’t sure what they were looking at really. Frankly, I would want to know too. Let me just say that from the start this was about creating a space that had a look and feel that was consistent, and at leased “loosely joined” two great technologies. It is certainly not a final answer, but a starting point. User integration, data integration, and presentation still need lots of work.

This “project” started at the end of last year when I went through the process of updating the theme to my blog. Mistylook was a finalist, but I ultimately went for Coffee Spot for a slightly more unique feel. Both of these themes, by the way, are the work of Sadish Bala, so large amounts of credit go to him for such pleasing designs.

I had been playing off and on with MediaWiki, but I had not gotten serious with it until this year. I was looking into issues with editing permissions and thoughts about vandalism, which oddly enough is that oh so delicate balance that Alan Levine barked about in reference to this MistyLook project. I also wanted to investigate the possibilities of getting video to work in MediaWiki and discovered first, the third-party extensions, and eventually the Google/YouTube extension.

Just recently I discovered the MistyLook skin for MediaWiki on the Skins Page, which was added sometime in March ‘07. The disappointment was that it was for MediaWiki 1.9.3. You know the rest of the story, but I did discover that Trevor had implemented the MistyLook theme at the University of Minnesota for a website, and it sure doesn’t look like any wiki. As I’ve said, Trevor has been a big help in all this. His suggestions keep rolling in and I’ll share more soon.

There certainly needs to be more skins made available that are based on the WordPress themes. Hopefully, that will progress sooner rather than later. So anyway thanks again, Oh Great EduWeb Community, for the encouragement. There’s more to come.

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