March 2009 Archives

Last Tuesday, Cole walked into my office and sketched out a picture of a page that would not only aggregate content from blogs@psu, but also pull in related content and media from around the social web.

On Wednesday, I modified the blog search template to include these ideas

On Friday, it went into production. Check out the page on "democracy".

It was really easy to make this change. The point of this post is not to toot my horn in how quickly this idea was realized. The point is to highlight another example of the benefits of a platform we can easily build on to realize our ideas. All the details on this new page, and my ideas on where this is all might be going will have to wait for another time.

I have mentioned here and there my vision of blogs@psu as not just a rigid web publishing system limited to the templates and structures that those running the thing (like me) will bless, but more of a general platform for enabling all kinds of interactions on the web.

This is why I met Chris Millet's blog post today with such joy. He used MT's custom field feature to add a location field for the entries and modified the templates to generate a GeoRSS feed and embed a maps widget from yahoo. Check out his post. It is really cool.

What MT/blogs@psu needs to provide is a way for developers to easily package and share these features. I know they could become template sets, but I am thinking something more flexible: 1) Something that I don't need to install on the server and could continued to be maintained by the author (kind of like the way styles can be shared via stylecatcher) and 2) something that could be mix-and-matched. For example, I might want to add maps support to either a "classic blog" or a "professional website".

The future is now, my friends.

You may play these in any order you like, or all at the same time.

Oh no! embedding is disabled on the last video I wanted to embed. you'll have to click below to watch the last video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6iEe_1kWqA

Thanks to a post by Reverend Groom, Heavy Metal Parking Lot was once again forced into my conscious active mind. Youtube has made a film like this obsolete, since this generation is now chronicling itself on youtube, and a camera pointed at a youth subculture is no longer a novelty.

This film is a great milestone in the evolution of grassroots video from the chemical (film) to the analog (video tape) to the digital. Just the fact that is such a cult classic says something about the time it was made. Footage like this was scarce. The genius was in pointing the camera. The movie's bootleg distribution of a copy of a copy of VHS tapes functions as an analog precursor to the large scale democratizing of video enabled by the internet.

Question: has youtube made people more savvy about being in front of a camera so that they are better are shaping their presence, and as such, would not act quite as dopey on film as the denizens of the heavy metal parking lot?

Overthinking this little filmic gem is kind of making me feel dirty.