[Advocacy] Re: Spread Open Media dot Org Update

Tue Jul 17 11:32:20 PDT 2007

Jon has a great point - the lack of available plugins for Open  
Formats on an open-platform such as Wordpress is both mildly ironic  
and frustrating for the "mildly-above-average" user (of which I  
consider myself). I know very little about modifying the php for  
plugins and thus I find the idea of going in and modifying actual  
code quite intimidating.

This is important for two reasons, one specific to the technical  
implementation of the project and one to the overall rhetoric of the  
movement.

Firstly, my assistance in modifying plugins will be near-coexistent.  
I'll continue to hack away at the WP theme and blog, but this is the  
extent of my technical abilities.

The more interesting piece of information that can be taken away form  
this is how do we expect Open Formats to take off without the ability  
for average and "mildly-above-average" users to integrate these  
formats easily? Obviously this gets at a central issue that SOM will  
hope to solve - taking Open Formats from the more obscure to the more  
commonplace. I think keeping the average user in mind is very  
important though. To really spread open-media we have to always keep  
the technical lowest-common-denominator in the back of our mind.

I'll post these thoughts a bit more eloquently to the blog...

-Cameron

---
Cameron Parkins
www.superhumanoids.com
AIM: cam3ran

"Among a coward's weapons, cynicism is the nastiest of all" - Tracy  
Kidder channeling Paul Farmer

On Jul 17, 2007, at 2:18 AM, Jon Phillips wrote:

> BTW, I think these types of discussions should be posted to the blog.
> They are both interesting wrt to open media, but also a good guide for
> others.
>
> j
>
> On Tue, 2007-07-17 at 11:13 +0200, Bjorn Wijers wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>>> Be sure to check out the wiki -
>>> http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/Spread_Open_Media#. Right now, we  
>>> are in
>>> between Milestone 1 and Milestone 0. We still need a couple of  
>>> things to
>>> happen before we can go somewhat live with the project - mainly blog
>>> posts and creating the relevant definitions for SOM.
>>
>> Ok, I will continue to come up with a definition / explanation of  
>> open
>> media. However, this is something I think all of us need to have a  
>> close
>> look at it.
>>
>>> The blog is up and running and the theme is in progress. Please,  
>>> give us
>>> any feedback on what can do to make it better. Of course, if you  
>>> want to
>>> lend a hand in the WordPress hacking, let us know!
>>
>> As for the wordpress hacking:
>>
>> - We need a mediaplayer plugin which allows us to embed theora  
>> video and
>> vorbis audio in the site. After all we're trying to set a standard ;)
>> As far as I know there is no such plugin yet, but there seems to be a
>> quite popular plugin for both Wordpress and Wordpress Mu called
>> Anarchy Media Player[1]. I've just downloaded it and have I'll have a
>> look to see if I can extend it to also play vorbis and theora  
>> using the
>> cortado[2] java applet. Would be nice to do this instead of  
>> creating our
>> own plugin. Btw I also found this interesting page [3] discussing  
>> more
>> of the FLOSS codecs and the issues surrounding it.
>>
>> - It would be nice if we would have a look at making the site
>> multilingual. I think we can get quite far by creating a theme for  
>> every
>> language we will support and using this plugin called Gengo [4]. I
>> haven't tsted this yet, so it would be cool if someone could have a
>> closer look and see if this plugin is really useful.
>>
>> - Extend the basic wysyswy editor with more options. Very useful  
>> if we
>> want more people to start blogging including those with less  
>> experience
>> with (X)HTML. I used this plugin [5], but I heard this one [6]  
>> might be
>> better due to it being more extended / advanced. Needs testing  
>> though.
>>
>> - We might want to add 'social bookmarking buttons' to all of our  
>> posts
>> and pages. This makes it easy for visitors to bookmark / submit our
>> content to sites such as digg and alike. Makes it very easy to spread
>> the message. This plugin[7] seems to offer this functionality. We  
>> might
>> want to add more localized bookmark sites as well such as the  
>> Dutch site
>> 'nujij'. Again, needs some testing and a look at the code.
>>
>>
>> LINKS
>> [1] http://an-archos.com/anarchy-media-player
>> [2] http://www.flumotion.net/cortado/
>> [3] http://wiki.transmission.cc/index.php/ 
>> BROWSER_PLAYBACK_OF_FOSS_CODECS
>> [4] http://jamietalbot.com/wp-hacks/gengo/
>> [5]
>> http://www.solo-technology.com/blog/2007/02/28/first-release- 
>> visualize-advanced-features/
>> [6] http://www.laptoptips.ca/projects/tinymce-advanced/
>> [7] http://www.valent-blog.eu/social-bookmarking-reloaded/
>>
>> grtz
>> BjornW
>>
>>
>>
> -- 
> Jon Phillips
> jon at creativecommons.org
> cell: +1.510.499.0894 (80% time)
> desk: +1.415.369.8486 (20% time)
>
> Community/Business Developer
> Creative Commons
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>
>
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