WebU

How to Present Video

From the Poynter.Org's E-media blog comes a pointer to what looks to be a fabulous use of web tech to produce (potentially) engaging journalism at the WashingtonPost.com. One of the brains behind this is Rob Curley, the guy who created Chicago Crime on his own (merging Google Maps with police crime reports) and, if I recall right, the Lawrence, Kanasas family of sites (LJ World etc.) before moving on to the Post.

http://specials.washingtonpost.com/onbeing/

This new subsite of the Post is well worth the visit, if only to see the gorgeous, useful, interface they've developed for presenting what is essentially a weekly video profile of ordinary people.

Here's what Poynter had to say:

onBeing: Nice Take on Creating Community

onBeing, washingtonpost.com In one of the debut onBeing videos, Washington, D.C.-based nun Sister Anne Elizabeth recounts her path from second base to the convent.

If you've been wondering what Rob Curley and his multimedia team at Washington Post-Newsweek Interactive have been up to since October, a hint of what's yet to come debuted midday today. It's called onBeing, in the CameraWorks section of WashingtonPost.com.

The onBeing project is based on the simple notion that we should get to know one another a little better," writes Jennifer Crandall on the site. "What you'll find here is a series of videos that takes you into the musings, passions, histories and quirks of all sorts of people. The essence of who they are, who we are."Jesse Foltz is responsible for the programming and neat interface design. Deryck Hodge developed the site in Django and Python. But it's right up Curley's community alley. There will be a new video every Wednesday. The development team is looking for comments (via e-mail) and suggestions for featured onBeing segments.

Some tips from Curley on using the feature:

• Check out the download options for each video, including the mobile phone option.
• Once you get to the video page, the video can be resized by dragging and dropping the lower right-hand corner of the video area to resize it on the fly without interrupting the video.
• On the video page, there is an option to watch the videos in high definition (if you have a high-def monitor).

Amazing what you can do when you pair web developers directly with content producers....

billD

Promiscuous bookmarking

One of the most popular web innovations of the past year has been "Social bookmarking".
Imagine you could free your web bookmarks from your browser and store them out on the web, so you could access them anytime, anywhere, from any web-connected computer.
Lots of services sprang up a few years ago offering that kind of functionality - but then a few went one giant step further.
They said, the web is all about 'community' and 'interactivity'. What if you could share those bookmarks, add to them, trade them, peek in on other peoples. See what was being bookmarked NOW, or what was being bookmarked a lot.
Social bookmarking was born.
There are many services that offer variations on this now - I use del.icio.us - and you can have a look at my bookmarks by going here  or here: http://del.icio.us/bdunphy if you can't simply click on the link.
If you'd like to see other social bookmark sites - click on the "bookmarks" tag in the right hand column, under "unbundled tags"