It’s doing a CoolIris embed from my flickr tag “dog” (what else?)

Cool. Iris.

Here is another one, this time using the MediaRSS feed I made for my Real Time Web presentation at Tulanw but it is now placed right in the page– http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/tulane09/embed.html and it now offers the same embed code to pass it around elsewhere.

Cool. Iris. Cool

My session yesterday at the Open Education Conference was absolutely the most fun thing I have put together for a conference. it was so fun I did not wait til the night before to finish it. The images above were totally not necessary, but I found myself up at 1:30am mocking up old covers from a collection of scans of the original Amazing Stories magazines (for which, I openly admit, I may not have permission to do).

So if you want to watch the presentation, you can do so via the UStream recording

but to be honest, it is better explored via the Amazing Stories site— the CoolIris version of the presentation (more or less a glossy way to browse the stories), or the individual stories as launchable videos, or the URLs relevant to the stories, or even a flash player to play them all sequentially at http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/opened09/.

The Idea

I wanted to come to the Open Education Conference
mainly for the caliber of other people participating, and is it seemed, I was able to meet a long ist of colleagues whom for up to now, I have only known online. Lots of people have this experience, and maybe we lose sight of how amazing this piece is that our online collaboration spirit is enhanced, amplified by the times we get to meet in person.

But to be honest, I dont have a lot to do with open content or open courseware.

So I rolled back to think just about the value of open- of sharing things online, and my past stories of funny, weird, and lovely serendipitous things that have come my way because of content I’ve put online- hence the idea to get other people to share their own stories.

I’ve long been interested, or more likely baffled, by why it seems so many in education are reluctant to share. This goes back so long in my career I cannot remember, and was heightened in the days I was working on a system to make it so easy to share that it was nearly fun.

And now I wonder why something so basic something that seems innate in kids in their play with other peer kids– is somehow schooled out of us in passage through the educational system. And thus I end up with my gut sense of what most kids know- when we share it feeds into the system that ultimately ends up with others others back to us.

It seemed as well when I talked to the people who contributed this stories that it does not take much of a response (a comment, and email) to generate the feedback loop. We all crave connection and attention and approval, and filling the world with more of the above towards others cannot but help.

It’s my hope that these stories just inspire a sense of, “I want to be part of this” or “that’s pretty easy” or whatever it is that makes people realize what I have known for long- when you share your stuff in the open, good things come back in return. That is not the reason to be sharing, but it is an outcome

At the same time, I have to avoid creating the expectation that if you just hang your photos in flickr or writer blog posts, that the riches will shower down on you. It is not a guarantee, and it also involves the other important aspects of giving feedback and response in other people’s online space.

The best thing to say about this came from my conversations with Clay Burell. I asked him about not wanting to put out this hope, that just by sharing content, you can’t count on getting some unexpected surprises. He sharply noticed then the only guarantee is

If you don’t share.. then you won’t get any unexpected surprises.

Was “Amazing” Too Big?

I issued a call for stories through several channels, and am clinging on to looking at that half full glass of the people who did share their stories, but at the same time, I was thinking I might get inundated with so many of these.

Perhaps “Aamzing” suggested to people that it had to be Huge, Epic, World Changing things I was looking for– in fact. I sought the opposite, the little, the small, the ones that just made us smile in amazement. Maybe it should have been “Amazing Little Stories of Openness”.

But I did get a Gardner Campbellian bag of gold.

The Method of Getting Stories

I hatched this idea in May or June, and set out getting responses by blogging about it, setting up a WikiSpaces site to host a call, groveling on twitter, etc.

What worked well was setting up a Google Form to have people share their contact info, the gist of the story, a preferred method of response (email, Skype, etc).

It was a few weeks later that I got the idea that posting a video call in YouTube would be effective, since people could just respond in a video reply.

I absolutely wanted this to be video, and for the few people who just sent the story details or did not respond to my emails, sorry I did not get yours in the mix.

The videos were acquired in multiple ways:

• Recording a Skype video call (using eCamm Conference Call Recorder for Mac OS). These worked well as it did not take anything on the tellers part, and I could ask some follow up questions. My fatal flaw was forgetting to record in the mode that puts my video/audio in a separate track, hence the heavy breathing looming in the background of a few stories.
• People send me their own recorded videoa. Oh that made it easy! Thanks Terry Anderson. Mikhail Gershovich sent a great audio recording, of which I ended up plucking images to use as visuals
• Recording people with my Flip Mino. This little device had some of the best video quality; I snagged a few while attending the ED-MEDIA conference (Stephen Downes, George Siemens, Rick Schwier) and also at home when Sue Waters visited in Arizona (and my own mug shots).
• Snagging from YouTube. Darren Kuropatwa, Cole Camplese, Mike Bogle, D’Arcy Norman, and Leigh Blackall posted them, and I was able to snag them as MP$ with the Download YouTube Videos as MP4 Greasemonkey script
• My little Canon camera. The little IXY came handy at ED-MEDIA in capturing stories from Nancy White and Tony HIrst whilst sitting in the windy dark of the hotel bar (thanks to whomever had the LED flash list, that worked perfectly.
• Pure improvising. I kept trying to bug Jennifer Jones into doing a story, but she was busy with a move, so I had fun taking the 4 phrase fragments she sent to the Google Form, mixing them with screenshots and background music into her story
  .

Editing The Videos

I went very simple on the editing, doing it all in a 3 year old version of iMovie HD. I sought out screen shots and photos that were part of the stories so that I could as on screen overlays (the voice continues in the audio channel).

I do this typically by separating the audio and video tracks, so I can insert a still to take the place of video, but often small bits of offset end up with the video and audio being out of sync

I have a simple approach for doing this, which is not always easy in iMovie since you only have one video content track (my next project is complex enough to warrant cracking open Final Cut Pro).

After importing my entire clip into iMovie, I trim and junk from the start and end, and if there are distinct breaks (e.g. if I have multiple stories in a single track) I use the Spit Video at Playhead option to break the clip into parts.

I first locate the point in the timeline IO want to insert my image, and note the time at this in point, in this example, 2:20:04 (it helps to be zoomed way in on the timeline so you can fine tune your cursor placement). I then do a command T or Edit – Split Video at Playhead to make a first cut.

I then move the playhead to an even number seconds ahead, usually I did 5 second inserts, but sometimes 3 or 4 seconds would do, and do another Split Movie at Playhead. If you click the timeline between these two points, you have the segment of video to replace.

Now with this 5 second segment selected, what I do is go to Advanced-Extract Audio, which then puts the audio for this segment only into the audio track.

Now I click the video track 5 second segment again, and delete that video clip. I can drop in the still image I want to appear in the 5 second space.

By having just the replaced segment’s audio on the sund track, I can be very precise in making sure my inserted still image lines up at the exact in/out points.

From here, I can go into the Media – Photos-Show Photos tools to zoom the still, or apply Ken Burns effects.

Oh Ken Burns.

It’s easy to make people nauseous with a lot of big zooms, but done in doses, it works well. My approaches are:

• Vary the direction of the zoom. If the previous sequence zoomed in, make the next one zoom out.
• Make only small amounts of movement. You dont have to zoom way in and out. Doing some with small amounts makes it seem less in your face.
• Try doing pure pans. Going across an image gives a sense of flow, direction.
• Get fancy with 3 point moves. The iMovie tool only lets you go from one point to another, but I have a method fo doing a 2 stepped Ken Burns; one that moves from point A to B, then from B to C.
  • So create a space for say, and 8 second insert.
  • Make the first one 4 seconds long.
  • Set the stop and end points for the first move, and apply the effect.
  • Now select and copy this 4 second clip, and paste it in as a copy right after the first one. Right away, use the reverse button– this makes the starting point exactly at the ending point of the first clip.
  • Now set the end point of the second clip the ultumate destination, and update.

I saved all my clips as MPEG 4, Exporting with the iMovie Expert Settings, using:

• MPEG-4 (MP4) using H.264
• Data rate: 672 kbits.sec
• 480 x 360 image size
• Frame rate 29.97 fps
• Key Frame: automatic
• Under Video Options- Best Quality (multi-pass)
• AAC-L (Music), 44.1 kHz, 128 kbps

I then converetd this to FLV for use in my web site.

Assembling into the Web Site

I tossed the full pile of media into the final web site at http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/opened09/.

Firstly, I set my presentation up to play in CoolIris… not to be explained here, but I have outlined it elsewhere. It’s a matter of creating a directory of images (U usually do at least 800×600 JPEGs for the full images, and 240×180 JPEGs for the thumbnail images. And yes, I roll the MediaRSS file by hand.

I am super wary of bad internet connections at conferences, so I run the entire show fro my MacBookPro running a local copy of the Apache web server, This minimizes the load time of media and bails you if thr local hotel wireless sucks (which it usually does).

I had to do something different for this presentation, since I dod not have time or desire to play all the stories as video. I created a second copy of the site, so that this one uses a mediaRSS file that pulls videos form a second directory, where I had taken each story and made a 1-2 minute excerpt. In the presentation, I set up the videos in my telling about it, and then could play the shorter clip.

I found an annoying glitch in my process on the plane flight to Vancouver– the new way they load CoolIris in a browser, it runs my media RSS feed through a URL at www.cooliris.com so I cannot run the show totally offline. I’m guessing they are gathering data on the feeds used, but I wish it would fail gracefully if there is no internet just to run locally like it always did before. There is no technical reason it has to run a URL through a live web site.

In addition to the CoolIris viwq of the stories, I added a long scrolling list allowing links to pull up the stories individually, and to provide web links to sites the people referenced in their stories.

I got fancier again, using some HTML/CSS/Javascript Lightbox- the method where a link opens media in a translucent layer over the page:

so this way, I can keep the experience in the same page. I’ve been using this a lot in my custom sites, and am wanting to do more writeups on how this can be effective.

Here, I made it a PHO script that opens s I can pass a file name for the FLV movie to load (using the Longtail Flash Player) as well as a download link to the same as an MP4.

The last bi I added was another link that can play all of the videos together in a single player- this uses the same Flash player, but I can pass it a playlist in XML format, so that all of the videos can be viewed in one place (using the menu at the bottom, or the track buttons on the player to advance, or just sitting back and watching).

That’s another pending blog post on using playlists for custom media sequencing….

So that’s pretty much the behind the scenes look at this presentation, which was one I just loved putting together.

And if you did not get your story in the mix… well, I am done putting them together, but you can always add them as a reply to my YouTube request.

Frankly, I know each of you has had some experience that is something that would not have happened if there was not this open space of sharing. I have dreams of seeing thousands of stories appearing, and of people dropping their fear, loathing, reluctance about sharing, and just share like mad, like crazy.

I wont promise that something amazing will happen, but as Clay said, you can be sure nothing amazing like this will happen if you don’t share.

Go out and be open. A lot of people doing that is Amazing.

I’m a huge fan of CoolIris, the browser plugin that turns media content into an amazing flowing virtual wall. It is hands down one of the best ways to explore flickr or YouTube searches, since results are not limited to one page, it becomes endless flow.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

Since February, I have been crafting a lot of my presentations in the CoolIris format, using the form of RSS to drive the content I pick- see my documentation on Tricking Out CoolIris as a Presentation Tool as well as the step by step instructions posted by Doug Belshaw.

The reason it works for me is the way I can associate “slides” with a URL so I can jump out to a web page and easily return to the presentation- or it is seamless to jump around.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

I pretty much modeled my work using the example CoolIris has for Enabling Your Site with RSS which again I have used for a strings presentations since February 2009, and in most of them I had embedded FLV video which worked flawlessly… until sometime in late May.

It was about the time I upgraded to Flash 10 that I noticed (and was told by Dean Shareski) that the embedded videos no longer worked. They status icon just pun endlessly and the video never played. Video for YouTube played fine. Dean had sent a link acknowledging this on the CoolIris Bug page which has since been removed. The CoolIris discussion forums had a number of people asking about this with a whole range of suggested work arounds that never worked.

In testing I I have confirmed that it fails on:

• Mac OSX with Flash 10 in Safari (3 and 4) Firefox (3 and 3,5)
• Windows Vista with Flash 10 in Internet Explorer 7

However, it does work in

• Windows Vista with Flash 9 in Firefox 3.0

For my most recent presentation, I did an end around by linking out to a web page to play flash video, which works, but is not optimum.

Tonight, I nailed and squashed the bug to the wall. I outlined this in fill detail to bugs@cooliris.com. Let’s see if they acknowledge it.

I found the bug when using their test feed linked under “self help”. I nabbed the RSS feed their example used, since the embedded FLV worked perfectly there.

I had modeled my MediaRSS for embedding FLV content after their example listed under step 1:

As their example suggests and their documentation states

Note: The URLS can be relative (i.e. images/photo.jpg) or absolute (i.e. http://anysite/images/photo.jpg).

So I started looking at their sample RSS test feed where the FLV video did work, and first was baffled since the format they used was nowhere near the example; the XML structure was different and text was encoded in CDATA format.

So I first copied this into my own MediaRSS and replicated the format. Nope video still worked.

In a whim, I wrote the URL path for the FLV content as a full URL.

Bingo it worked.

Bug found- relative path URLs do not work in the MediaRSS file.

My original MediaRSS was the same as the basic

 <item>
  <title>Their Generation</title>
  <media:description>stick around for the smashing end..
    </media:description>
  <link>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqfFrCUrEbY</link>
  <media:thumbnail 
       url="pl_thumbs/zimmers.jpg"/>
  <media:content type="video/x-flv" 
    url="pl_video/zimmers.flv"/>
</item>

which is the format that fails to load. However, if I recoded it:

 <item>
  <title>Their Generation</title>
  <media:description>stick around for the smashing end..
    </media:description>
  <link>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqfFrCUrEbY</link>
  <media:thumbnail 
    url="pl_thumbs/zimmers.jpg"
  <media:content type="video/x-flv" 
    url="http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/salemstate08/pl_video/zimmers.flv"/>
</item>

My videos now work.

So for the final proof, I have two versions that can be tested:

This version with relative links to FLV video FAILS:
http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/salemstate09/index.html with feed http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/salemstate09/show.rss

This version with FULL links to FLV video works:
http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/salemstate09/index2.html with feed http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/salemstate09/show2.rss

If you do test this, be sure to also confirm your version of Flash as the bug does not show for Flash 9 but is there if you have Flash 10.

So, the skeptic says, “Stop crying and use full URLs, will ya?”

Here is why I dont want to. First of all, I often replicate my shows for a different audience, moving the presentation to a new directory. I don’t want to have hard coded URLs.

But more importantly, I run my live presentations from a web server running locally on my laptop, so I can be free if the vagaries of hotel internet, so actually my shows run from a “fake” URL — http://www.cogdogblog.loc/ which is set to localhost on my Mac.

But even more importantly, this bug has been out there for months, and they have not done anything to even acknowledge it. And that si the reason for this long bug post.

C’mon CoolIris, step up, list the bug, and fix it, will ya? Thanks!

cc licensed flickr photo shared by moonpie dig it

Update: CoolIris is listening! They’ve responded to my reports- new versions (or documentation) will fix the full URL for video, plus they will fix another problem I notced that clicks on the open in page link blow out the cool Iris content (command-click is the short term fix).

Nice to know they are listening!

It went fine, I had fun, people laughed at the Blabberize Alpaca. There is an audio recording coming from EDMEDIA, which is going to be full of me popping my p’s a bit loudly. It was a few days before that I realized I was missing a key cultural reference:

Hawaii 50+ Ways the trailer

Going into this I felt I needed something new as an angle. ED-MEDIA is a big international conference, and swirls around the thousands of papers presented. Egads, I needed something academic?

I’m really ready to hang it up and retire the shtick. This time I tried to take a tack of emphasizing some things I suggested were more important than the tools, some things I called “the craft” and aimed to hang them on some of the examples.

• A story must clearly arc to an end, to a “punchline.”
• Distill a story down to only its most necessary elements.
• If you cannot create media, modify or re-purpose.
• Think and tell in metaphors and symbols.
• Be creative within a limited tool set.
• The act of locating media is a key craft

I did get the audience to join in the group story game where they had to contribute to the prompt:

Under a Full Moon, Last Night I Saw The Strangest Thing Happen On Waikiki Beach

(as usual) it involved Elvis singing “Blue Hawaii” and then he was dancing with a shark… someone has to wrap that one up.

And also as usualy lots of people want t know what software the presentation was done in.

“That’s the web”

and it is! It’s just images, some RSS, and the CoolIris plugin– all building on what I outlined in CoolIris as a Presentation tool. It’s a bit easier now to run your own image slide shows, even from your desktop, and Scott Leslie keeps pounding at other ways to create shows– but to me, the most powerful method is rolling your own RSS feeds since you can then define the web link for each slide. That is the reason I use CoolIris as it is nearly ideal for doing presentations about web sites because of the way it moves back and forth from presentation to web and back.

A few new wrinkles I tossed in this time:

• For candy on the eye candy, I added my own logo to the CoolIiris menu bar. Easy stuff.
• Ever since May, something changed in either CoolIris or Flash (and no one is owning up) so that my previously working FLV videos that played inside the CoolIris wall now refused to play. They just spin and spin and spin, and CoolIris is not even acknowledging this as a bug. I ran an end around by doing anormal image and link to a web page– a page I created that autoplayed my flash video in a web player- e,g, http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/50ways/hawaii-50-ways.html
• Almost by accident– yes it was an accident or a typo– I found a new CoolIris trick. The normal thing is to make a thumbnail image by making copy of the full size image but smaller dimensions II do mine as 240 pixel wide JPEGs). While testing, I had noticed that I had a thumbnail of a different image than the full size- and when played in CoolIris, you get some neat transition effects. I used it on a few slides- as shown in the video below, not sure if it comes through as an effect (or a gimmick):
  cool iris trick

A few other notes on my mad methods- I do everything to avoid the inevitable Sucky Hotel Internet. So I run my presentation in a web browser, but running locally from Apache running on my MacBookPro. That makes it run a little faster. IN addition, because of the awkward pauses while waiting for web sites to load– all of the external sites I planned to use I had pre-loaded as tabs in my browser, so all I needed to do was to minimize the CoolIris interface, and flip to the right tab.

So that was 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story, Hawaiian Style (pineapple and Canadian bacon??).

Book ‘em, Dominoe.

I hear from folks who want easier ways to run presos in CoolIris (if you missed that boat, get the cool Firefox add on)- and there are more options now, including running it from a set of photos on your desktop, and likely the easiest, IMHO, is to create a flickr set and view that in CoolIris.

A recent tweak I found, which adds zero to the presentation itself, but I could not resist, is the new ability to add your own custom logo to the CoolIris menu bar:

This is just a PNG file (useful because you can use PNG transparency to avoid Logo in a Box) I have stored in an images directory on the root level of my web site– it’s just another line in your media.rss file right after the first tag. The image should be no higher than 26 pixels so it fits in the bar

<channel>
<atom:icon>/images/cogdog-piclens.png</atom:icon>

You typically would be using a full URL, but this is because of another presentation “trick” I do with CoolIris- I do not run the presentation from the web (oh the joys of conference hotel internet) but from a web server running locally on my laptop- so my desktop URL is http://www.cogdogblog.loc/…. and I use relative links to keep everything in tact.

So it’s not really crucial, but just a Neat Thing to Do.

A current frustration with CoolIris is that either the newer version of it or Flash v10 has broken the ability to play FLV videos inside CoolIris- I can view videos fine from YouTube, but nothing works as it did a month ago for my own spun shows. Dean Shareski did send a link from the developers site acknowledging this (and that link is now gone), the developer forums have others asking about this, I even got a tweet response from CoolIris where they acted surprised– but the point is the method that worked in May 2009 to embed FLV inside custom mediaRSS now fails.

One approach would be to uninstall flash 10 and roll back to 9. What a PITA. For now, I am just changing my strategy, and not putting the FLVs in my mediaRSS file, but building an image representational screen, and using the link option to jump out to my own web page that has the video embedded. Not as elegant but you do what you can….

So as a sneak preview, it was just a few days ago that I realized I had missed a major cultural reference that fit in well for my presentation in Hawaii:

50 Ways Hawaiian Style

The real reason I like using CoolIris, beyond the “wow” effect, is that ability to jump out to URLs in the middle of a preso (simply by assigning the URL in the ... tag) and to easily jump back to where you were before. I may adjust this in the live presentation, because there is a wait period while the URL loads in a new tab- for just my presentation version, I plan to pre-load all my externals in tabs, and just jump out of CoolIris to go right to the site. It can be awkward standing on stage waiting for the site to load.

Book ‘em Domin-O!

Today was a full on day at the opening end of a 2 week road dog trip around New England. Yesterday I flew into Newark, and did the train into New York for today’s fantastic experience at the Annual Symposium on Communication and Communication Intensive Instruction at Baruch College, thanks to a generous invitation form Mikhail Gershovich to be a workshop presenter.

Today’s events deserve a full blog post (hopefully coming next), but this was the first in a series of re-presenting 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story, which I am a bit worried as becoming one of these road show presenter types as it will be 2 years old in July. But there is some new life; A few tools are retired (JumpCut, Zude, Flektor, Thumbstacks), but added even more- PhotoPeach, Tikatok, Tar Heel Reader, Pixton, and the exciting and first and maybe nauseating later– prezi (I am happy with my prezi ;-). There are new examples thanks to people who commented here and there, so layout cleanup, removal of examples with dead links… and the big one was recasting the presentation part for today as a CoolIris version — http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/50ways.

Today’s audience was really energetic (and I had to keep dismissing people’s apologies for attending other sessions– its not personal to me, and I would have actually preferred to be in Gardner Campbell‘s session).

I’m giving thought to some really good questions today; some people wanting to see more educational examples (me too, please share); a little of the whip lash deer in the headlights look I saw, the oft repeated desire to hear more about some assessment of which tools are “better”. At the same time, many people as usual were very positive, one gent talked about how there would be one less person inflicting bad powerpoints… so I am checking my normal reflex to focus on the negatives.

At the closing session, the five afternoon workshop presenters, including myself, were invited up to the front of the room. Jim Oswald, a graphic facilitator for the event asked each of us presenters to give a “30 second” synopsis to the larger group, after which people in the audience in our sessions were asked to share their takeaways from our sessions.

This plays into the whole Symposium theme of asking about “the Audience”; and in many ways this was a bit frightening to see what people might say (nor not say) about your session. When you present, you just make some off the cuff guess as to what people walked away with.

But a huge highlight was the enthusiastic response to the part of the workshop where I ask the audience to toss out stream of consciousness suggestions for a possible story based on a prompt I made up, usually something locally relevant. Today’s was, “I Saw The Most Interesting Thing Happen on the Number 6…” referring to the local subway. It struck me then that there is no need in New York to make up wacky subway stories since there are so many real ones.

This group ran with it like I have never seen. The series that got tossed out was (and this came from them, not me)…

• A nun and a fireman are making out on the subway.
• Besides the storyteller and the couple above, the subway car is empty– except for a chicken which is pecking at the boots of the fireman…
• (for the introducing conflict)… the doors open and a bunch of school kids enter.

I stop it there, because the point is just to have (the audience) participate and just try thinking on the spot of something weird, funny to make into a story. I told them that finishing the end of the story was a homework assignment.

How would you end it?

I may not blog the rest of the day, but the total highlights were the mix of people drawn to this event, both academics and business people, from several of the CUNY schools, and people who came in from other parts of the country, and a number of interesting people in the private sector, all to chew on the theme of “Audience”

Our discussion on will revolve around the theme of “The Medium is the Audience.” We will approach the broad topic of “audience” in a number of different ways ranging from exploring how electronic media have changed our conception of what and who an audience is, to considering how the needs of an audience shape what constitutes effective, purposeful communication. By the end of the day, we hope to have generated many concrete, useful ideas, activities, tools, and approaches to fostering effective speaking and writing in the classroom and the workplace.

Twitter was fairly prominent here, and it was great to add follow some new names and meet up some that previously were just @’s in my cerebrum.

Kudos to Mikhail and everyone on his team at the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute.

I was asked to touch on new technology and understand students use of technology, which led me down a few paths- one for some Digital Native bashing, but also a chance to delve into two trends I am growing interested in – one being YouTube / video as a communication and its evolving culture. I borrowed heavily from the brilliant videos by Michael Wesch (I am convinced I could make an entire presentation just by playing his videos). And the other the rise of DIY culture and media creativity as a past-time. And for the day job, I wanted to toss in a review of the 2009 Horizon Report.

I’d been collecting video and web links and a folder of images. I discovered a great set of presentation type slides on technology and trends in the Digital Bites collection by Will Lion.

So I had a pile of media.

In the back of my mind, I had wondered about the capability of using CoolIris (actually pack when it was PicLens) having just seen its lush 3D wall of images you get when viewing a flickr or facebook page. It is very elegant. And I had noticed they’d added support to explore YouTube in the same interface. I saw that you could use arrow keys to move through images sequentially and said, “One day I will do a presentation in this format”.

Today I was able to use something that looked like:

But I thought I’d be limited to assembling my slides as a flickr set. And for this presentation, I wanted to use a mixture of images and video. The next thing I thought might work is using the “favorites” feature to build up a set of images, but oh my, getting the order right would be a b**** and if I wanted to change ot insert, I;d be screwed. Plus, I could not share it.

Then, a few days ago, I found the grail.

The holy presentation grail.

Well, at least it looked shiny.

In the Developers area of the CoolIris site was a section on Enabling Your Site with something called Media RSS, apparently a standard of sorts developed at Yahoo.

And there it was, I could have CoolIris lanuch from a web page I created, and by connecting my web page to an external RSS file that specified the data about the slides, I could have my own stuff in the order I wanted.

It was a matter of making a folder of the images (I made mine 1000px wide/high JPEG or PNG images), another folder of thumbnails of the same, and another folder of video clips (must be flash videos- flv. For the video, I grabbed 1-2 minute snippets in an undisclosed manner form certain video sites (cough cough TOS), that I used as my displayed video.

So I made a Media RSS file I named show.rss following the sample on the CoolIris site -this has an example of an image slide and a video slide from my own presentation.

<rss version="2.0" xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
  <channel>
   <item>
    <title>I Observe</title>
    <media:description>and I may have more
      questions than answers</media:description>
    <link>http://www.flickr.com/photos/timberwolf/65066095/
    <media:thumbnail url="pl_thumbs/observe.jpg">
    <media:content url="pl_images/observe.jpg">
  </media:content>
  <item>
    <title>Did You Know 2.0?</title>
    <media:description>video by Karl Fisch and
      Scott McLeod</media:description>
    <link>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMcfrLYDm2U
    <media:thumbnail url="pl_thumbs/did-you-know.jpg">
    <media:content type="video/x-flv" url="pl_video/did-you-know.flv">
  </media:content>
  </media:thumbnail>
</item>
</media:thumbnail></item></channel></rss>

What I really link is all e media URLs and links can be relative links (handy for moving sites around) or full URLs. Notes:

• title slide title: displayed in bold and hover over image
• media:description more like a caption added to bottom of image
• link URL or just local image link displayed when the Jump to Page button is clicked
• media:thumbnail location of thumbnail image
• media:content The link to the media shown for each- an image or FLV

And you can easily re-order your presentation by moving around the <item>…</item> blocks.

The Jump to Web functionality is what I really dug as I do so many presentations about the web, and going from something like powerpoint to the web and back is just awkward. My CoolIris presentation is accessed ON the web and I can access other web content seemlessly by using the right-more icon below the image (this is my own photo BTW):

So I can click that little button, and jump to the <link>…</link> I specified, roam all around the web, and CoolIris leaves a small button in the lower right of my screen that allows be to jump back into the presentation.

The videos worked really well too, and I could stop and start the video with the standard controls below the video.

Maybe it is just me, but I love this format. It bends RSS sweetly into something stunning.

Uh oh, I forgot my own law to start with the demo!

The presentation is live and viewable below. To get the 3D wall effect, you need to install CoolIris (free plugin); without it you can view the presentation in a more linear format via the embedded code that uses a PicLens lite player. But get the full monty effect with the plugin; any time you are at an enabled page, ike miine, you can launch the CoolIris wall by clicking the superimposed logo on the bottom right of any image in that page (shown left by red square and arrow).

So here it is, “The More Things Change… the more things change”

You can listen to the audio I recorded:
The More Thins Change…. (52 Mb).

On the site above, all the icons are hyperlinked to whatever they were linked to in my media rss file.

Thanks again to SCC and all of the enthusiastic people there today who seemed to enjoy the show- especially great to run into my long time Maricopa collaborator Bernie Combs, who I worked with in the 1990s on Research Methods (it may still work) and Negative Reinforcement University (which does likely work well anymore).

And thanks to CoolIris for cool technology!