Materials, binders and laptops, for our 3 day workshop for the NMC Marcus project.
Storymining is the slick name of the 3-day workshop we (NMC) are doing in Dallas. This is part of our Marcus Project which is helping 24 art museums across the nation of Texas to become designers and producers of rich interactive web content using Pachyderm software and the approaches of digital storytelling (with help from Joe Lambert at the Center for Digital Storytelling).
It’s an energetic group and by tomorrow, they will all be knee deep in doing pachy content, as we scramble to assist as well as give crash courses as needed in audio recording/editing, video interview techniquies, digital video editing, scanning and image manipulation, and the odd need to digitize cassettes or video tapes.
The project web site is a definite placeholder, using the NMC existing statuc web page content. My big project, affectionately termed “NMC 2.0” is lumbering along, as I try to flesh out ideas for a rich, mixed. aggregated, aggregatable “community driven” site, ostensibly fueled by Drupal. I’ll be bugging D’Arcy for advice, part of my strategy of looking closely at technology that People I Respect Use.
I’d be blogging my progress on this, but it has been nudged gently aside by new things that have popped up all this month (Second Life, getting new sites up with MediaWiki, aiming my imaginative shotgun at sub contractors who do not show up), but takes priortity when I get out if this stinking Dallas heat to some comfy Phoenix heat next week.
The other things I’ve been stokled about is a concept I’ve known for a while that has been bopping around the back of my brain- reBlog.
It’s hard to encapsulate briefly, but it is a set of Loosely Joined Tools that can take an RSS aggregator one step further- you load it with feeds of relavant sites, and a human reviews, and flags specific items that are then easily/automatically “reblogged” on its own site, alomg with some optional commentary. And a side benefit is that it generates new RSS based on the reblogged content, as well as OPML of the aggregated feeds.
I’m prototyping for a pending project that will do well to have a group of external experts do the “filtering” and reblogging.
The software was not too hairy to set up, and it has plugins to make it grap content to publish in MovableType and WordPress (Drupal in progress). The WP plugin was a bit crude, and did not add a whole lot because my users would have to master the reblog tool (“reFeed”) interface as well as WP. Instead, I am using a provided reBlog RPC plugin that just routes the items published via reFeed to a WP blog- as long as it is set up with style sheets, a pretty face, then none of my editors need to see the second interface of WordPress edit screens.
The code is well written, the documentation sparse, but good responses to the forums at SourceForge. I’m a bit stoked at toying with a cool new tool.
“sub contractors who do not show up” – hey, if you ever need me to show your attendees how to do digital storytelling, just call! I’ll show up, I swear.
You want to come back to the Phoenix heat? 118 degrees today. Months of it to go… and it wasn’t dry due to the thunderstorms passing through. Oh, they didn’t actually rain on us, they just made it humid and utterly stifling outdoors.
reBlog sounds cool. Off to check it out now.