On Mar 12, 2007, at 12:01 PM, Steve Watkins wrote: > > I guess its a subject that comes up quite often here, and yet I never > ending up recording much progress on that front. I know a stock answer > has become 'use spinxpress' and clearly it must work and be good > because it comes recommended by some people who will ahve used it for > such purposes. As I havent used it myself I remain pretty ignorant > about exactly what it offers beyond peer2peer filesharing, anybody got > a few moments to elaborate on how it fits into the process, and what > sort of collaborative processes fit well with this tool? >
I am so glad you asked. Thanks Steve :) Folks like Ryan Hodson, Jay Dedman and Michael Verdi have shared much of what they have learned working on collaborative projects like AliveInBaghdad, Sawjana and Freevlog. They have documented much of their experiences and best practices on various wikis and vlogs. We have asked them to help us build great tools for use in distributed media production. We have also been working with vloggers like Adam and Erik of WreckAndSalvage, Jan of the FauxPress, Josh Paul, JD Lasica and many others to better understand issues related to collaborative vlogging in particular. This may be old hat for many, but generally speaking, people have an idea and start communicating face2face, on IM, voice/video or via email. Often a team sets up an email list or group like this. Maybe a wiki too. Usually, for us, there's a vlog involved (and possibly an entire website to admin). Maybe there are other related sites and services (e.g., to do lists, feeds, video hosting, audio or video conferences, etc.). Needless to say, there are lots of great tools, services and resources a group can tie into these days. Clips and knowledge gets shared, people edit or augment, share back and review. Iterate. Eventually, a finished result is published (often in several formats and to several hosting and aggregator sites). In many cases, different team members contribute complementary skills and carry out different steps in the workflow. Standard practices evolve and are documented and passed on. The problem is: Multiply that times several interesting project groups over time. It quickly becomes a lot to keep track of. We can help with that. Instead of hunting through tons of emails, feeds or bookmarks, we are using open-source tools to turn p2p file and metadata sharing into a sort of "glue" for pulling together distributed production teams and their resources. As Jan might say: "it's not rocket science, but then again, it's not exactly brushing your teeth either". We try to make it drag & drop and point & click simple. At this time, we support three basic collaborative activities: get, share and publish. "Get" helps locate Creative Commons licensed media from places like the Ourmedia/Internet Archive and from within SpinXpress itself. We are also working with several other sites to include access to more media. We spend a fair amount of time talking to people about making their feeds and APIs' more search friendly. "Share" refers to sharing media, bookmarks, metadata and ideas. The p2p feature you mentioned is part of this, but so are the features that allow commenting, discussion forums, white-board, links, etc. Peered file sharing is performed by the clients, but group content can be accessed from browsers without installing a client. The "Publish" part is about uploading media through sites like Ourmedia, blip.tv and others and being able to keep track of what is published where. This is primarily a feature of our desktop client, but also reflected in profiles on our website (thus publishing through SpinXpress increases the link love :) ) I'd like to point out that much of this is now visible on our new kick-ass http://SpinXpress.com website that Verdi, Jay, Eric Zimmerman, Chris Ritke and others poured their souls in to. We are so excited about this. You can now browse, find and join cool collaborative projects on the site. This is a major addition to SpinXpress. That's it in a nutshell. I hope it helps explain what we do and how we fit. Thanks for the opportunity to plug something I'm so excited to be working on. --- Markus Sandy http://SpinXpress.com/Markus_Sandy http://Ourmedia.org/Markus_Sandy [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
