[IMC-Video] video.indymedia

Wed Sep 13 01:57:35 PDT 2006

hi,

we've developed video functionality (with auto-torrent creation, 
vodcasting etc.) at EngageMedia.org for Plone, and will be releasing a 
package of our Plone customisation and multimedia products as GPL along 
with our public beta in the next few weeks. so there's a video CMS for 
Plone package available as an option :)

we're in a closed beta testing phase at the moment, but will be opening 
up as a public beta in the next few weeks. if anyone would like to check 
out our development tracker and have a snoop around on the site to see 
what can be done with video and Plone, please email me off-list and 
we'll make you a beta tester. we'd appreciate the input from imc-video 
types. this is our dev site:

http://dev.engagemedia.org/

otherwise our live site which is an earlier version of the package is here:

http://www.engagemedia.org/

are there less python/Plone people involved in Indymedia than php/Drupal 
people? i get this impression but perhaps i'm wrong. this is important 
to consider. as many indymedias are using or moving to Drupal it does 
seem to make sense on that point for video.indymedia to move to Drupal also.

there are good reasons for choosing Plone however, including great 
internationalisation/localisation, security and accessibility built in 
to Plone, and it's own library of useful addon products. non-profits 
such as Creative Commons, the Free Software Foundation and Oxfam use 
Plone as well as some massive commerical sites using Zope or Plone.

more pros and cons between Drupal and Plone are discussed on the Plone 
for NGOs list, some good threads are archived here:
http://lists.plone.org/pipermail/ngo/2006-June/thread.html

or for more info on Plone:
http://www.plone.org

i also feel like video.indymedia should be given props for getting to 
this stage, but i don't feel like it has a viable future, nor does any 
software that is supported by such a small volunteer developer base. we 
should move on.

i don't think video-sharing sites are a fad (neither are myspace and 
other social-networking sites) they're a phenomenon. it's just the way 
people are using the net now and will continue to do so. we have so much 
to learn from YouTube and MySpace about usability etc. in order to 
create the tools that can be an alternative.

i think it's important that indymedia provide an upload space as well as 
a portal / aggregator of video on other sites (including indymedia sites).

1. many local IMCs don't have the infrastructure to support video or 
larger video files
2. we shouldn't be supporting the use of commercial ad-supported options 
like YouTube if we can provide a decent alternative - here's an article 
on the fine-print in the YouTube clause regarding their re-use of your 
content without your permission for whatever commercial purposes they 
may choose:

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20060727.html

this is a serious issue for anyone uploading their content to YouTube, 
but it's also an indicator of where they're (obviously) coming from and 
why business policies behind these sites are not going to provide an 
appropriate distribution platform for our kinds of content.

of course the major reason for providing an alternative is that any of 
these popular video-sharing sites will pull content given government or 
corporate pressure to do so.

but we should be aggregating content from other sites at the same time, 
so whichever option video.indymedia goes with as a codebase should have 
potential for pulling in tagged video and rss feeds from other sites, 
and this should be developed as a core function of the new system.

then this information needs to be sorted and displayed sensibly for the 
user. simply pulling in "indymedia" tagged videos from other sites would 
not be enough, there is the question of how to fit these feeds into the 
taxonomies or folksonomies running on the site.

one option we discussed at the transmission international meeting of 
online video projects for social change in Rome this year was to use the 
transmission.cc site as a portal for some of the international video 
projects operating in the independent media space. we talked about 
bringing in videos based on category feeds from other sites and grouping 
these in a cloud - treating category definitions as project-generated 
tags to be aggregrated within a cloud on our portal.

http://transmission.cc

this was just one idea which we haven't yet even tried out. there is 
some action-research being conducted into metadata standards for sharing 
or aggregating content by Zoe from http://www.ifiwatch.tv at the moment. 
we can feed back any ideas generated from this back into this list.

also check the transmission front page for at least some websites whose 
material can be potentially pulled in to a future video.indymedia site, 
presented here in the basic form of a latest videos RSS feed from each 
project.

video.indymedia.org were invited to be part of the Transmission meeting, 
but couldn't make it, i think very unfortunately as many of these 
questions came up for all of our projects and we knew they were relevant 
to video.indymedia too. there is another event as Mick flagged as a 
follow up to Transmission in London in October, I recommend checking it out.

http://retransmission.org.uk/

anna

 >>>>>

I agree entirely that video.indy is at this point only minimally 
functional, and is basically getting its ass kicked by corpo video sites 
(obviously, especially YouTube). Christ, we don't even have thumbnails, 
let alone tags, ratings, one click for embed link, auto file conversion 
to multiple formats, etc., and forget about innovating next generation 
stuff like the ability to link to particular moments within a clip and 
true online collaborative editing (think video editing wiki).

Part of it is that there seems to be no-one putting any significant time 
into Nimiq. And honestly, at this point I really feel like its a serious 
mistake to continue with Nimiq if there are no developers working on it.

There are already better FOSS video CMS tools out there, obviously 
people are working on stuff for Drupal, and there are the tools 
developed by participatory culture foundation (broadcast machine, 
videobomb, democracy player).

Frankly, I can't think of any reason to continue with a CMS that no one 
is working on, when there are other projects that a) already have better 
functionality and b) have significant teams of developers constantly 
working on them.

I'm sorry if this sounds harsh to anyone on this list who has put energy 
into Nimiq. Please correct me if I'm wrong and there is some team of 
people working away and soon to release the next, more functional 
version. But if not, it just doesn't make any sense, and we should start 
seriously discussing a switch to a system that is more functional and is 
alive.

Just off the top of my head I can see 3 interesting possibilities:

1. Drupal (duh). And re: the previous post, we can use Archive.org 
instead of Amazon.

2. Broadcast Machine. Not very flexible yet, really, so I don't know if 
it's a good choice, but frankly it would work better than what we have 
and it has developers working on it (it supports thumbnails, tags, 
multiple feeds, user accounts, etc.)

3. A different conception of the site entirely, where we focus less on 
providing a space for people to upload and more on syndicating indymedia 
content from everywhere: from all IMCs, but also could pull video 
content tagged 'indymedia' from every video site (videobomb, mefeedia, 
etc. etc., hell, even youtube)

OK that's more than 2 cents.

peace
schock

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