Democracy Player

Posted on by John

You might have seen mention of the Democracy Player go by in my del.icio.us links feed, back when the Mozilla Foundation donated money to the Participatory Culture Foundation.

If you haven’t taken a look at the Democracy Player itself, you really should. Think of Democracy Player as an alternative to Joost : an open source, multi-platform (Windows, Mac, and Linux) video player and download client which can handle video podcasts / vodcasts as well as bit torrent downloads. It’s also open in terms of content, and the channels which can be made available. It is soon to be renamed to “Miro” – in anticipation of the 1.0 release.

As the project page explains, the Democracy Player is not only a better player for its users, but also better for the ecosystem of the internet:

Television is the most powerful medium in our culture, and it’s moving online. There’s a huge opportunity to hear new voices. But if video on the internet is dominated by just one or two huge video websites, we’re all in serious trouble. Openness, competition, and decentralization make the internet work. We need to ensure that online video has that same freedom.

Democracy Player keeps online video open by letting you connect to all of the big video hosting sites and thousands of independent publishers, all in one place. Don’t get locked in to one video host.

Safari for Windows

Posted on by John

I have to admit I thought I was stumbling across an old April Fool’s joke when I found this BBC article.

However, now that I’ve installed and used it for a bit, I can validate this is not a joke. Apple’s Safari browser, version 3 beta, is available for Windows XP and Vista.

Safari for Windows

Movable Type Open Source

Posted on by John

(via blog.wohlrapp.com among others)

The folks at SixApart have announced that coinciding with the release of Movable Type 4, there will be an open source edition of Movable Type, which will form the basis for the commercial products.

The Movable Type Open Source Project was announced in conjunction with the launch of the Movable Type 4 Beta on June 5th, 2007. The MTOS Project is a community and Six Apart driven project that will produce an open souce [sic] version of the Movable Type Publishing Platform that will form the core of all other Movable Type products.

I can understand Rod Begbie’s quip (“I’ll take ‘Two Years Too Late’ for $400, please, Alex”) and I too found the inability to spell “open source” correctly rather strange – I guess MovableType doesn’t have built-in spell check, even in 4.0 beta?.
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CNN.com Beta: Behind the Scenes

Posted on by John

The good folks at CNN.com have launched a beta site for their ongoing redesign of the main cnn.com experience, at http://beta.cnn.com/

Accompanying the beta site, they’ve launched a blog, Behind the Scenes at CNN.com, where they are encouraging discussion of the redesign.

It’s a great concept – specifically highlighting what the team is trying to accomplish in the redesign, and going beyond the constraints of carefully chosen focus groups under NDAs for a far more transparent and open forum.

Not all the comments will be terribly valuable, of course; the first comment on the first post says in its entirety: “It’s too white. Not enough color. print is too small. Make it more colorful like USA Today. com or MSNBC.com.”

But when all the comments are taken together, they will undoubtedly get insights and guidance from their most vocal constituents which will help guide their evolution, and which they would only have received too late (or not at all) under the old “design and build under a cloud of secrecy, then reveal only when it is all complete” approach.

They’re also explicitly working on what Dermot Waters characterizes as “being a good web citizen” by pointing to local news sources and blog posts which are outside CNN’s domain.

The idea, which sounds almost self-evident but isn’t always well understood by online media sites, is that:

. . . by being a good web citizen, we fulfill our core mission by doing whatever it takes to help you get the full story — even if it takes you away from CNN.com. If we do that well, we believe you’ll keep coming back.

It will be interesting to watch the site (and the discussion about its goals and their fulfillment) evolve.

(In the interest of full disclosure, Turner Broadcasting is an Optaros client – but that doesn’t influence what I’ve said above except that I’ve had a chance to meet some of the folks behind the effort and know that they get it and mean what they say.)