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Plumi 0.1 RC2 Released

Plumi 0.1 release candidate 2 is now available. This fixes two key bugs that affected installation. You can get the rc2 release here http://plone.org/products/plumi/releases/0.1rc2

Thoughts about MediaRights and Transmission

"MediaRights maximizes the impact of social-issue documentaries and shorts. " they say. as a film-maker this article I find vaguely interesting:

"Upstream: Building Community Around Online Identity".
http://www.mediarights.org/news/2007/07/17/upstream_building_community_around_online_identity

maybe here we're more 'building identity round online community'?

Released! Plumi - Free Software Video Sharing Platform

EngageMedia are very excited to announce the first release of Plumi, a free software video sharing Content Management System. Plumi enables you to create a sophisticated video sharing site out-of-the-box. In a net landscape where almost all video sharing sites keep their distribution platform under lock and key, Plumi is one contribution to creating a truly democratic media.

http://plumi.org | http://engagemedia.org

Plumi is based on the popular Plone Content Management System and enables a wide array of functionality including:


Future features will include:

an update on metadata standardisation, ifiwatch.tv, documentation and subtitling etc - one year on from Transmission in Roma

Metadata standard:
Shiftspace has now been promised financial support from OSI to take forward finalising and implementing the metadata standard across the Transmission and other networks. For a layperson's explanation of what metadata standardisation is, and why it's important, see http://wiki.transmission.cc/index.php/What%2C_who%2C_why_the_standard I'll be working with this process using www.ifiwatch.tv as a test case for feeds in and out, aggregation and sorting and so forth ...using real issues, real information swapping needs to see how the whole thing works.

www.ifiwatch.tv
The other side of this story is that we have nearly completed the recreation of ifiwatch.tv in the free and open source Drupal content management system. we will soon be launching a beta site for everyone to test the feed functionalities, see how the model works, start and if possible keep the sorted video info flowing between our diverse video projects and websites... yay!

Plumi is coming

The first release of Plumi, the Plone based video sharing CMS produced by EngageMedia, is just around the corner. The beta should all be out in the next few weeks and available for installation and testing.

from the site

Plumi is a GPL licensed video sharing Content Management System based on Plone and produced by the EngageMedia collective. Plumi enables you to create your own sophisticated video sharing site; by adding it to an existing Plone instance you can quickly have a wide array of functionality to facilitate video distribution and community creation.

Plumi is set for release mid-June 2007. You can see an operational version at http://engagemedia.org

On top of the out-of-the-box Plone functionality Plumi adds the following features:

Docs gathering, brief summary

A highly productive couple of days discussion free software online video documentation was had at Dekspace in Deptford, London May 22/23.

Key amongst the discussions was the development and implementation of FLOSS Manuals and Suitecase Manuals as engines to develop a modular documentation repository. The idea being that custom methods could be built by pulling in xml outputs from various modules that were then annotatable and also skinnable. This would allow a central, version controlled repository to exist whilst allowing projects to customise the documentation to their own needs. As such everyone collaborates to create documentation but uses their own format to display it.

London Docs Gathering

A few of the crew from the Transmission documentation working group are going to be meeting up in London in a couple of weeks to talk online video distribution documentation.

The aim to create a common repository for housing and collaborating on documentation to avoid re-inventing the wheel and to create a better resource.

The dates are May 22/23. More info can be found here
http://wiki.transmission.cc/index.php/Documentation_working_group

moving along now

anyone seen joost? what's the initial verdict?

meanwhile, we have new developments afoot with the project that got me into this whole malarkey, that is Eyes on IFIs. we are transferring it into the free and open source Drupal content management system, and creating new data upload forms partially based on the draft transmission metadata standard.

it is getting increasingly urgent to finalise this standard, not least because Engagemedia are also at a point where they need to implement standard forms for their Plone video package. we're enthusiastic users and ready to test the standard with real world implementation, yet the technical comments on the first proposal have not yet been argued out and integrated....

Free Media vs Free Beer

The free beer Richard Stallman loathes is everywhere. Media companies are currently falling over themselves to produce the new hive for user generated content. The names have rapidly become common place - YouTube, MySpace, Flickr - and their affect has been enormous, dramatically changing the production and distribution of media globally. Free beer pours from the taps of these new hubs of participatory media as they clamor to get you in the door. But free beer, as Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman has always emphasised, is not the same as freedom.

The Free Software Foundation has a stock standard one liner about what free software is and is not: "free as in free speech, not as in free beer". That is free software is not about price, but liberty. Free software is software that may be freely shared and modified on the basis that those modifications be made available to others. The defining document for free software is the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL).

semantic web from above - or below... blog repost

Why the semantic web will fail

"Rather than expecting a top-down implementation coming from the established players, if there is any great utility to be gained, I think it will emerge from the ground-up in an initially limited yet scalable form."