A quick note here on some online tools I’ve recently come across:
Kaltura – a collaborative video making tool that another colleague brought to our attention (thanks Sam). I realize this is not new to bloggers and videophiles in the know – but its relatively new to us here and we’re considering ways to use it on a project… They also have an interesting collaboration with Wikipedia. Moreover the open-source tools they offer are things that it seems more content creators (and viewers) are going to be clamoring for in the days to come including: video mixing, annotating, and ad serving.
VuVox – this is a mega-mashup tool of sorts allowing for more ‘dynamic’ content (video, animation, sound, still images- let your imagination run wild). Their new tool Collage was unveiled at We Media conference I attended about 2 weeks ago. the exciting promo text on the site reads
“Any real world location can become the launching point for a rich media story that features live media hot spots and embeddable links. A COLLAGE can be published, embedded, and syndicated into any website, blog or social networking site.”
This is still in private beta but interested parties can request to become a tester here. This tool is certainly limited to people with good broadband connections who are looking to creatively use their media, create mashups of mashups. I’m wondering if human rights bloggers could use the tool to provide context to a situation as it happens (after they’ve uploaded the video or embed a live stream of video) and again, yes this wouldn’t be those in places where lack of access to internet is a reality.
Anyone using either of these tools who would like to share your experience? Please let us know here… and thanks.
I just got word via the Oral history mailing list of another one that's a plug-in for Firefox:
Hi all,
Some list members may be interested in this media annotating tool that can be used for analyzing oral history audio and video files:
Vertov (http://digitalhistory.concordia.ca/vertov) is a free media annotating plugin for Zotero (http://zotero.org), a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. Vertov allows you to cut video and audio files into clips, annotate the clips, and integrate your annotations with other research sources and notes stored in Zotero. It is produced by the Concordia Digital History Lab (http://digitalhistory.concordia.ca) at Concordia University, Montreal, and is developed by Stuart Thiel.
The current 0.7.0.4 release is a stable beta, with a public release planned in April. Minimum requirements include: Firefox 2.0 browser and QuickTime Player for Mac or Windows; Java Runtime Environment (Windows only); Zotero, a Firefox extension. We plan to add more features, including export of clips and collaborative annotating, as well as add support for more file types (currently dependent on QuickTime), web services (such as downloading/annotating YouTube clips) and operating systems, especially Linux. For more information on future development, please browse the Vertov issue tracker
(http://vertov.htmlweb.com/trac/), which allows anonymous viewing of tickets, changesets, and source code.
Vertov is a free, open source Firefox 2.0 extension/Zotero plugin written in Java and JavaScript. If you are interested in contributing to this project, please post on the zotero-dev mailing list (http://groups.google.com/group/zotero-dev). Use Zotero forums (http://forums.zotero.org/categories/) to report problems and suggest new features.