March 2010

I just came accross an interesting little read where the Academic Technology Specialist for Stanford University's division of Literatures, Cultures and Languages expresses 3 reasons why he is invested in using Drupal for 9 projects at Standford. 

I totally agree with Zach's reasons of Flexibility, Leverage and Longevity - we love using Drupal at Design Guru because its a powerful framework for almost all web projects we undertake, scales fairly easily and quickly plus features a highly extensible architecture.

The Opening Reception for an exhibit by Design Guru associate Abigail Godfrey is being held on Thursday April 8th from 7 - 9 PM here in Toronto at the IX Gallery.

Here's some more description of the exhibit by Abi:

"Familiar landscapes have been transmuted. Each scene moves with its own rhythm. The movements of passersby, commuters on their way home from work, a glimpse of an ambulance. Each one has become essential, its energy revealed. Diffuse, as if looking into a memory, you begin to remember that day. It is re-born with painterly texture and elemental echoes: the angle of the rays, the bags you carried home, the sounds on the street, the scent of winter’s wane and spring’s advance. Travelers glide in and out of sight. Trees are made of clay. Cars and buildings bubble and burst in a hurrah of sunlight. The mundane is transformed into a dreamscape. These altered visions, simultaneously telescopic and microscopic, emerge from the liminal anew."

You can RSVP on Facebook...

IX Gallery
11 Davies Avenue
Toronto, ON
www.ixgallery.ca
info@ixgallery.ca
416 469 4848

Episode 4 is a conversation between Design Guru director Qasim Virjee and Social Media thinker/consultant Jaime Woo. In it, they recap lessons learned at 2010's South By Southwest Interactive festival in Austin, Texas - mainly, how attendees used new technologies such as Twitter and Foursquare/Gowalla to communicate and navigate through the multitude of events happening.

LINKS:
designguru.tv
jaimewoo.com
qasim.ca

TWITTER HANDLES:
@designguru_org
@jaimewoo
@qasim

Filmed at an event we organized in Toronto - held at the Centre for Social Innovation on February 25, 2010, this panel was put together to discuss Open Video/Media and followed a live-streamed talk by Lawrence Lessig.

The panel was moderated by designguru.org's Principal, Qasim Virjee, and featured:

• Maclean Greaves (VP, Interactive - Zoomer)
• Ruby Ashtar (Copyright Lawyer)
• Brett Gaylor (Film-maker/Director, RiP a Remix Manifesto, EyeSteelFilm)
• Mark Surman (Executive Director, Mozilla Foundation)

You can see photos from the event on flickr here.

LINKS:
designguru.org
by.mcleangreaves.com
films.nfb.ca/rip-a-remix-manifesto
mozilla.org

Our friend Jaime Woo just clued me into an interesting workshop he's organized next week in Toronto (April 1, from 6pm - 10pm @MaRs) which aims to help entrepreneurs equip themselves with conversational skills to help engage in modern online dialogues.

Media veteran Ian Capstick will share his knowledge of approaching media and successfully 'getting your story told.' This workshop will prepare people with major media jargon and background info. In addition, Ian will go through media training tips to help people in interviews to clearly get their message accross - irrespective of the media through which the interview is published.

Jaime Woo will then share his insights on how to approach online and social media with your story. Jaime will explain 'social media outlets' and weight the pros and cons between each major avenue for engaging people online. He will also offer takes on how to measure efficacy of efforts in social media for PR and other campaigns.

Tickets for the session are $129 and can be purchased through this link: http://guestlistapp.com/events/16500

Tumblr is a great idea - the hosted service lets you sign up for free and then create a blog that is essentially comprised of different types of content - text, photo, quote, link, chat, audio and video.   Your tumblog can be posted to quickly and re-themed using their provided ones or custom html; all editable within their web interface so there's no need for ftp'ing files etc...

Okay, so its yet another blogging tool.  What's so great about that?  Well, asides from the fact that it has different content types to segment views by them (something not in the de facto wordpress standard approach), tumblr's unique in letting you import rss feeds automatically into your tumblr site!  Cool eh?

Drupal heads reading this will no doubt instantly say "Whatever man, Drupal can do that in a second!" and they're right; it can.  We recently took a stab at building out a site to do everything that tumblr does for Flavorpill in NYC using Drupal 6 and some contrib modules.  Ultimately, we wanted a site that lets anonymous/public users contribute as well as logged-in ones, all submitting the same types of content.  The main benefit of registering on-site was keeping track of your posts with a profile page that features a User Tracker.

Development time was short and we were really aiming at making a site which people could use easily - so we skipped making some crazy implementation of Flashvideo or Kaltura and just allowed 3rd party video embeds through a single field (for URL or embed code) via the Embedded Media Field module.

Here's the quick module over-view for anyone who has been pondering what they need to make Tumblr using Drupal.

First up, install Drupal 6 and the following modules:

• CCK - lets you define the seperate content types etc...
• Pathauto - gives you flexibility etc through semantic URLs
• Embedded Media Field - works with CCK to create fields which accept video or audio media from 3rd parties; automagically embeds and provides interface for display options
• Gravatar - displays avatars based on users' email addresses
• Imagefield - create field in content types which can accept image(s) and store locally
• Imagecache - automatic ad-hoc image resize rules with multiple displays
• Date
• TinyMCE - a pretty solid option as WYSIWYG editor for general public/basic user options
• Views + Panels - create the dynamic displays of content per content type etc...
• Captcha + ReCaptcha - safeguard the site from spam-bots... Recaptcha provides enough security for accepting public content submissiosns withou moderation
• Fivestar - simple/instant jquery content rating.

Of course, the beauty of using Drupal to build a site like this is that you're afforded scalability; meaning that you can always add features to the site and go far beyong the basic set of tools tumblr offers people.

Now, on this implementation we didn't build in the automatic rss-to-node functionality, but that could easily be afforded by the FeedAPI module.

To view the site we built a la Tumblr, please head over to:
http://www.whatisinnovation.com

I've just flipped the switch on an exciting new project for Toronto-based arts organisation Indian Electronica - its a campaign to help channel international momentum in reaction to the BBC's announcement of plans to close their Asian Network station.

You can visit the campaign at http://savetheasiannetwork.com and read more about its justification and technical make-up in our client projects section here.

The event we hosted here in Toronto last week was a great success - thanks to our panelists, the OVA, Kaltura and of course, to all who came out to watch Lawrence Lessig talk via video-conference + engage with our panel! The video footage of the panel discussion is being encoded and I'll post it here later this week.

I've been a fan of Vimeo for a while now - its a video hosting service similar to YouTube but with a keener appreciation of interface design and community base largely focused on cool techniques for creating motion graphics which push the envelop. 

Vimeos users are generally professionals or serious hobbyists when it comes to video - which early-on saw them creating a commercial offering called their 'Plus' service to offer hi-def video hosting/on-demand streaming with configurable embedded players which can be limited by domain and feature custom colors, logos and post-roll options.

The latest innovation in their offering for Plus account-holders is a new approach to viewing video statistics.  'PlusStats' has some nifty stats I haven't seen anywhere else - like displaying where your videos are embedded (URLs + georgraphic locations) and the number of loads vs. plays.

You can check out a demo of PlusStats here: http://www.vimeo.com/stats/demo