This video exemplifies what I am talking about when I say media = features + content.

A breakdown:

• 0:15 The cover: Yeah! It can play video, so let's do that! But, it doesn't start with video, you have to launch it. Because if you started with video, then every time you go to read what the top heads are, you'd first have to wait for the %#^&! animation to end.
  
  
  

Lost in all the talk of Free, failing newspapers, piracy, e-readers, e-learning is the aspect of media and features. But when leather bound books are romanticized and the daily crossword is praised, features are being discussed. Aggregation is one new media feature that has gotten much discussion relevant to newspapers.

There's too much focus on "content". Content is important, journalists are needed to produce stories, musicians to create music. But content isn't published without features that allow access to the content, and ignoring them is limiting.

In the race to provide news worthy of the "new", Twitter beat the New York Times again. Sure, "again". What's noteworthy in this story is that the event in question literally happened outside the Times' window. (My own tweetpic, from around 9am: http://twitpic.com/ip30w)

A couple of weeks ago we had great success with a website. One of our community clients experienced a neighborhood water outage. This unfortunate event affected several hundred residences.

However, residents were at least easily kept updated via their community website. Community management could post updates using simple web forms. For residents who had registered, email updates announced site updates at regular intervals.

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The Chocolate Lab was a boutique chocolatier in North Carolina. We are proud to have provided them with:

• An integrated e-commerce checkout system
• Editing entirely through forms
• Configurable product features: Dark or white chocolate?
• Easy inclusion of product images
• Ticketed events as products

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Been enjoying Flex Builder lately. Built on Eclipse, it is therefore a great environment: Wysiwyg window builder, good code management, useful new document templates, SVN integration... We've quickly prototyped an AIR app for remote learning object access and the environment allows a design that adheres to sane coding practices.

The funny thing about software projects: Even the most off the cuff ones seem to live forever. Want to tell whether a piece of software has any merits? Come back in 5 years, if it's not in use it was better never done. It's true even for seemingly single purpose scripts-- this post is prompted by a recent trip through my archives to dig up a string parser from the late '90s. That script was for the very particular purpose of matching a Taiwan Mandarin wordlist against a mainland one, but it wound up being a useful basis for some XML-ery I had to do over the weekend.

http://epubzengarden.com/#/static/middlemarch/OEBPS/chapter1.html

This website provides a "Zen Garden" approach to showing how CSS can be used to render the same content in different ways. Unlike the original CSS Zen Garden (http://www.csszengarden.com/), it is focused on ePub.

www.bevillage.net

Bald Eagle Village is a townhome community in northern New Jersey. We are proud to have provided them with a showcase site that:

• Keeps residents informed through community headlines and email updates
• "Automagically" creates photo galleries from pictures in news stories
• Gives an easy form for residents, potential residents and realtors to contact the Association
• Helps staff by simplifying updates completely to web forms

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