Earlier in the month, we launched The American Image: The Photographs of John Collier Jr., one of the activities included was the Propaganda Filmmaker. This custom version of our own experimental online Flash video editor, allows visitors to make their own short, 40 second films, which can then be embedded or emailed. Some work on the server-side keeps track of the latest videos and the top rated ones. It is an interesting activity in that the visitor is given creative control and can immerse themselves in the content. (You can learn more about the project our design portfolio.)

We’re currently working on a new and more elaborate version of the video editor. The new editor will include; four minute editing time, a pan and zoom timeline, draggable clips on the timeline, and a pop-over video “inspector.” But the biggest new feature will be two-track editing. An overlay track will allow visitors to edit still images and video over other video clips. This process has reminded me of the early days of desktop video editing. Adobe Premier 1.0 (1991) used “A & B” track editing in much the same way. Nowadays nearly all desktop video editors use single track editing, something that would be extremely difficult to build in Flash.

In designing the first and now the second video editor we’ve spent quite a bit of time looking at desktop and online video editors. Below is a listing of online video editors and some Web 2.0 video sites that we came across.

In the online world, JumpCut is perhaps the best known of all online video editors. Purchased last Fall by Yahoo! this was seen as a move to help them compete with Google which acquired YouTube last summer. JumpCut uses a standard player interface with a “clip sorter” below. It allows “trim” (changing the durration of clips) and supports wide screen video. Additional features include: transitions, titles, effects and styles. Jumpcut’s most important development since the acquisition is the ability to import content from flickr and facebook.

Eyespot allows you to arrange video clips sequentially has a “trimmer” to cut clips. You can upload your own video or grab clips from their promotional partners–mostly music videos and movie clips. Eyespot isn’t really a video editor, it is a “mixer” as they correctly call it. What’s interesting here is that while the clips are Flash video, the thumbnails and timeline interface utilizes Ajax.

Movie Masher is a Flash-based video editor, loaded with features including: trim, multiple transitions, timeshifting, color adjustments, and compositing. I found it harder to get started with Movie Masher than the others, but there are some very impressive features here. This was created by one developer who has estimated he’s put in 8,750 hours of time in creating this online application. The site is also for sale you can read about this on the site.

The other video editors we found work more like our own with a content focus and more traditional timeline-based editing. Bravo TV’s Project Runway has an excellent flash video editor, they call it a video mashup. (Not to be confused with mashups that use public APIs, Application Programming Interfaces.) The Simpsons TV series had a video editing contest which has since closed. You can view the winning entries, the editor was Flash-based.

We’ll likely see many more of these online video editors, mixers and mashups as online video sites themselves continue to multiply. In searching for online editors we came across a ton of video social networking sites: Brightcove, Motionbox, FireAnt, Metacafe, StashSpace, VideoEgg, Blinkx, Vimeo, Phanfare, Dailymotion, Ourmedia, vSocial, Beedeo, Dovetail, among others. How many of these will develop editing (or still be in existence?) in the next year or two. We’ll have to see.

In designing and developing The American Image: The Photographs of John Collier Jr. website with The Maxwell Museum of Anthropology we’ve found ourselves spending a lot of time in Flickr. The Collection of photographs found on the site are pulled in from Flickr using a Flash-base mashup. The Shooting Script activity works in similar way: pulling out John Collier Jr’s images as well as those of other Flickr members. An earlier post, Colonizing Social Spaces, looked more broadly at the benefits and drawbacks of museums utilzing social networking sites. In this post, I’m going to look exclusively at Flickr and our experience with the American Image site.

Many Mashups
We looked a number of interesting Flickr mashups before we began the project and there are plenty of examples to look at. ProgrammableWeb lists 152 Flickr mashups and can imagine there are more that aren’t listed there. Along with the sheer number of examples, there are a lot ways to go in developing a Flickr mashup. The Flickr API supports a wide range different technologies; the “API kits” go from ActionScript to Ruby. We decided on using Adobe Flash (although currently we’re developing a mashup using Ruby on Rails).

One of the better mashups we came across was Findr developed by Doug Marttila. He was kind enough to let us see his code and although we wound up developing something from scratch, Doug’s code help us get up to speed. Findr is a good example of just how feature-rich Flickr mashups can be. The mashups developed for the American Image site are decidedly simple.

Back on Flickr
John Collier Jr’s Flickr site which pre-dates the launch of the American Image has already received 2,000 views. Back in October when put up the first test images we began to get interest. Almost immediately, we received comments and had photographs favorited. As a way to connect with these visitors we added them as contacts. Since we (The Maxwell Museum and Ideum) are representing John Collier Jr. who died in 1992, we’ve decided not to go out and comment or favorite others photographs. While this is certainly the correct approach it does limit our ability to fully operate within the Flickr community site. By favoriting and commenting on others photographs, you can increase your network and drive traffic to your Flickr site.

We have joined a number of groups and have been adding photographs as way to make connections with different communities. Right now John Collier Jr. is a member of 28 Flickr groups. Some groups are regional ones like Essence of Maine or The American Southwest, others focus on black and white photography, and still others focus on vintage photographs or very specific topics like Farm and farmer or Caves and Mines. In the Farm and farmer group we received an interesting comment on Collier’s photo Feeding time for baby beeves. Apparently, we (John Collier Jr.?) don’t know the difference between dairy and beef cows? The things you learn on Flickr!

Joining groups has made an enormous difference in bringing traffic into the Collier Flickr site and has helped make contacts. However, you can’t join every group on Flickr and plaster the same photo in every group. Recently, Flickr has cracked down on this practice as many were using it to boost “interestingness” flooding as many 60 or 70 groups with the same photo.

Interestingness
Undoubtedly, interestingness is a unique Web 2.0 invention. Yahoo! (who owns Flickr) has even gone to the extreme of patenting it, while others think it might be Yahoo!’s secret weapon in its search battle with Google. We are interested (in interestingness?) because we want people to see John Collier Jr’s amazing photographs and we of course we are curious.

One of John Collier Jr’s photographs, Albert Gagnon’s daughters knitting was among Flickr’s Top 500, the most interesting photographs on October 26, 2006. On that date it was #245. As of yesterday it had dropped to #283. Interestingness is continually calculated based a variety of criteria. As Flickr’s About Interestingness page tells us…

“There are lots of things that make a photo ‘interesting’ (or not) in the Flickr. Where the clickthroughs are coming from; who comments on it and when; who marks it as a favorite; its tags and many more things which are constantly changing. Interestingness changes over time, as more and more fantastic photos and stories are added to Flickr.”

Recently, I came across Scout a tool that let’s you find and monitor the position of your photographs on Flickr. (This only tracks those that are in the Top 500, or Flickr’s “Explore.”) Finding Albert Gagnon’s daughters knitting and its’ history in Scout I thought it might be interesting to conduct a crude experiment.

I emailed a few friends and asked a few people here at the studio if they would favorite and comment on the photograph. (It helps when you think the photograph really is a great one.) Two of the comments were posted weeks ago. We added seven more comments, and favorited the photo seven times and pushing it up about 40 places in interestingness ranking for the day, landing at #242, its highest ranking ever.

While were not advocating gaming the Flickr system (although I guess that’s what we did?), it is interesting to get a glimmer of how interestingness works and what’s involved in changing a photograph’s ranking. Moving a photo posted in October from #283 to #242 took seven people, not much of a payoff for the effort. Certainly as we continue to develop mashups, having a better understanding of how applications like Flickr work is essential.

Update (1-17-06): After this post was written, an additional comment and a favorite helped boost Albert Gagnon’s daughters knitting to #164 on Flickr’s top 500. It may be that this new activity helped reach some sort of an “interestingness threshold,” catapulting the photo 80 places up. Or perhaps the timing was a factor. Most of the original comments and favorites happened within a relatively short period of time. There certainly more to learn about interestingness.

Also, The American Image: Photographs of John Collier Jr. was listed in the Best New Mashups on the Programmable Web blog.

Streaming and downloadable video clips from the National Digital Forum in Wellington, New Zealand are available on their site. Both days from the conference are covered, so there’s a lot of material here that’s relevant to museums, libraries and archives. My keynote speech, Museums and the Web 2.0 is included, along with those from other international and local presenters. I summarized some of the highlights from the sessions that I attended back in November, check out the National Digital Forum category to see all of the postings. Seb Chan over at the Powerhouse Museum’s fresh + new blog also covered the forum.

There are now 100 blogs listed in the Museum Blogs directory and fittingly Museums and the Web online was the 100th added. Our survey of museum blogs is now just one shy of our target of 50 blogs surveyed. The count right stands at 49. The running total of the multiple choice questions has already produced some interesting results. Half of museum blogs are for the public, the other half are for other museum professionals. Also, more than 1/3rd of the blogs survey publish twice a month or less. As I’ve mentioned before the results will be presented in a session, Radical Trust: The State of the Museum Blogosphere at the Museums and the Web conference in San Francisco in April.

We recently discovered a few map mashups, Flash Earth and Map Compare, which allow you to compare a variety of mapping APIs (Application Programming Interface). The first, Flash Earth, as its’ name implies uses Adobe Flash to pull in aerial and satellite imagery from Google Maps, Virtual Earth, Yahoo! Maps, Ask.com, OpenLayers, and NASA Terra. This zoomable mashup allows you to directly compare the different map services within their aerial or satellite mode. It was really interesting to see the different imagery that each service provided. Often times, if your zoomed in far enough you’ll find missing data from one service or imagery that varies by season, color, and quality. I’ve never experienced this type of comparision through any other mashup. Most of them tend to focus on street level mapping where the only thing that seems to change is the pixel width of the streets. An amazing feature found in Flash Earth is the ability to rotate the entire map in any direction using the navigational compass. You can also zoom using your keyboard or mouse wheel and it provides the ability to search a location with a street address or through latitude and longitude. Another little trick on Flash Earth is the ability to create a permanent link to your map location. This has typically been problematic when developing these types of applications in Flash.

To create this mashup the creator, Paul Neave, used “unofficial techniques” to pull in the imagery. In doing so he was able to gain better control over the service. The navigation is quite smooth because the zoomable interface was developed using Flash. Ajax mashups typically have to refresh when you zoom because image tiles need to be swapped out. When I asked Paul about how he worked around the API, he mentioned he pulled the “map images (tiles) directly by accessing their URL rather than using the JavaScript API.â€? He continued, “The API doesn’t allow you to do this, you must use their interface and layout to access the imagery. Once the files are downloaded, they’re stored in your browser’s cache similarly to the Ajax version.â€? In this instance the advantages over Ajax are apparent in the ability to more easily modify the imagery and enhance the interaction to make a more cohesive user experience.

On the other side, Map Compare displays three maps together using Ajax. It combines Virtual Earth, Google Maps, and Yahoo! Maps. It allows you to compare all three simultaneously. One of the more interesting observations between the three was the lack of mouse wheel support for Google Maps. Virtual Earth was the only one that attempts to smooth the zoom level transition by adding an effect (similar to Flash Earth). It didn’t seem to work properly and added even more of a distraction than the image reloading delay. However, Virtual Earth did offer an interesting “Bird’s eyeâ€? view, a nearly isometric view into major cities. You can then rotate your camera perspective into the four cardinal directions within this view.

In addition to this mashup, I was able to find a more technical comparison by James Church who looks at the Yahoo! and Google Map APIs side-by-side. If your looking for even more examples, you can visit Google Maps Mania. For more unusual sightings you might want to take the guided tour at Google Sightseeing. With nearly half of all mashups using some variety of mapping software we were happy to find some ways to compare these services.