I spoke today as part of a ClearStory Systems webinar on rich media management. You can get a PDF of my slides here. The full set of slides, including those given by John Gonzalez of ClearStory, will be posted on the ClearStory site later; I will post the link when I get it. My presentation is based heavily on our recent white paper, Rich Media Management and Business Agility.
During John’s presentation, he mentioned how Sony and other customers are using the ClearStory technology to bring more rich media applications to the Web. I like this site, which markets stock video footage from Sony Pictures.
Category: Publishing & media (Page 51 of 53)
Passing this along from Don Day, Chair of the OASIS DITA Techical Committee:
The OASIS DITA Technical Committee seeks your input on the list of known requirements/enhancements for upcoming DITA TC activity. Your help in ranking this list (or suggesting additional new requirements) will help the TC prioritize the most urgent issues for upcoming DITA 1.1 design work, and beyond. I have posted a list osf the issues currently known to the TC at this location: http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/document.php?document_id=12814&wg_abbrev=dita
Please assess what you consider to be your top 5 requirements and submit those Issue numbers to the DITA TC via the comment form:
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/comments/form.php?wg_abbrev=dita .
If you have a new issue or requirement not included in this list, please enter it as a separate comment via the comment form. We still need your “top 5” from this list, so read it carefully–most of the known hot issues are in there in one way or another, possibly including yours. There is no need to include more than 5 items in your list at this time; all of the 48 items are candidates for work, but we need to know which are MOST critical for initial work going into DITA 1.1.
This review period opens on May 23 2005 and closes end of day on June 6 2005 (2 weeks).
I am often guilty of not keeping up with the blogs that are worth reading. I recently took to reading Dave Winer’s blog regularly, and it is a real pleasure. He has all kinds of good technical insight, of course, and has been talking a lot about podcasting lately. You could make the argument Dave is the father of blogging, so it is interesting to keep up with where he thinks things are going.
Arbortext announced the company will release version 5.2 of its enterprise publishing software in September 2005. Representing a year-long development effort, this release has improvements in functionality and compatibility for organizations implementing enterprise publishing applications. The Import/Export feature, which provides conversion between word processing/desktop publishing files and XML, will provide over 50% new functionality and replace Arbortext’s Interchange product. The Import feature will offer much finer control over the conversion of styles into XML tags, so that word processing and desktop publishing files can more easily be translated into XML. The Contributor Web-based XML editor will be able to track changes (additions and deletions) so that editors can review, revise and approve documents more easily. In addition, Contributor will provide an API that provides developers with a greater level of control over the product’s functionality and appearance. DMC (Digital Media Composer) DMC replaces CD-ROM Composer and represents a major upgrade in Arbortext’s capability to publish large sets of documents that are too big to distribute over the internet. DMC can produce both DVDs and CD-ROMs for very large data sets and supports multiple volumes, password security and data compression. http://www.arbortext.com
We have published the results of our informal survey on enterprise use of blog, wiki and RSS technologies. We’ll keep the survey going for awhile and will update the results every so often. To date there are 58 respondents.
A few interesting tidbits:
- Although most respondents are using one of the technologies, only half of them have official IT support.
- knowledge management, internal information dissemination (portals!?), and project collaboration are all closely grouped as the leading applications.
- Shockingly, only a third use RSS!
- Almost a third are using one or more of these for content management. We’ll be sure to explore what this means in our upcoming Amsterdam keynote debate.
I remain a fan of Onfolio, which began life as kind of a personal knowledge manager for Web-based content, but has evolved to also handle RSS feeds and provide more publishing capabilities. I have used it for quite a while now to maintain my eForms Resources page, and am currently using the new version, 2.0, which supports Firefox, which is now my primary browser.
I’ve had some correspondence with Sebastian Gard, who does product marketing for Onfolio. He asked me for some feedback on 2.0 compared to the earlier version of the product, and I offered the following.
Writing for Publish.com, Matt Hicks provides a very good update on SVG support in the browser, putting in perspective recent announcements about SVG support in upcoming versions of Opera and Mozilla Firefox.
I’m way behind in planned blog entries from last week’s conference, but this has jumped to the top of the queue. Rather than repeat points made by others I’ll point you to Thad’s post, and a couple of other postings and focus on a point I haven’t seen made yet. Brice and others made the clear point that application redundancy means death for certain products. I also share Tim’s skepticism of Flash. But while every analyst under the Sun will talk about what this means to Microsoft, there is an aspect of this that needs more attention.
Whatever the combined suite of Adobe and Macromedia apps ends up looking like, it will be a mammoth suite with a combination of document and web capabilities that will compete with Microsoft Office, which will also have a combination of document and web capabilities. The real competition won’t be immediate because the difference between creative and knowledge worker tools is still pretty wide, and it won’t be complete because there will always be a need for a difference. However, over time the differences will be managed more by configuration of functions than by buying separate applications.
Thinking about a future dominated by these huge suites you can’t help but think “What’s the alternative?”. Many of us author less and less in big powerful applications, and more with simple editing tools (email, blogs, HTML forms, Notepad etc.). There are two reasons for this. One is that “fast and easy” is critical for efficient communication and we naturally gravitate to it. Second, none of the authoring tools available today have succeeded in allowing us to easily author once for both documents and web pages. The big feature-heavy suites are good to have around, but we also need new authoring tools that are light, flexible and create content that is marked-up just enough to easily share with applications, whether office or web suites, or enterprise applications.
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