The Confluence of Digital Journalism and Digital Humanities
"I've increasingly felt that digital journalism and digital humanities are kindred spirits, and that more commerce between the two could be mutually beneficial. That sentiment was confirmed by the extremely positive reaction on Twitter to a brief comment I made on the launch of Knight-Mozilla OpenNews, including from Jon Christensen (of the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford, and formerly a journalist), Shana Kimball (MPublishing, University of Michigan), Tim Carmody (Wired), and Jenna Wortham (New York Times).
Here's an outline of some of the main areas where digital journalism and digital humanities could profitably collaborate. It's remarkable, upon reflection, how much overlap there now is, and I suspect these areas will only grow in common importance."
(Dan Cohen's Digital Humanities Blog)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Brand Toolkit: Firefox Web Browser
"Here is your guide to all things Firefox, the flagship brand in the Mozilla universe. It's full of guidelines, examples and tips to help you create websites and communications that are on brand and on style, both online and off.
The Firefox brand is a living thing. It grows, changes and adapts. So we want you to have easy access to the latest and greatest out there. And lo we created this toolkit. And it was good."
(Mozilla, 2012)
Fig.1 Mozilla's unabashedly self-promoting "A Different Kind of Browser" clip.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Video for Wikipedia: Guide to Best Practices
"This new effort takes advantage of a movement toward open video - a movement that has its roots in the free software movement that is largely powering the web today and which, through companies such as Apache, IBM, Mozilla, Oracle and Red Hat, has resulted in trillions of dollars of value creation for the stakeholders involved. The open or open-source video movement recognizes the contributions from, but also the limitations inherent in, the video work of industry leaders such as Adobe, Apple, and Microsoft. Flash, Quicktime, Windows Media and Silverlight are handsome technologies. But they have been developed and controlled by commercial companies that often protect themselves against innovations by outside coders, designers, developers, programmers - technologists, lawyers, producers, and educators keen to move away from proprietary solutions that are delivered for the benefit of shareholders first and the billions of everyday people who connect via the web a pale second.
The open video movement recognizes the importance of rights and licensing strategies designed to create profit or serve national interests, but it is critical of systems that prohibit access to film and sound assets becoming part of our collective audiovisual canon. Many film and sound resources digitized for preservation, for example, do not appear online because of dated copyright rules; and some of the great investments (millions of dollars in fact) by, for example, the U.K. government in film and sound resource digitization result in materials being put online only behind educational and national paywalls that keep students in Nairobi and Nashville from using London-based resources in their work.
Enabling video to catch up to the open-source movement on the web goes to the heart of our efforts to improve our understanding of the world. The central technologies of the web - HTML, HTTP, and TCP/IP - are open for all to build upon and improve, and video’s future should be similarly unobstructed."
(Peter B. Kaufman, 2010)
Fig.1 Kid Kameleon, CC BY SA NC
2). Video for Wikipedia and the Open Web October 2010 An Intelligent Television White Paper PETER B. KAUFMAN INTELLIGENT TELEVISION WWW.INTELLIGENTTELEVISION.COM THE OPEN VIDEO ALLIANCE Version 1.0
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
How Firefox Is Pushing Open Video Onto the Web
"HTML 5, the emerging standard, is that content creators will be able to embed video and audio files on web pages with the same simplicity and ease as images and links.
The tools being used to power this behavior are the Ogg Theora and Vorbis codecs maintained by the non-profit Xiph.org. Currently, most video and audio on the web is presented using either Adobe's Flash Player, Microsoft's Silverlight or Apple's QuickTime. These are proprietary technologies, which means they come with various restrictions - licenses, patents and fees - attached.
Ogg, being open-source and patent-free, has no fees and very few use restrictions. Ogg has been around for a while. It was beaten out by MP3 in the Napster days as the audio format of choice, and has remained obscure ever since. It's also gotten a bad reputation because of poor quality and large file sizes compared to competing tools like h.264, which is used by both Quicktime and Flash, and will be used in the next release of Silverlight.
However, in the past year, the quality issues dogging Ogg have been largely solved thanks to the increased interest and involvement of developers who want to see support for open video on the web become a reality.
At a recent developer conference, Google showed off how it was building Ogg support directly into its Chrome browser to handle video playback without using any plug-ins. Mozilla's Jay Sullivan was then invited on stage, where he announced the next version of Firefox would also include built-in Ogg support, all part of a grand plan among browser makers to, in Sullivan's words, free video from 'plug-in prison.'"
(Michael Calore. Webmonkey, 18 June 2009)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Ubiquitous web font embedding just got a step closer...
"A short while ago, Mozilla announced that Firefox 3.1 will, along with Safari which already does, support the @font-face mechanism for linking to online TrueType fonts. Internet Explorer already supports (and has done so for years) @font-face font linking, but here's the catch, not to TrueType fonts - only to EOT font files. EOT, now a proposed W3C specification, incorporates anti copying technology, helping to assuage the fears of font foundries that font linking in browsers would unleash a wave of unlicensed copying of their fonts. Chris Wilson, Platform Architect for Internet Explorer has made it clear that he's strongly opposed to simple font linking
we (Microsoft) should NOT support direct TTF/OTF embedding, unless 1) there is some check that the font intended that use to be allowed, which I don't think there currently is (as it needs to refer to the license agreement), AND 2) other browsers also implement a system that actually ENABLES commercial fonts - those that are allowed to be embedded, but cannot be legally placed directly on a server - to be used
So, is this a return to the stalemate of the 1990s, when both the major browsers supported font linking, only of a completely incompatible type? From a technical point of view, no. Since the same mechanism, @font-face rules, is used to link to TrueType, EOT and other font formats, then it is quite simple to define multiple fonts, and the browser can use the font format it supports."
(John Allsopp, 19 October 2008)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
