Tuesday, July 19

A call for "bookmarklets" bar in FireANT

So, I saw the proposal by the ANT gang for a standard "rel=payment" or a payment url spec in the RSS metadata specs such as mediaRSS, which I've been taking to Andreas about, and we had another idea for extending ANT and making it a more flexible platform allowing for not just a "payment" link but to help it become a platform for all sorts of feature advancement by developers.

Essentially Andreas and I talked about the possibility of including a javascript programable "bookmarklet" bar that acts upon the metadata that's contained in the RSS of the post. With the amount of innovation going on with javascript and other open AJAX type technologies this could be a huge boon for ANT. It would opening up the doors for ANT to become more of a platform for additional functionalities that are driven by vloggers themselves and outside developers. Instead of continuing to add individual functionalities to ANT such as "email this" or "blog this" this "bookmarklet bar" would allow anyone with a basic knowledge of javascript and a blog to create their own functionalities.

Will we one day have a google map features that show where a video was taken in ANT? So called geo-vlogging? I don't know, but we could certainly have a bookmarklet that searches the feed or post meta information for geo-location information and push it to google maps, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

There are some possible developmental issues with Javascript implementation in ANT and there are some differences between acting on a web page and acting on RSS, but I believe making all the variables contained in the RSS via Javascript could make ANT a very flexible, very powerful and very extendable platform.

I've created a simple little mockup just to enumerate a few possible ideas. I'm not sure all of them are so technically possible, such as sending a screen snap of a video to Flickr, but this would ensure that ANT can operate not only with Mefeedia.com quite easily, but with Del.icio.us, Gmail, Technorati and a infinite amount of third party web services, which I believe is going to be key to FireANT's long term success.



Anonymous said...

wow... awesome. i hope that gets implemented.

Michael Meiser said...

Thank you.

On a side note, holly cow, try as i might I cannot for the life of me make a post without rempant gramatical and spelling errors.

The more I proof read, the more I rewrite, the more errors I introduce. :P

I just hope people can understand the gist of what I'm saying.

The point is... to make the meta information contained in the RSS available as variables through the Javascript so that developers can come along and create functionalities that use those variables at will passing them off to other webervices.

IE. Take the Geolocation information and pass it off to a mapping service. Take the permalink and search for references on technoratti, take the name of the podcast file (the video, or mp3) and search for it on yahoo videos to see who's hot-linking to it and talking about it. And of course checking out what people are saying on mefeedia, or using ourmedia's "quote tool" for quoting a small slice of a video clip.

There are a HUGE, incalcuble number of opportunities here. Istead of the ANT team (great as they are) having to identify and impliment each new idea or new tool, the idea is to creat a framework through which ANYTHING potentially in the feed can be developed to by any developer using javascript. In this way innovation can be driven through ANT in a lightning quick manner in the same way innovation is being driven through the web browser platform that is Firefox with the likes of Javascript, CSS, Greasemonkey, and other "AJAXian" technologies.

That IE, SUCKS and is not transparent and open, and that the majority of the "rulling class" or "web elite" have moved away from it to Firefox that is open, is what is driving this innovation. Clearly what is driving quite a bit of this boom in innovative usability and accessibility of webservices is that we are no longer slaves to the closed browsers that were resultant of the the early browser wars. Which is to say, that we've broken free of the opressive tyranny of Microsoft and Internet Explorer. Damn them to hell. This boom is being driven almost exclusively by open source and open technologies and we're getting VERY, VERY good and creating more "open" services such as Flickr that are still very profitable and successful. We should attempt to emulate these business models, their development frameworks, and always keep the goal of more transparency and more openess in mind. In other words whe should work toward our goals to be profitable and successful while always striving for the open source ideals as laid down by Bruce Perens and other leading lights of the open source movement.

That the ultimate big idea with this bookmarklet bar would to be to start putting together a "standards body" not just to push RSS meta data specifications, but to push standards for news and RSS readers so that we have not only standardized metadata, but also ways of using that metadata in an open framework.

In this way not only ANT, but all sorts of RSS readers from NetNewsWire to iPodder can start enjoying the benifits of an open end user oriented development framework.

In the future no longer would each RSS reader need to create cutom functionalities for every little feature from "email this using gmail" to "blog this with blogger.com" or "..with moveable type", but would be able to just implement the framework and make it available to their end users to customize to work with any webservices as they need or see fit.

This is not only the big proposal, but it is enevitable the direction things MUST move in to keep up the pace of innovation with RSS and move on to the next level of democratized media.

Anyway, that's the dream. So is it a good idea, and if so how do we accomplish it?

Disclaimer: pardon any grammar or misspellings, this was completely stream of conscious and I haven't even proof read it once. Sorry.

jeepbastard said...

I would enjoy being able to pull instantly all videos on feeds on a specific geographical location. Talk about a powerful research tool. You might even find a video of something in a 5 block radius where you live just posted. You could almost assemble your own local news from local bloggers (I guess that would rock in NY or Seattle and other places where there are dense concentration of bloggers)

Letting it be open to that level of widgets would be very cool. Then someone could start a repository site of these JS widgets and get bought out by download.com/cnet.