You don’t do good software design by committee. You do it best by having a dictator. From the user’s point of view, you must have a coherent design philosophy, and I don’t see how that could come about from open source software. The person who’s done it best is Steve Jobs, and he’s well-known for being a tyrant.
– Don Norman
Eric at Outhink pointed out this interesting product:
"Flow is perfectly suited for personal and group information management
alike — publicize your content through Flow’s multiple publishing
options (web servers, web logs, RSS) or set up a share-space to grant
multiple users the ability to edit, discuss, organize and use the same
content."
Based on the little information on the website, Flow looks very nice, but it seems like it only runs on a Mac and with Safari (I haven’t tried Flow yet - the Mac I had suddenly died). Cost is $99 + additional subscription service for peer-to-peer option.
Obviously, it would be great to see a free, open-sourced and cross-platform version of this.
SpinFlow.org is free and cross-platform, but has nowhere near the web features of Flow at this time. Feature of this nature would be easy to add if SpinXpress were open-source. Resources, collaboration and freedom to create is the key here.
Unfortunately many companies, like Outhink and Near-Time, still appear to want to build proprietary systems based on the open-sourced efforts of others.
Outhink attempts to give back to the community in it’s support of
creative professionals. I hope Near-Time will also contribute to the
communities that help it grow.
But the use of open-source software for commercial purposes can be a slippery slope as Linksys has recently found out. Linksys was extremely diligent in respecting the conditions of the numerous open-source licenses for the components that it exploits. Nonetheless, they received a fair amount of bad press for being a little too close to the boundaries of these licenses (in one case they had to argue that their changing of a config file they shipped was not in violation of a specific license.
I think it would be better to avoid these problems altogether and "share-alike" as they say over at Creative Commons.
Freevlog.org points the way for free services and Steve Garfield recently pointed out a new version aimed at commercial services like TypePad. Of course, this site’s located at Feevlog.com.
There is still a long way to go before anyone makes any true progress towards simplifying the work-flow process that both SpinFlow and Flow are trying to address:
Create, Gather, Organize, Publish and Collaborate.
I’ve been talking with renegade at Luxomedia about the idea of some sort of playing or trading card for vloggers. I think it would be fun to come up with something in time for the next Vloggercon.
Rene just turned me on to a related idea: Flickr Badges. Very cool. I gotta make one.
I agree, "Vive la Rene-zistance!"
Here in San Francisco, they are making a Media Center in the Apple store. (basically it will be computers with FCP and iMovie on them and people around to help answer questions), which I think is perfect to showcase what we do.
from schlomo at schlomolog.blogspot.com
FCP is Final Cut Pro (of course).