Recently, I have been experimenting with new ways to create collaborative "rooms" for use with the Podcast Hotel event in Portland next week. The general goal is to create ad-hoc web-pages that provide an environment where people can share media captured at the event and make it easily (and instantly) available for anyone to mash-up or re-mix and upload again for others to play with and comment on. Of course, being a videoblogger, I want these "rooms" to have rich media feeds that I can use in tools like FireAnt.
It is easy to imagine how an enterprise system for this might be designed. However, part of the challenge was to build on existing tools and infrastructure in order to design and build something that could be used with any kind of web page, particularly blogs like Blogger, WordPress and TypePad.
Another challenge was the the solution could not assume an underlying storage system; blogs like Blogger do not provide storage for media except pictures and those that do (i.e., Typepad) are too limited in bandwidth and storage to support significant uploading and downloading of media files.
I also wanted these collaborative rooms to be simple to add to a web page. For the moment, this means that it should be no more difficult to use for the author/publisher than inserting a Flickr or Feedburner badge.
I used SpinXpress as the basis of a solution because it is a p2p (person-to-person/peer-to-peer) file sharing tool that allows you to form "groups" (like rooms, or spaces, or networks) where you can store files, bookmarks and comments. You can also access content in SpinXpress via web services (i.e., HTTP) and, most importantly to a geek like me, you can extend SpinXpress functionality via Java servlets.
So I did that. I’ll leave the technical details to future posts, but basically I created servlets that add XML (XHTML, mRSS, SMIL, XSPF, etc) feeds, forms and handlers that allow one to add a "room" or "group" to a post where people can share files and collaborate.
I will demonstrate this in the very next post. In the meantime, here is my first SnapZ ProX screencast about SpinXpress. It just covers the most basic concepts, but should help with the conversation. Click the pic to view the vid.
Disclaimer: I receive a small sponsorship from Outhink and have equity in the company.
Jan created a SpinXpress group for the Road Node 101 happening. I have created this post to allow public access to her group (I asked her permission, because groups are generally private and invitation only in SpinXpress). A simple script inserted into this blog post will cause the group to be displayed on the post page when view the full version of this page (click the "Continue" link below if needed).
