Thursday, March 29, 2007
A Beautiful Mash
Several people have asked me about mashups. In a recent presentation, I showed housingmaps.com as an example, but there are many, many more. Google Maps seems to be in the middle of this trend. I have not attempted it myself, but the APIs are very available and reportedly pretty easy to use. Check out Google Maps API Official Blog or the many unofficial sites. It has occurred to many of us that mashups would be ideal for the Forest Service (maps + data + images + public input + ....). What's not to like? Tell us when you've tried one. We'd love to share it with our readers.
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I spoke with Gary Chancey in a lengthy conversation about hosting and publishing podcasts. He recommended going with the web host, Stream hoster. It would cost us about $25 month to use, but well worth it to host our work so it can get published on our Forest Service websites.
Gary published the podcast, Gifford Pinchot: Life of Leadership on the Black Hills page. Our webmaster in R1 is working on doing the same. We need to have a web host in order to publish our work. Let me know what you think about Stream Hoster.
One does not actually require a specialized hosting environment; i.e., a streaming server, in order to serve media from a website. In fact, there are probably more requirements in preparing the common formats (for a public-facing site) and ensuring 508 compliance. The URL below provides a fairly nice introduction to streaming video.
http://www.mediacollege.com/video/streaming/http.html
I want to add that while I'm not about to act like a 'cyper-cop,' there is clear direction from OMB on using domains that are exclusive to the government (and, thus, the use of commercial servers):
http://www.usa.gov/webcontent/getting_started/naming/domains.shtml
I tinkered around with the Google Maps API and plugin for WordPress last night - it layers blog content on top of a Google Map – at least one flavor of mashup. There are some things I like about it and a few things that I don’t. Here’s the link (click the marker) - http://www.dwalbert.com/?page_id=5
Great to see so much excitement about Podcasting in the ranks. The Black Hills National Forest has been developing Podcast content for several months. The outsourcing of storage for our audio and video content has proofed so far to be very productive. I produce a podcast for an audiocast or videocast and then upload to streamhoster.com. The site automatically generates a url and I link it to the newsroom or a site like Inciweb or a blog that feeds content to iTunes. The site allows you to track your traffic for those days leadership ask how many hits have you gotten. It's nice to have an answer. The Forest Service isn't dealing with bandwidth issues or ensuring the delivery is going well. I would love to see the Forest Service come up with a solution to the hosting of multimedia content. In the meantime, I'll be more than happy to keep developing and distributing content to the public the way we are currently fulfilling that mission. I encourage everyone to keep the conversation going. Again, I believe this technology is here to stay. Look forward to sharing more.
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