Project 29, Day 1: A crapload of folders
Interestingly enough, starting/restarting 6 media companies is a LOT of paperwork.
Today’s pic Featuring Xylophone Films & BakitWhy
- Kaywan, Managing Partner
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Kasama Media’s going through a month-long rapid transformation from an online communities solutions provider to a diversified media outlet holding company. We’ll post interesting tidbits as we stumble and crash through the month of February 2012.
See anything interesting or helpful? Feel free to contact us with your input. Uber-appreciated!
Welcome to Drupal, Partna’
By Kaywan Shiraz
Back in the chaotic nether of the early pre-2000 Internet, codeslingers whipped out their dual pistols of HTML and Javascript and corralled the eyeballs of viewers through animated under construction signs, dancing hamsters, and long-forgotten “frames.” Times were tough in those early days—a developer had to work the virtual land with nothing but their Windows desktop and their trusty Notepad applications.*
Time warp to today. The digital pioneers of the past either through sheer ingenuity or foresight (or just bad cases of carpal tunnel) decided that code…can write code! And thus several years ago several Content Management Systems came into the foreground. These Content Management Systems (CMS) allowed the developer to spend more time being creative than simply getting the code together to make the site say “hi!.” Simple blog providers such as Livejournal and Xanga took over the public in early 2000s while the businesses adopted a mixture of high-priced IBM and Microsoft-provided solutions. But what about the small business? Or the big business with a sensible budget? Or just the Ubergeek which loves to strut his code-generation stuff? Free and publicly-contributed CMS’ such as Wordpress, Joomla, and yup, Drupal burst into the scene to make your site-building fantasies ever more tangible.
So let’s cut right into it. Drupal is best! But why choose it as your CMS? Better than Wordpress for your blog? Better than Joomla for your online community? Better than um…whatever Microsoft/IBM provides for your company intranet? Three strengths: Customization, Control, and Connectivity.
Customization
Example: Fast Company
- You can basically create content with any kind of field for any situation. FAQs? That’s content. Blogs? That’s content. Q&A section? That’s content. Basically, if your site has content (if not, I’d be worried about your site), it can be built and customized to a fine point within Drupal
- Not only can you customize the types of content on your site, you can customize how the user interacts with it completely. You can do everything from letting a user add a piece of content to their bookmarks to doing a combined Tweet/Facebook Share/Digg/Text/Email/Phone Call/Fax a la “WUPHF”
- Also, a lot of other CMS confine you to either a set of themes or have some esoteric method to change themes. With Drupal, you can make your site look like any which way you’d like in any variety of ways connected to an unlimited number of actions and content. Well, you can make it look however you’d like.
Control
Example: AOL Corporate Intranet
- The sticklers who want control over the data in, out, and around the site can be assured that Drupal, when properly configured, can give even the most Draconian administrator control over every lowly piece of data out there. For cases such as a corporate intranet, messages can be logged and indexed, content can be hidden or shown at will, and virtual high fives can be administered to only specific ultra-privilaged users.
- Got a nasty comment, blog, or message out there? You can zap the content into oblivion or be more sinister and do an all-in-one delete, user ban, IP ban, report to the authorities, dispatch special forces (well maybe) in one stroke!
- Drupal can also be configured to instantly combat outsider penetration through various methods such as IP safe zones, site-keys, and user verifications, and many, many other terms I may have made up.
Connectivity
Example: MyPlay by Sony BMG
- Let’s get it straight. People don’t just visit cool websites anymore. With most of their time on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube (well Facebook), the typical user isn’t on your site without a damn good reason. Drupal sites can be written to be friendly with Facebook Shares, Twitter messages, or any future social network that would be leading the audience to your site.
- Then there’s the death of the desktop computer. With browsing increasingly being done on mobile devices and tablets, the typical website structure just doesn’t cut it. Drupal themes and code can reflect the user’s browsing device on the fly so you can ensure that your content is viewed without issues.
- So you don’t care about getting the mainstream audience to your site. Maybe you have a corporate intranet—Drupal can connect to existing databases and APIs to make sure that your organization data flows between Drupal and any proprietary systems.
Hopefully that’s enough for you to try to attempt to think about checking out Drupal. All of our clients and communities run on Drupal, so feel free to plunge through the Kasama Media site for more examples. And always, feel free to drop us a message if you have any questions.
*I apologize for the cowboy references, I’ve been playing too much Red Dead Redemption on the PS3.
And nope, we don’t get a referral fee for convincing you of all this ‘cause…Drupal is free!
The Future of Ubiquitous Media
By Kaywan Shiraz
Note: This is a repost from my personal blog from February 7, 2010
Nestled in the trendy mid-Wilshire area of Los Angeles, the Interpublic Emerging Media Lab aims to prove that any message can be embedded into…well basically anything. IPG’s high-tech lab seems more like the geek’s ultimate fantasy apartment than a space for intensive media study, but big name companies and cutting-edge marketing firms use it as their playgrounds. Their goal: to provide real-world demonstrations of how media can be integrated into life. Be it a fridge that’s connected to the home network, a gaming-intensive dorm room, or an interactive bar, IPG Labs develops innovative ways for companies to reach out to their customers. However, with so much media integrated in everyday devices, what can we do with all this information? There’s already the phenomenon of email fatigue — long-term email users get overwhelmed with daily e-mail. What about information fatigue after media becomes hyper-ubiquitous through the proliferation of wirelessly integrated devices?
There are several online tools that scratch at the torrent of information provided by ubiquitous connectivity. iGoogle, Friendfeed, chi.mp, and various identity and media aggregators are trying to to find order in the midst of the digital chaos. But what if every single item in your life was fighting for your attention? Your computer(s), mobile phone, and game consoles all are networked to the larger Internet community, spouting bits and bytes of every topic and product imaginable. Soon, networked televisions will be more commonplace and they will provide you customized (and ultra-relevant) information from multple sources. But how much information can we really take in we saturate our lives with these “smart” devices?
The study “How Much Is Too Much? Media Structure, Content, and Cognitive Load, and Overload,” viewers were given increasing amounts of visual and aural inputs through the television. The study tried to find at what level does the average person start ignoring or confusing inputs.
“Initial results say that increasing the number of dimensions increases reaction times and decreases recognition. Signs of cognitive overload appear at 4-5 dimensions of information.”
If television viewers alone reach cognitive overload after 4-5 dimensions, imagine if your Chumby tells you 5-6 different things, your iPhone is alerting you about recent news items, and your car radio is scrolling the latest song and associated advertisement — all at the same time. At some point, the average media consumer will loose tons of information or worse, get the messages jumbled in the mix.
The same overload issue can be applied to social media. Conversation fatigue is a very real thing. Jennifer from the Search Engine Guide Blog shares her dialy social media routine:
“On an average day, I skim through roughly 400-500 RSS feeds. I have active accounts at four or five major social networks. I run three blogs. My instant messenger program generally has five to six conversations windows running throughout the day. All in all, I spend anywhere from 4-6 hours a day using or talking about social media and Web 2.0 tools and another 2-3 hours a day writing.”
Jennifer solves her time sink dilemma by prioritizing what messages and conversations are worth participating in:
“Out of that 4-6 hours I spend reading each day, I might find two to three topics worth writing about. I have to wonder if I might not find the same amount of topics with less reading. Or perhaps the same amount of topics with less reading, but more thinking.”
I see the same trend with technology; where Jennifer picks and chooses specific places like Facebook and LinkedIn, we’re going to pick and choose which devices to pay attention to. A media-saturated bar (like the one on the left) might not be that good for advertisers who bank on one message per technology.
With fatigue and overload issues on the horizon, the world needs something simplier. If we can get one plug-in wireless communication and computing device with variable projection or display technology, then our TV won’t need to spout 5 lines of stock tickers and local weather conditions and the toaster won’t spit out a torrent of RSS feeds. Defeating ubiquitous media fatigue is all about the individual’s total control over the information they want, instead of having multiple devices pushing all of your senses at once. But that’s probably something advertsers don’t want…
You can find IPG Lab’s thoughts on the future of media on their blog, The Future of Media. Oh! Click on the pictures in the post to find out what tech is in them.
