Still figuring out vine & having fun doing it! vine.co/v/b129535EbiH

— Christine Walsh (@christiewalsh) February 4, 2013

Vine is Twitter’s foray into rich media. You can think of Vines as video tweets.

Just as tweets max out at 140 characters, Vines max out at six seconds. (I wonder what kind of user trials, technical constraints and cognitive insights they used to arrive at this decision…)

Of late, tools and platforms are emerging that enable people to communicate in short bursts of rich media. Vine joins things like Snapchat and Ptch to create a kind of “microvideo” ecosystem.

Vine gives you a streamlined way to share the mundane and weird and wonderful with your network. Snapchat lets you send ephemeral bursts of peer-to-peer video. Ptch is fast and slick and lets you become a music video director. What do these things have in common? They take 60 seconds to make, they’re frictionless, they’re mobile (and they’re all native apps, but more on that later).

These things remind me of conversational media like image memes and macros, and multimedia culture mills like ytmnd.com. But they seem new.

60 seconds, frictionless, mobile

Popcorn Maker could definitely play here. It’s already a powerful way to stitch videos together from any addressable media out there on the web (an advantage over things line Vine and Ptch). And it can run in many contexts—it doesn’t require fast hardware for encoding, or fast internet for uploading media (another advantage over things like Vine and Ptch).

But while our underlying framework is powerful, and we’ve shipped a fairly full-featured studio authoring environment for desktop users, we don’t yet have a mobile offering. We’re not part of this conversational media space. People don’t reach for their phone and start Popcorning.

This is a huge design opportunity. It’s an opportunity for Popcorn Maker to casually find its way into users’ everyday use, regardless of where they are—the way Google, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram have for millions of people. These things are “60 seconds, frictionless, mobile.”

Mobile webmaking on your morning commute?

One of the things that makes Vine compelling is the uber-simple mobile app they’ve created for shooting and editing videotweets. If Mozilla made an uber-simple mobile app for remixing the web, what might that look like?

(One thing to note: I’m no longer working day-to-day with the team building Popcorn Maker. But I care a lot about Popcorn, and about Mozilla’s potential to be a game changer when it comes to video. So I hope you’ll entertain my idle prototyping.)

I’d start with remixing video. Imagine your future morning commute…

You’re waiting for a train or bus; you’re nursing a cup of coffee and catching up on the day’s news with your phone or tablet.

Now imagine that you come across a bit of newsworthy video. It’s Toronto mayor Rob Ford swiffing a field kick and falling down. You want to put it in context for your social network and show them just what a jackass the citizens of Toronto are dealing with.

With unthinking fluidity, you use your fingers to:

1) trim the relevant part of the clip, because you just want the money shot.

2) add a title card and some links for context.

3) re-publish to your friends and followers. It takes 60 seconds, all said and done. Not much longer than composing a Vine.

Remixing video on your iPad’s browser is effortless and natural. You’re able to pull the (potentially distant) threads of an argument from videos you find across news and social media, weaving together your own video. Then you’re able to publish that video back out into the web. Read-write style.

This is, admittedly, an unsophisticated concept sketch. But in terms of user psychology, I believe we should be designing for this instinctive interaction: you reach for Popcorn because you want to communicate with the wider world. It’s just like leaving a comment on a newspaper article or re-tweeting a blog post. In this case, the motive is: “I think Rob Ford’s a jackass, and want my friends/family/the world to know it.” Video is just another medium in which to communicate. It’s simple as that.

If blogging is the massively participatory version of writing an op-ed in the New York Times, this is like the massively participatory version of being Jon Stewart on The Daily Show. Everyone has the tools of media criticism. Everyone can be the media.

Universal copy-paste for video == a technology intervention

Henry Jenkins and the MacArthur folks propose expansive definitions of 21st century literacy, suggesting that  “[learners must be] equally adept at reading and writing through images, texts, sounds, and simulations.”  (p48)  I agree—to be truly literate, you’ll need to read and write many different forms of media.

During the days of the Open Video Conference we talked a lot about a future in which “you can copy and paste video as easily as you can hypertext.” To me, that’s what this is—at least on a conceptual level. With Popcorn Maker it seems possible to deliver universal copy-paste for video.

As it stands, you can find any media on the web, rip it, and upload it back in a new form. But it’s complicated, discouraging, and cumbersome. The technology stack, time, and skills required to “copy-paste” video get in the way of video becoming a primary medium for self-expression. So to date, copy-pasting video is a bit of a bohemian thing. In the 80s, Negativland had a lot of VCRs and lot of patience. In academia, film professors have been assigning video essays for years. Transformative artists like Jonathan McIntosh chop up popular culture into subversive remixes and millions of people watch.

But what if copy-pasting video were accessible to everyone? If any video on the web could be clipped, contextualized, and republished as easily as you can with text? Or a Tumblr?

A unique conceptual approach to copy-paste

Popcorn takes a fascinating conceptual approach to this problem. Instead of actually clipping, rendering, and re-encoding and hosting derivatives of the original media, we simply point to them where they live on the web. In other words, Popcorn is a non-linear editor for the entire web. It’s the way all video editing should work in the future—fully cloud based, fast and fluid.

The user composes the work entirely in the browser, and it’s stored and represented in Javascript which enables the work to be reconstructed, on-demand, in any browser client. The source files stay exactly where they are, addressable by HTTP.

Popcorn already enables this kind of webmaking with media from YouTube, Vimeo, Soundcloud, Twitter, Google, Flickr, and billions of files stored in mobile phones, desktops and servers. Consider what a powerful paradigm this is, and how it might grow as things like Vine become more commonplace. Or consider how—as truly revolutionary things like the TV News Archive make the day’s broadcast news addressable by armchair Jon Stewarts—webmaking becomes a massively participatory phenomenon.

But this won’t begin on the desktop. And it can’t be for a special class of “mediamakers.” It has to be mobile, and it has to be for everyone. This is the challenge: if we can nail “60 seconds, frictionless, mobile” in Popcorn, we’ll be granting all the formal powers of a remixer to anyone with a phone.

In the future I’d like to see, all a person needs to do to participate in the day’s culture is to weave the web together—and weaving the web is the easy part.

The brain was several miles away in the neurosurgical wing of the Cleveland Clinic. The presiding surgeon had just inserted a periscope camera through a catheter installed in the patient’s skull.

The camera found its way through canals and tissues in the brain, taking a detour to avoid penetrating a pulsing artery (“we can’t get through that way,” the surgeon explained).

Live and direct!

Across town, the audience in Severance Hall was, at turns, chuckling at the surgeon’s good humor, and absorbing the future shock of what it’s like to remotely witness live brain surgery in high definition.

When Tim Berners-Lee fired up his NeXT machine and awakened the World Wide Web in 1990, it’s unlikely he imagined this as a potential use case.

But 22 years later, we live in a world that’s thoroughly and deeply connected. The internet is everywhere and embedded in everything—even periscopes inserted into patients’ skulls. And thanks to open source, open standards and the open web platform, it’s much easier for internet applications to emerge—even live brain surgery broadcast in HD.

Mozilla Ignite Challenge: the basics

To me, livestreaming a brain surgery no longer seems out of the ordinary. This is just one novel use of next-generation networks, and working on Mozilla Ignite, I’ve been lucky to see quite a few cool ideas in motion.

Through the Mozilla Ignite challenge, we’re working to create a culture of experimentation around the future possibilities of the web. We’ve joined in a partnership with the National Science Foundation and a range of public and private institutions to bootstrap and build applications that show off what’s possible on next generation networks.

Specifically: we’re talking about networks with speeds 100-250 times faster than today’s, and opening up network programming with new technologies like OpenFlow.

These technologies have clear applications for cloud computing and IT industries, but we’re particularly interested in user-facing innovation. What are the experiences that are not possible on today’s networks? How can future networks can make people happier, healthier, or more well-informed?

Last month, we announced the winners of a big public brainstorm to answer this exact question, awarding $15,000 in prizes. The ideas ranged from real-time emergency response apps for firefighters, to Star Trek-syle 3D videoconferencing, to multi-perspective video playback of live events, distance education, personal fitness apps, and more.

We’re now moving into the development phase of the challenge, where we connect teams with money (almost $500k in all), mentorship (including a panel of judges that includes folks like Tim O’Reilly, John Lily and Susan Crawford), and other resources to start building.

Our gigabit workshop

Building gigabit apps is hard. Gigabit networks aren’t evenly to distributed, available only to university campuses and in a select few communities (like Chattanooga, Lafayette, Salt Lake City, Kansas City). And application developers generally have no idea how to approach network programmability—all their lives they’ve been skating on layer 3, taking TCP/IP and network topology for granted.

That’s why we’ve partnered with GENI, the nationwide testbed for next-generation apps. Where appropriate, we’ll help get teams up and running on GENI so they can test and refine their gigabit apps. And we’ve recently completed a complete guide for beginners to get up and running on GENI.

In addition to this, we’re busy preparing learning labs and hackable demos to demonstrate the value of today’s technologies—like WebGL—running on tomorrow’s networks.

Our plan is to build a community of practice around these technologies and concepts—a bottom-up, hacker-tinkerer approach. Come through Ignite, do an experiment, and release the code for others to see and use—so we can all be more effective, together. Classic open source principles. Small steps, big journeys—US Ignite is a multi-year effort.

Early experiments

Here are some sample code snippets, concepts and building blocks that have been generated at events like the SF Gig Hackdays and Hackanooga.

Jeff Terrace hacked a way to import a model into ThreeFab, the open source scene 3D scene editor, paving the way for immersive 3D learning spaces and simulations.

Kate Hudson, Michael Dale, and Jan Gerber hacked an app that queues the most popular stories on Google News and generates a video wall—a great way to visualize the benefits of faster internet connections.

Andor Salga, author of an excellent JS library called XB PointStream, is working on using Kinect sensors and fast networks to enable 3D videoconferencing.

None of these early hacks are what you would call “killer apps.” In fact, when it comes to gigabit apps, we’re unlikely to get a true “killer app” in the immediate future.

Why do I think this? Because we can’t predict how changes in computational scale will affect human experience. And so we can’t design that app that really significantly shows the breakaway potential of gigabit networks. We can prototype things that are amazing and impossible on today’s networks, but they’ll be presented in a vacuum.

Bicycles for the mind

It’s often said that computers are like “bicycles for the mind.” I’d argue that as we become more sophisticated users of computers, it’s no longer the computer, but the network—the experience we assemble for ourselves with the available hardware, software, services and even people—that is the bicycle for the mind.

At the Gigabit Breakfast Club, the origin of “bicycle for the mind” and how it applies today.

As web users, we effortlessly marshal hardware, software, services and people all the time. Think about what it means to complete a transaction on Craigslist, eBay, Facebook, Skype or Wikipedia.

In each case: bare metal and silicon, copper and fiber, blood and sinew combine to get things done. Sell a couch. Buy trading cards. See photos of a newborn niece. Make a business deal. Learn new facts. So much complexity, but applications are so good at mediating this complexity that we hardly stop to think.

But when you want to get something meaningful done on the internet, you don’t just rely on a single application like this. Often, you rely on a whole suite of applications. The high school student doing her multimedia book report relies on YouTube, Wikipedia, iMovie, popcorn.js and GitHub. She shares it with peers and teachers using email, IM and message boards. Drawing together these disparate applications, she builds her own “bicycle for the mind.”

We know how to build applications for today’s internet. But how can we hope to imagine—let alone build—applications for the even more complex world of tomorrow? How can we show what it’s like in the future?

Get Involved

A low-cost hack against a tapestry of gigabit experimentation.

The answer: we can foster libraries, building blocks, and tools. We can invest now in experiments and reference implementations that will someday find their way into the mind-bicycles people will build for themselves.

By running challenges and building communities of practice—or any kind of applied open source methodologies—we can gather ideas and concepts from all corners, hastening the future and laying the foundations for a gigabit world one brick at a time. And it should go without saying that I’m super excited to see what develops.

If you want to get involved in Mozilla Ignite, check out http://mozillaignite.org. Our goal is to connect you with money, mentorship, and other resources to chase your gigabit idea. To be eligible for the first round of funding ($85k), get a code concept in by October 25th. If you have any questions, drop us a line.

We felt it was time to reboot the calls, in part to bring visibility to the work of users & contributors and in part to coordinate work around shared tools. So last Thursday, the Popcorn community call was resurrected from the dead.

The response was great, with over 50 people dialing in on short notice. Here’s a quick recap of what the Popcorn community is working on.

Silverhacks Documentary Film Festival

Kicking off the call were brief presentations of two web documentary prototypes from the Living Docs hackathon at Silverdocs—lovingly called “Silverhacks.”

Green Corps – http://livingdocs.github.com/greencorps/

Citizen Corp – http://brianchirls.github.com/citizencorp/

Popcorn base

OG Popcorn hacker Brian Chirls showed Popcorn Base, a boilerplate Popcorn plugin with some built-in affordances like keyframe animation.

Using Base, Brian’s created plugins for:

• iframe (animates scrolling, set html content or src url)
• loudness (set volume of conductor media, “animate” like rubber bands in final cut)
• style (apply any styles to target element; general purpose positioning, animation)
• typist (typing text. plain text or html markup with formatting)
• words (simple, just puts text into the target element, optionally wrap in a link)

Check out the demo, it is awesome.

SEO-friendly Popcorn

Jacob Friedman from Ryerson U showed a Popcorn-based solution for dynamic lower-thirds title cards. The twist: he’s working to make them semantically correct and indexable by search engines, benefitting discoverability and linkability. A lively discussion unfolded on Etherpad between Jacob and others working on SEO-friendly Popcorn strategies.

Rashomon: multi-perspective video playback

Longtime open video hacker aphid demoed Rashomon, a system for multi-perspective video playback. Developed at UC Santa Cruz, Rashomon is being developed as a tool to aid journalists and activists who want to discover what really happens at police clashes, sit-ins, and other public events. Many events are captured and timecoded by multiple bystander cameras and cellphones, and Rashomon uses Popcorn to play them together in sync.

Sketchcasting

Ari Bader-Natal demoed a Popcorn-based system for playing back Processing sketches from Sketchpad.cc, which may one day make its way to Etherpad too.

A proposal for a music education platform

A Toronto-based team pitched a Popcorn project to teach the intricacies of symphony orchestras. They’re currently looking for development help.

An update on Amara.org subtitles display

Amara.org (formerly UniversalSubtitles.org) is transitioning its subtitles playback system to Popcorn, to benefit from the scale collaboration and community in the project (and to simplify its own code base). Nick Seargant from the Participatory Culture Foundation provided an update on how the work is going.

Other cool stuff

Much more went down than I can adequately describe in the post. But check out these updates too:

• A report on Popcorn’s youth media program, “Storycamp“
• The Design of Destruction, an awesome deconstruction of 50 years of Godzilla title sequences

Next call

Join us for the next Popcorn community call, Thursday July 26th at 10am Pacific / 1pm Eastern.

All participants prepping the day before the event.

Four projects participated:

+ A Perfect Terrorist, an investigation of “the mysterious circumstances behind David Headley’s rise from heroin dealer and U.S. government informant to plotter of the 2008 attack on Mumbai.”

+ The Wounded Platoon, the story of the “3rd Platoon, Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 506th Infantry… a group of young men changed by war.”

+ Post Mortem, a look at how death investigations take place in “a dysfunctional system in which there are few standards, little oversight and the mistakes are literally buried.”

+ a group focused on archival applications of Frontline interviews, starting with the recent Economy series.

I was drawn to the “Perfect Terrorist” group, probably because of a fascination with the Mumbai terror attacks. When I passed through Mumbai in late 2009, the Lashkar e Taiba attack made for very interesting conversations with Indian college students.

Tom Jennings, producer of "A Perfect Terrorist" gives a whiteboard run-down of the Collaba neighborhood and the "Kill Zone."

Our group wanted to visualize the complex web of relationships in which the American terrorist David Headley is centered. Headley is the mastermind of the 2009 Mumbai terror attacks—a man who was, in turns, an informant for the DEA and a member of Lashkar e Taiba. Producer Tom Jennings calls him a “perfect terrorist.” He is a complicated figure.

The FRONTLINE piece is outstanding, and the long-form journalism style has distinct advantages. But we wanted to help Tom tell this story in ways that traditional forms can’t afford. Though a documentary runtime must have a beginning, middle, and end, a web-native documentary can let users follow story threads that lead in many directions.

FRONTLINE has generated a ton of material around this story—not just the film, but a series on in-depth blog posts and features. There’s an opportunity for viewers to more deeply explore themes and events in the story, like Headley’s motivation for planning the attack. Just how does someone grow up to become a “perfect terrorist?” How was the attack orchestrated? How can we understand the terror network of 19 accomplices? Who are the victims? What is the aftermath? What are we to make of allegations that Headley was a double agent, and how do we begin to resolve some of the bigger questions raised by the tragedy?

Ideation

We imagined a ton of UX concepts. Among the ideas discussed: a navigable map of the “Kill Zone”; making use of perspective video from surveillance cams; a navigable 3D scene of the same; an attack timeline; a map of relationships; making a viewer clear the “fog of discovery”; and challenging users to ask questions and contribute to a discussion. But though these ideas appeal to the geek in me, they must be developed in service of story, or they’re not worth doing.

After cycling through story, then UX vision, then tech (in the style on which I insist!) we arrived at a pretty interesting concept. It’s a hybrid concept that gets at many of the ideas above.

We drew inspiration from the force-directed graphs in use by Mozilla Collusion and others. Without creating a “force” graph, per se, we wanted to create a visual representation of the “spider web” of relationships that Headley spun. With Headley at the center, we wanted to show the life events that culminated in a perfect terrorist recruiting and directing the 19 attackers, and how this ultimately affected the 166 victims of the attack and their families.

But we also wanted there to be an element of time control. Users should be able to experience this project passively, just by watching—but also actively, by navigating the timeline of events and seeing how the relationships developed.

A mockup prepared by Pietro Gagliano shows our interface ideas.

To do this, we placed Headley as a central “node ” on a vertical timeline. The timeline corresponds to a condensed narration of the entire Headley story. When the user presses play, the narration begins and Headley’s node travels through time. Users can go back and forth in time by scrubbing Headley along the timeline. Because Headley’s is basically a playhead on an audio track, we’ve casually taken to calling this “Playheadley.”

But Headley is also at the center of a time-controlled visualization. As Headley comes into contact with key players in the story, “nodes” are spawned for each person—along with connecting lines of varying levels of elasticity.

By watching this play out passively, you can see Headley’s placement in both the terrorist and informant networks evolve over time. And you can pause the experience at any time to explore a node more deeply. Click on one of the terrorists and the narration will pause. You’ll have the opportunity to explore B-Roll, blog posts, and other elements of the story in a non-linear (but intuitive) fashion.

Each node on the timeline represents an element of the story.

We also discussed how this story map could link to other projects in the same form. So you can imagine a tapestry of FRONTLINE stories connected to each other in this way.

This is an interesting way of mixing time and relationships, telling the story in a way that would be impossible in the traditional form. Check out Pietro’s rapid-fire summary deck for more detail: [PDF]

Hackin' away

Prototype

A protoype was made in six hours and is up on GitHub. It’s made with some custom d3.js voodoo by Devin Chalmers, a simple jQuery powered HTML audio player, and popcorn.js. Because of the short amount of time available for hacking, the project is pretty incomplete. But the repo has semi-functional code for all the individual pieces and is hours away from assembly.

There’s interest in taking this beyond the protoype, which I find tremendously exciting. I think there’s a lot of overlap with The Tillman Story project, and its objectives: to let users explore a much more expansive “surface area” of the story; to let interest drive the user’s experience; to provide additional context to the story; to connect it to journalistic material and conversations in social media; and to accommodate a large number of story threads while keeping the main thread engaging. Both of these projects are pioneering ways of telling non-fiction stories on the web.

A high-five for HTML5

As an open video booster, one thing about the event struck me as particularly fascinating: no-one blinked an eye that this was essentially an HTML5 media hack day. Until recently, this type of event would have been impossible. But thanks to the maturation of HTML media, to libraries like Popcorn, to human readable and hackable source, and to GitHub, these types of events are way more viable. Actually, rapid protoyping with video apps is way more viable—imagine having to coordinate with team members while compiling a Flash or iOS app and merging in functional and stylistic changes from six people on the fly. Very, very difficult. With HTML, we can make changes immediately and with little friction.

HTML5 media rocks. You can also check out the repo for the Wounded Platoon group, another HTML5-based project from the event.

Popcorn Maker will let you make and share interactive HTML5-based videos while teaching you some web skills. It’s like the best parts of iMovie and Wordpress.org spliced together, and it’s 100% open source.

We want it to have the polish of Apple product, but the soul of a Mozilla product. We’re breaking a lot of ground.

Version 1.0 is coming in November. So if you’re interested in contributing to Mozilla Popcorn, now is a great time to get started!

Breakin’ it down

Happy 0.2 Birthday, Dave

Last week, the Popcorn team wrapped the 0.2 milestone toward Popcorn Maker, cheekily codenamed Ghostbusters. (This made for a great release party, with a special screening of the movie and a Stay Puft-themed cake).

This release encompassed 104 tickets, which is pretty intense. Major props to Bob Richter, Jon Buckley, Scott Downe, Chris, Dave, and the rest of the CDOT crew. And this is just getting started.

Because this is a release focused on rewriting Popcorn Maker’s foundations, we’ve skipped deployment for 0.2. But you can play around with the new UI in a sandbox here. And you can also check out the changelog.

As expected, Bob Richter has done a much more intelligent and comprehensive explanation of the changes. But read on for a summarized version.

What’s new?

A lot has changed. I’ll call out 4 things in particular:

1. Stronger software foundations

Butter is the software development kit for Popcorn Maker and other Popcorn-powered web apps. In the past, Butter was tucked into the Popcorn Maker app, which loaded HTML templates in an iframe and communicated with them in a somewhat unreliable way.

We want the foundations of Popcorn Maker to be strong. So we’ve re-factored Butter to live inside user templates. This makes for much more elegant code and reliable interactions.

A cool side effect of this is that any page can be turned into a Popcorn Maker template by simply including butter.js.

2. New and improved UI

Popcorn Maker UI, version 0.1

Popcorn Maker UI, version 0.2

Because Popcorn Maker is a WYSIWYG tool, it’s important that users have as much screen real estate as possible to visualize their projects.

So we’ve shrunk the tray to the smallest practical size. It’s 25% thinner than before. And we’ve moved the playhead to the status bar, so you have access to the whole timeline even when the tray is minimized.

We’ve added a layer of polish all around—lots and lots of nice touches. Track events are now distinguished by color and have more pleasing regions for moving and stretching. Track events are now selectable, which will pave the way for multiple event selection, copy+paste, and undo operations. In all, this makes the app feel much more tangible, and approaching the level of polish you’d expect in a native app.

3. Droppable regions

Popcorn events are now drag-n-droppable.

Popcorn Maker now lets your drop a Popcorn event (say, a map) directly onto the page target.

This is a small change that will make the app many times more usable. We’ll be introducing an even nicer “Add Popcorn” flow in the next release. And we’ll be exploring other drag-and-drop concepts over the year (like dropping a video into the page to upload).

4. Accounts and saving

Thanks to Cornfield—the Popcorn server—this is the first Popcorn Maker release with server-side project storage. We have initial support for creating accounts with BrowserID and saving project data to the cloud.

Cornfield needs to be made more secure, so we have no public demo just yet. But if you’re inclined, you can clone Butter and Cornfield and test this locally.

Next up: 0.3, “Breakfast Club.”

This month, we’ll be rolling up all this work into a version of the app that will stand on its own. The 0.3 release, codenamed Breakfast Club, should be approachable by users and enable top-to-bottom project creation, saving, and publishing.

This release will introduce a temporary template loader that will tide us over between now and June, when we stand up a proper Django backend.

It will be a big challenge to coordinate all these things—Butter, Cornfield, the template loader, templates and documentation. But Popcorn Maker is getting more real—and more powerful—every day. Exciting stuff.

Popcorn Maker 1.0 will empower you to make cool web-based media, whether you’re a beginner or pro. With over 20 plugins—ranging from Twitter to Google Maps to video processing—you’ll be able to stitch up a stylish video that’s “woven” into the web. And, of course, it’s 100% free and open source.

Users will be able to publish and share their creations on their blog, Twitter, or Tumblr (or just grab the code). And the app will reward them for learning more advanced HTML, CSS, and Javascript skills.

When it hits critical mass, Popcorn Maker will be an engine for community innovation in open video.

I blogged about the Popcorn Maker vision in July of last year. Since then, it’s moved to the center of the Foundation’s “Maker” strategy for 2012.

Roadmapping

Last week—thanks to four intense, caffeine-fueled days—the project team arrived at a pretty solid roadmap and vision for Popcorn Maker. Our issue tracker also includes several hundred new/reassigned bugs, mapped against cheeky code names for each release. (We’ve chosen a blockbuster movie motif, so look forward to 0.2 Ghostbusters, 0.3 Breakfast Club, 0.4 Top Gun, 0.5 Pulp Fiction, 0.6 Terminator, 0.7 Amelie, 0.8 Rushmore, 0.9 Wrath of Khan, and finally, 1.0—Matrix.)

What’s new? A heightened level of ambition, matched with increased rigor to get it done.

Starting in 0.7, you'll be able to embed a viral Popcorn player on third-party sites.

Importantly, we’ve developed a working theory of how Popcorn can become a webmaking virus, which Brett Gaylor has blogged about here.

All of this is reflected in a shiny vision document, which is a work in progress (we’ll share next week). We’ve hashed out some user stories, gotten granular on the technical challenges, and imagined how the UI/UX might work. We need to kick the tires a bit before we’re confident in both the user stories and the roadmap, but we’re close.

We’d love to have your feedback in our Lighthouse issue tracker. (And, as always, we’d love to hear your template ideas! Feel free to create a ticket and let us know what’s on your mind.)

Here’s a look at some of our thinking.

Editor UI

Most users will experience the app as a special editor tray that sits on top of the project you’re working on (Popcorn Maker is a WYSIWYG tool). We need to get the editor UI/UX right. It needs to be compact but not constraining.

We’re moving event editors to the tray (in lieu of floating windows) and making it more intuitive to add Popcorn events to a page (just drag and drop onto the page target).

To make the app more versatile, we’ll offer a simple CSS editor UI to change your styles, without isolating you too much from the actual CSS:

Popcorn Gallery

The life-force of Popcorn Maker will be the Popcorn Gallery, which will let contributors share templates that others can build on. Call it the “Wordpress.org effect.”

Plugins

You can use any popcorn.js plugin in Popcorn Maker. Even write your own.

Last but not least—plugins. Popcorn.js plugins are what make Popcorn Maker magic. We’re currently planning on supporting the following plugins, each with a pleasing editor UI (these are subject to change): Image, Video, Webpage, Wikipedia, Attribution, Media control, Apply class, Google map, Open Street Map, Chroma, Video effects, 3D object, Processing, WordRiver, PDF, DocumentCloud, Twitter, Facebook graph, Flickr.

One of the coolest things about Popcorn Maker, though, is that it will support every Popcorn.js plugin through a default editor. And plugin authors can create editor UIs for their plugins. In other words, the project is intentionally modular, so the Popcorn.js community can help us build out the functionality of the app.

As the community grows, the app becomes more powerful.

Seriously. Check out Seriously.js, then read that again.

Roadmap—want to help?

It’s going to be a hard sprint. But it’s super plausible, especially with Bobby Richter, Dave Humphrey, and the brilliant students of Seneca’s CDOT at the wheel. Here’s our roadmap, which will likely change a bit before we freeze it this month. Want to help? Join #popcorn in irc.mozilla.org, or join our mailing list.

The Mozilla Foundation is going big on learning in 2012—learning through the web, learning like the web, learning about the web. Mozilla wants to create a web literate planet.

It’s a grand vision that’s expressed through things like the Mozilla Hive learning networks, Hackasaurus, web skills training, learning labs, badges and assessment, and the “open source” model itself.

You can find the kernel for many of Mozilla’s learning initiatives in the 2010 Mozilla Festival: Learning, Freedom and the Web — a 500 person meta-hackfest that took place in a Barcelona city square.

For a good part of 2011, I’ve been working with members of the Mozilla community to capture that event for posterity. We finally finished, just in time for the Mozilla Festival 2011.

Check out Learning, Freedom and the Web, the story of the 2010 Mozilla Festival. Available in PDF, HTML5, and paper.

This was a pretty big effort. Anya Kamenetz, oracle of the edupunk movement, thoroughly documented the event. She conducted extensive interviews with participants and gave it the journalistic treatment. Working with Matt Thompson, she also curated some of the best blog posts by participants, and captured the best tweets and Flickr photos. Chris Appleton, designer extraordinaire and the creator of the Festival look-and-feel, did an excellent job designing the book, with beautiful typefaces, visual elements, and layouts. Jess Klein contributed some amazing illustrations. And many, many Mozillians contributed edits (mainly through Etherpad, of course!).

You can get the book, for free, in PDF form [8MB PDF]. Or you can order a physical copy for $50. They’re pricey, but well worth it, with 247 crisp full-color pages.*

There’s also a tablet-optimized, HTML5 version, designed by the wonderful Alex Samuel and her students at Emily Carr University’s Institute for the Future of the Book. This edition includes videos from Barcelona and from the Mozilla Science Fairs, as well as interactive how-tos and social features. Huge thanks to Alex, Celeste Martin, Justin Alm, and everyone at Emily Carr!

The coolest thing about the HTML5 version is that you can hack it. It’s licensed CC – BY – SA, so you can take the source and do whatever you please with it—as long as you share. The source is on GitHub. If there’s enough interest, we can keep growing the ebook. If you see an error, or would like to add to the book, fork away!

This book was written by the participants of the 2010 Festival. But it was assembled by a core group of hard working folks. It was fun to play “air traffic control”—and I’ve gained a huge appreciation and empathy for those who work in publishing!

Check it out, let us know what you think.

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*DIY publishing is hard. These books are too expensive, even though we’re breaking even. We’re working on ways to get the price down, and are considering offering a black and white edition for under $15. Would you be interested?

Like everyone else, the death of Steve Jobs has me thinking. I’ve mainly been thinking about how much cooler Apple was before the iOS era.

Before Apple distilled personal computing into 114 pixel icons with rounded corners and turned it into a cycle of continuous consumption, it was a very different company. The Apple of 2011 makes computers that help you buy things. But Apple used to make computers that help you make things.

I owe my earliest, fondest memories of computing to programs like Hypercard, ResEdit, and iMovie—tools which have cultivated millions of creative technologists.

When I think about some of the work we’re doing at the Mozilla Foundation—and why it excites me—I realize that it’s animated by the same spirit as the Apple of old. It’s about about empowering people to make things with computers, to better express themselves, and to teach themselves how to make good on their own potential.

Hear me out…

The path to success for Mozilla’s web maker/education agenda runs through powerful, simple, fun to use software—the kind Apple used to make, but different.

I don’t mean to suggest that we need to make consumer-grade web apps for creators. I mean that we need to make it fun and accessible to create things with HTML5. There are millions of people, young and old, who want to be web makers—but it’s not going to start in a text editor.

This is what Popcorn is all about. Popcorn is a gateway drug to web-making, and Popcorn Maker will scale this even bigger by giving non-coders a way to experiment with open video.

This is what Hackasaurus is about. When people use the X-Ray Goggles, they’re awakened to the malleability of the web, and the cool things they can make with its raw materials.

This is what the Paladin tools for indie game development are about. (Paladin is just now getting started, but stay tuned—browser-based gaming is the next frontier for web makers).*

If we can capture the spirit of Hypercard, ResEdit, and iMovie, we can help the web take on some magical qualities. And this will mean more people learning about the web, playing with the web, and making things on the web. It starts to look like the beginnings of a more participatory, empowered, web-literate planet—and that’s a pretty darned good strategy for protecting the web.

Mac —> Maker —> Mozilla

I can trace my path to Mozilla all the way back to my first Mac. When I was six years old, my dad bought me a Macintosh Centris 610. It had a mighty 25 MHz processor and 8MB of RAM.

It cultivated in me a permanent sense of curiosity and creativity, a confidence to make things and take them apart, and an expectation that I should control my computer—not the other way around. I owe that to two pieces of software: Hypercard and ResEdit.

Hypercard: my early digital literacy education

Hypercard was a graphical programming environment so powerful and simple it was used by professionals and children alike. The basic abstraction in Hypercard is a “card.” A card is a lot like the canvas of a webpage—you can put images, text, sounds and video on cards. You can also “link” cards to each other, just like hypertext links on the Web.

With Hypercard, you could make a custom application in 15 minutes.  Manufacturing companies and medical research centers used Hypercard to run complex databases. The original Macintosh version of Myst was made with Hypercard.

I used Hypercard to make games and cartoons that I shared with my friends. I painstakingly drew scenes (one frame per card!) and linked them to the next card on automatic half-second intervals. This was basically a hack to get animation going in Hypercard—which I’m not sure the designers anticipated!

As I continued to learn and experiment, I started adding sound effects that triggered on click, simple decision trees, and “game over” screens—adding up to my own homebaked computer games. All coded by trial and error.

I didn’t realize it then, but I was getting a real digital literacy education, and a set of expectations about what computers should be. I was learning a kind of programming, but it was all sugar, no medicine. I was motivated by my urge to create, more than anything else.

Hackasaurus promises to bring this phenomenon to the web at large. Through fun curricula and the power of the X-Ray Goggles, kids will learn to build things on the web, the same way I learned to make things with Hypercard. The difference is: the whole web is their playground now.

They can build, hack, and reconstitute their media environment. And they’re learning real skills, that they can carry into future careers and callings.

The explosive potential of this can’t possibly be overstated. Imagine if the universe ran on Hypercard when I was using it as a 7 year old—how empowering it would have been to make and change things at will? The universe does run on the web today, and we’re helping kids to teach themselves its inner workings.

Hypercard made digital creativity readily accessible in a way that, in my opinion, still hasn’t been fully matched. And it, in fact, served as an inspiration to Tim Berners-Lee in creating the world wide web.

But the world wide web is everywhere now, and kids everywhere should be hacking and playing with it. That’s what we want to encourage with Hackasaurus.

Busting a hack with ResEdit

Getting kids immersed in the world of HTML and “hacking” is the goal. Hackasaurus is the trojan horse. Check the Hackasurus hack gallery to see the early results—what kids can do now in their first 10 minutes of play.

Why does this feel so familiar? Maybe because I see a younger version of myself in these kids, “busting hacks” on my 1993 Mac Centris with ResEdit.

ResEdit was a developer tool application for the Apple Macintosh, used to create and edit resources directly in the Mac’s resource fork architecture. For the average user, ResEdit was pretty easy to use, because it used a graphical user interface. Although it had been intended to be a developer tool, power users often used it to edit icons, menus, and other elements of an application’s GUI, customizing it to their own preferences.

I used ResEdit to customize my interface, for starters. I also used ResEdit to “remix” Mac games by swapping out graphics, sounds, and other resources.

Once I downloaded a PacMan-style game from Usenet and swapped out the sprites for pictures of me and my friends. The result? A PacMan clone where I’m PacMan and my friends from the block are the ghosts. They loved it.

Imagine how this might work in 2012. Imagine a world where you can fork a game, the same way I did using ResEdit in 1993, but in such a way that friends around the globe are playing it by the end of the day. That’s what Paladin is all about.

We’re now poised to enable this kind of playful experimentation at the scale of the web. That’s exciting.

iMovie and mediamaking

There’s one last piece of Apple software that warms my heart. It’s from a different era than Hypercard, but it was just as formative for me.

Video editing has always been hard. Telling stories with higher fidelity media like video requires a person to have baseline of knowledge about storytelling, technology, and aesthetics.

When the first version of iMovie was released, it instantly became the Mac’s killer app. Unlike high-end systems like Avid or Adobe Premiere, iMovie was simple and streamlined, with most tasks easily accomplished by clicking and dragging.

iMovie (and a legion of copycats) truly democratized video editing.

I used iMovie to make skate videos. I used it to wow teachers with class projects that were way cooler than a poster presentation. I used it to express myself in the medium in which I spent most of my time—TV and movies. iMovie let me play in that medium, and I can’t understate the effect it had on me. (I should also note that Garageband kindled the recording artist in me).

With Popcorn Maker, we’re looking to enable a legion of web makers to make their own skate videos and class projects for the interactive medium that they live in day-to-day. But unlike iMovie, Popcorn Maker projects will be made up of the raw materials of the web: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Check out Dana's Popcorn-powered book report.

Mozilla, creativity, and “view source-ism”

Mozillians intuitively get that the web is a canvas. The web is Hypercard and ResEdit supercharged and writ large.

What we need are programs to teach this way of thinking, working, and creating. Call it “view source-ism.” View source-ism is about learning by doing, remix, and recombination. It’s what happens when you Google for the answer for a solution problem and land on Stack Overflow or MDN. It’s forking millions of GitHub repos and using shared code like Lego bricks.

Mozilla can take this phenomenon and imbue it with the spirit of Hypercard, ResEdit, and iMovie—making web making approachable, fun, even magical.

Sometimes what’s called for is software—things like Popcorn or Hackasaurus. Sometimes what’s called for are hackfests, incubator programs, open educational resources and events. Whatever the method, we need for web-making to feel intuitive and full of possibility, in the same way Hypercard was for me.

I want Mozilla to mean as much to the next generation of web makers as Apple meant to me in the 90s: an education in how computers can augment human intelligence, curiosity, and creativity.

Brett 's excellent vignette about the Living Docs hackathon.

WIRED just published a story about our Living Docs project with ITVS. In a nutshell, we spent two days with six documentary filmmaking teams to prototype how the web can bring their films to life.

This was about much more than “making a website” for the film. It’s about making web-native films that live in your browser.

It’s a very cool story, and validation of our goals for Popcorn, like:

1. making web video work more like the web;

2. fostering innovation in web-native HTML5 filmmaking;

3. building capacity for creatives to work effectively with web developers.

But a recurring theme in the press for Living Docs, and for Popcorn generally (see Atlantic’s take on the Open Video Conference), is to put popcorn.js at the center of the story.

In a way that makes sense. But popcorn.js is not a platform, or a comprehensive framework, or a panacea for people who want to do interactive storytelling.

It’s a gateway drug.

With popcorn.js, you can spin something up in a few lines of code. And as with jQuery, the growing body of plugins serve as building blocks for new and exciting experiences. But you still have to roll your sleeves up and make something. Popcorn.js is a gateway drug to the intoxicating world of webmaking.

The real story here is how HTML5 and open video enable innovation in form and process. Fork me on GitHub. Borrow some code. Make a tweak and instantly see the results. This makes web making much more than an afterthought: it puts HTML5 at the center of the creative toolkit, right there with the camera and the editor, from the beginning.

(Imagine what this means for social issue documentarians: they can more easily bridge the gap between viewers watching the films and taking action, for instance. We’ll publish these prototypes soon.)

Making web makers

A lot of creative people recoil at the idea “releasing early, releasing often.” The thought of developing for the web, and all the peril and promise there, is scary and foreign.

But popcorn.js is a gateway drug to a new way of working. Working with developers in a highly iterative, open way shows that speed and experimentation are rewarded. It sparks ideas about how you can engage with audiences as active participants. And it inspires confidence in creative people to become web makers themselves, go out and make amazingly cool stuff using the raw materials of the web. That’s a win for the web, web makerism, and Mozilla.

I think we demonstrated all of that at the Living Docs hack day. So to focus on popcorn.js as the center of the story doesn’t do it justice. Popcorn is just the synaptic sugar that makes x event happen at y time—on its own, it won’t hold up to the hype or scrutiny.

Cole Gillespie put it really well during his presentation at the Living Docs event: “A lot of people are really excited about popcorn.js. But you know what? It’s just javascript, man.” Amen.

It’ll take place over 8 months in collaboration with the National Science Foundation, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and US Ignite (a national competitiveness initiative to lay “a new foundation for America’s Broadband Future”).

As part of this project, we’ll be playing in the GENI test bed: a sandboxed network environment that offers flexible design and absolutely huge pipes. We’re talking 1 Gbps territory, up and down—about 250 times faster than average residential speeds.

I’m extremely excited to serve on this project, and proud of our contribution to a great public need: universal, high-speed connectivity, and all the economic development it enables.

The project

The theory behind US Ignite is that there are a number of “killer apps” that are impossible to build on today’s public Internet.

In the same way that email and the world wide web drove demand for our current networks, we’re looking to drive demand for next-generation networks through innovative apps and experiences that feel like they’re from the future. Stuff like (to throw out a few ideas) instantaneous streaming of the highest possible definition video; zero latency medical imaging; and the ability to render photo-realistic, constantly evolving 3D environments directly from the cloud.

These kinds of apps require sustained, ultra-high upstream and downstream speeds, and a new kind of design flexibility. Of course, these apps will run in modern web browsers, and will capitalize on all the newest open web technologies—HTML5, fast javascript, device APIs, hardware acceleration, WebRTC, WebGL, WebCL, and more.

The project is compromised of two very specific competitions:

1) an ideas challenge, where we ask participants to imagine how web apps running on next-generation networks could improve people’s everyday lives;

and

2) a development challenge, where small teams will compete for rounds of funding from a $500k prize pool, drawing from their creativity and talents to build “apps from the future.”

The first part is designed for everybody. It will scratch the same itch as the The Internet Wishlist, “a suggestion box for the future of technology.”

We want to inspire a sense of wonder and possibility, appealing to people’s wildest dreams and aspirations for the web—the kind of stuff that shows up in futurist videos, in science fiction, in dreams and flights of fancy. And then, we’ll start to build this future with the GENI community.

The second phase will require participants to have some pretty specialized skills, and will be conducted under some tight constraints (since these apps won’t be possible on today’s internet, they’ll need to be developed through proxies, as mockups, or at sites in the GENI testbed). But we will strive to make it as inclusive and approachable as possible, with regular events and consultations, community building, and developer resources.

Mozilla and innovation challenges

This project will lean on software and expertise we’ve developed in the first year of the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership (MoJo).

Through MoJo, the Mozilla Foundation has developed or refined a number of capacities: things like running innovation challenges and distributed events; engaging new developer communities; and channeling the passion of Mozillians in areas where Mozilla hasn’t traditionally played.

We’ll be doing all of this and more in the Ignite project. And all the code generated by challenge participants will bear open licenses, which will support future developers in assembling ultra high-speed web apps.

The Hard Parts

Running a challenge program requires an informed balance between timing and incentives. To get to that balance, I’ll be consulting with a ton of people over the next few weeks.

As we finalize the program design, assemble a jury, build relationships with companies, researchers, agencies, developers, and users, and push out the project’s home on the web, we’ll try to stay flexible.

At its core, this program is about guiding a group of highly specialized network engineers and client-side developers through a few rounds of iterative development on their apps. We need to learn about (and speak naturally with) this constituency. At the same time, we need to bring the core Mozilla constituency—web makers, participation wonks and social entrepreneurs—into both the challenge and the broader discussion about how the web will work in the future.

That will be one of the most important things to get right: making Mozilla Labs, MDN, and Webcraft equally at home in the program with the GENI network engineers and community.

Equally important—we’ll need to pull off this big and complex program without overly exposing our process, or brow-beating people with programmatic rationales and details. I’ve already done a fair bit of that in this post!

Help!

We’re shooting for an initial launch in November. I’m working on ways for interested parties to get involved in the project planning. In the meantime, stay tuned and leave your feedback in the comments here!

Popcorn.js is a javascript library that gives developers a robust events framework for video. Using popcorn.js, developers can create all kinds of awesome interactions with video, the page content, and the wider web. And developers can write an infinite number of plugins to extend popcorn’s functionality. Check out the demo gallery to see some examples (and a number of high-profile use cases by Arte, PBS Newshour, Radiolab, and others).

Popcorn.js aspires to be “the jQuery of open video”—a set of building blocks for advanced HTML5 web apps that use video in new and exciting ways. The 1.0 release will be out later this year.

Brett asks: 'what are the opportunities presented by hyperlinking, browser-based compositing and non-linear storytelling?'

Though Popcorn has evolved into a very developer-centric project, it wasn’t always imagined as such. Popcorn was created to scratch Brett’s creative itches—bringing live data into stories, personalizing them, making them interactive, making them social. In short, taking visual storytelling in new and uncharted directions, taking advantage of all the capabilities of the web and web browsers.

This kind of creative experimentation—the kind for which Popcorn was created!—shouldn’t be limited to developers. The Mozilla Foundation wants to awaken the web maker in everyone, not just those who’ve mastered javascript. So a big priority, from very early in the project, has been creating tools for non-developers to explore the possibilities of what we’re calling “web-native” cinema. Here’s a look at where we’ve been, and where we’re going.

Round 1: Butter

Butter, our first stab at an authoring environment for popcorn.js.

Around November 2010, Brett started working with CDOT and Bocoup to develop a companion app to pair with popcorn.js. They called it Butter—because nothing goes better with popcorn than butter.

The app was imagined as a general purpose popcorn.js authoring environment for filmmakers. You’d visit the Butter web app, point it to your video file, and layer in elements of the web like live data, social networks, and the like.

You can try Butter today [try the stable or experimental versions]. The authoring interface mimics the track/timeline UI of popular video editing programs like Final Cut Pro or iMovie. But where adding a track in Final Cut or iMovie is part of the process of creating the edit, adding a track in Butter is part of the process of creating the web page. The track metaphor makes sense because we’re giving users the ability to play with time-based actions, like queuing a map of Alaska when Sarah Palin appears in the edit. The timeline interface lets filmmakers experiment with useful functions, tweak, and test the results. When users are finished creating their projects, they can export a chunk of HTML and host them anywhere.

This was a step in the right direction. Using alpha versions of Butter, we were able to run workshops where participants could quickly spin up their own popcorn projects. The feedback was great— it feels super empowering for a non-technical person to quickly create a popcorn.js-powered web page where their content is triggering all kinds of interactivity.

Solving the wrong problem

But there were two problems with this approach.

Do we want to do an 'authoring environment?'

1) The first problem had to do with the design of the product itself. From a user perspective, the app was pretty limited. There was no way for users to easily customize the layouts or visual styles of their projects. The way we had designed this iteration of the product constrained us to a single use case—a page with a video and a bunch of boxy widgets. These pages were interesting, but fell far short of the creative revolution we were hyping.

2) The second problem was strategic. Part of the long-term plan for Butter was to slowly add functionality for users to design custom pages. We wanted to provide a fuller authoring environment to let people create unique experiences that begin to approach the sophistication of something like The Wilderness Downtown. You would always need a lot of talent and a lot of elbow grease, but we would provide a basic toolkit for you to use.

The more we thought about it, the more we realized we were setting an unattainable goal for ourselves. Whatever authoring environment we delivered would take forever, would cost us a lot of money, and would probably suck. And we’re convinced that others (Adobe?) will take up the baton of making high-end HTML5 authoring tools for creative people, in any case.

Developing a full authoring/design environment for filmmakers to play with HTML5 is not a good use of our resources. Filmmakers will always need more specialized and powerful tools than we’re in a position to provide. And most filmmakers will need developers, too—developers who will serve as a “human API” to popcorn.js and advanced web development generally.

So instead of developing a big and complex (and ultimately niche) tool, we decided to focus on the things we know best: the web, open-ended design, and community. This will help us make a much bigger impact in the non-developer-facing part of the Popcorn project.

Round 2: Popcorn Maker

The newly imagined Popcorn Maker; beta coming in September.

So we’ve scrapped some of our assumptions and reset our perspective. We pulled out the guts of Butter and refactored our existing work into a brand-new product: Popcorn Maker.

Popcorn Maker will be much more useful to our core filmmaker demographic. But we also think the potential demographic for Popcorn Maker is much bigger than filmmakers: it will interest creatives and web-makers of all stripes.

Popcorn Maker does one thing really well: add popcorn.js actions to any web page. Popcorn Maker won’t limit you to what you can design inside the confines of the app. Bring any web page into Popcorn Maker and you can make the video conduct the other page elements like a marionette. This is a big departure from Butter: in Popcorn Maker, what you see is what you get. (This is a bit abstract, so check out the excellent video walkthrough post from Brett to see how it will work.)

This is a simple but incredibly powerful approach. It will enable people to create a huge range of HTML video experiences.

By following the conventions of the Butter API, developers and adventurous newbies can make their own templates. Just design a page using regular web technologies like HTML and CSS and give the popcorn-able elements some special attributes. Once you’ve designed a template to your exact requirements and specifications, you can import it into Popcorn Maker.

The WordPress.org Effect

WordPress.org harnesses community and code sharing—so will Popcorn Maker.

For those who don’t want to design their own templates—which will be most people—we’ll offer a template directory. Anyone can submit a template, and we’ll be encouraging people who make popcorn-powered pages to distill them into re-usable templates for Popcorn Maker. We will kickstart this directory by developing a bunch of templates for the kind of apps we know people want: book reports, walking tours, e commerce, and other tropes we’ve observed in the popcorn universe.

By making creators responsible for the design of their pages (or at least for picking an existing design from a templates directory) we’ll be able to make a much more open-ended and useful app. Instead of banking on our own ability to make the ultimate authoring tool for Popcorn, we’re aiming to get the scale benefits of people hacking, building, and sharing together. In a way, we are thinking of the Popcorn Maker template directory as a kind of wordpress.org for open video. As with wordpress.org, our users will be able to draw from the work of our growing developer community—and hundreds of plugins and templates—so they don’t need to start from scratch.

What’s next?

The new and improved Popcorn Maker incorporates our learnings from trial runs with The Factory program at BAVC. We’ll have an early, but feature-complete version of Popcorn Maker for them on August 15th. We’re hoping to do a general beta release of Popcorn Maker sometime in September.

We’re also experimenting with putting the Butter API that powers Popcorn Maker into other products. Dave Humphrey’s group at CDOT is experimenting with a plugin for Final Cut Pro that will embed Popcorn Maker into FCP itself, so filmmakers can edit and develop popcorn.js projects in one integrated step. We’ll continue to develop Popcorn and its galaxy of plugins and templates on its steady march to 1.0. And we may even be experimenting with some long form content to show just what the web can do for the craft of storytelling.

Lots of amazing stuff is brewing. Get involved!

[UPDATE: check out Brett's video walkthrough post.]

I’ve blogged about the program before. In a nutshell: The Factory works with local changemakers to create documentaries, PSAs, and other forms of media to get a message out. Using open video tools in development at Mozilla, we’re going to help The Factory create four innovative video productions that live and breathe on the web. These “web-native” projects will complement the DVD versions of the films.

To prepare the Factory students, we’ve been introducing them to HTML, CSS, and some very basic Javascript. We’ve also been developing some GUI tools to help them create their projects (including the Popcorn Maker, which I’ll blog about next week). Along with these new skills, we’ve been workshopping project ideas to make sure the web-versions of these films are amazing.

The Inspire USA group at The Factory, prototyping their web-native documentary project

It has been a multi-step process. The Factory Manager, Jason Jakaitis (along with Factory staff members like Ewen Wright) has been helping the groups iterate on their project ideas until they shine. He’s been asking tough questions: How can the Factory projects use the capabilities of the web to reinforce the message of their films? How can they build meaningful audience engagement using new creative techniques?

Here are the near-final concepts for the four projects:

Creative Growth

Creative Growth Art Center

The Story: Julian, Stephanie and Matt are making a documentary about the Creative Growth artists studio in Oakland, California – the first art gallery in the country created specifically for artists with developmental disabilities. They want to create a project that shares with the audience the “safe space” that Creative Growth fosters through positive reinforcement and a spirit of inclusion.

The Project: The team envisions a web-native documentary that is preceded by a short questionnaire that prompts the viewer to share their ideas of what is beautiful and who inspires them. After completing the short survey, the documentary begins: it uses interviews with the Creative Growth staff to share the broad tenets of the organization’s philosophy but then has empty place-holders for b-roll that are “filled in” through an automated Google/Flickr image keyword search using the viewer’s answers in the survey. The documentary will then be endlessly variable, tailored to the tastes of the viewer, and in line with the inclusive and open-minded philosophy of Creative Growth.

The Huey P. Newton Foundation

Huey Newton adresses a crowd in Oakland

The Story: Nick, Brian and Patrick recently took the Black Panther Legacy Tour of West Oakland – a four-hour door-to-door history lesson, conducted by former Black Panther Chief of Staff David Hilliard. The tour stops at crucial locations in the Black Panthers struggle and highlights the role that the political party played in fighting for basic civil rights of the African-American community in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The young men were deeply moved by the tour and were appalled by the lack of recognition the City of Oakland had accorded sites of such historical significance.

The Project: The filmmakers have decided to create a virtual “walking tour” to raise visibility of the Black Panthers and their importance to the West Oakland community—this will provide an opportunity for individuals outside of Oakland to learn the history of the movement. Each “stop” on the walking tour will include pan-able Google Street View images of the location as it is now, along with historical stills and Wikipedia articles for additional context. In addition to this core experience, users will be offered unique share & comment links (Facebook) for each leg of the tour.

City Slicker Farms

City Slicker Farms plants gardens to renew communities

The Story: Zoe and Jasmine want to tell a story about the West Oakland organization City Slicker Farms, which has spent the last ten years working to promote access to fresh produce and prevent violence by “boosting community” through a series of communal urban gardens and weekly farm stands. The girls are also impressed by CSFs “Backyard Garden” program, in which the organization helps homeowners set up gardens in their backyard and then provides them with seedlings and regular follow-up visits. They want to create a project that brings visibility the organization and shares important information about their efforts, but they also want to make something that reinforces the City Slicker commitment to bringing people together and creating a sense of shared community.

The Project: The team envisions a web-native project (utilizing both Google Maps and YouTube) in which their documentary plays over the center of a Google Map of West Oakland. As the documentary mentions different farm sites that City Slicker Farms has created, pins will drop to indicate their location on the map. These pins will be clickable, linking to a short YouTube-link video portrait of the location. Furthermore, there will be an option for beneficiaries of the Backyard Garden program to drop their own pins where their home gardens are located and share videos or still images of their progress.

Inspire USA

A mockup for the Inspire USA project by the Factory

The Story: Ray, Lauren, and Fifer are working with Inspire USA, a non-profit that helps teens cope with depression & mental illness and live happier lives. The Factory group is creating a series of vignettes to share the stories of survivors. They have settled on four stories submitted by youth who have experienced mental health issues.

The Project: For the web-native version of their project, the emphasis remains on “finding your purpose.” Viewers will be able to watch the vignettes, as well as discovering and sharing positive messages on Twitter. This project will help teens discover that it is not unusual to go through tough times, and that they are not alone.

What’s next?

We’ll be working all through the month of August to help the Factory design and deploy these projects. And we’ll be packaging the tools and learnings from this program to help youth documentarians everywhere to design their own interactive media for the web. Stay tuned!

The first challenge was all about “unlocking video“—bringing the best qualities of the web to the staid medium of news video. The second was about “going beyond comment threads“—using open web technology to create more dynamic spaces for news discussion.

Today, submissions are open for the final news innovation challenge. The topic: harnessing the power of the web to make news better for the people who create and read it. Of course, there’s a twist—you can only use open web technologies. That means no Flash, iOS, or any other proprietary SDKs.

How do we get data, reporting and local knowledge into the hands of users, wherever they are, no matter what devices and platforms they’re using? This is an open-ended opportunity to share your world-shattering news innovation concept. You could end up with a paid fellowship to work on this problem inside Al Jazeera, the BBC, Boston.com, the Guardian, or Zeit Online.

The Open Web Opportunity

For this challenge, we’re looking for your most revolutionary ideas. How can we harness the open web—the technologies, the connections, and the people—to make news better for the people who create and read it? What should a news website look like in 2011 and beyond?

We’re not talking about infographics, mashups, or interface tweaks. We’re not talking about solving corporate IT problems. We’re talking about reaching right into the core of journalistic endeavors and hacking the system. As Matt Waite writes at the Nieman Journalism Lab:

All this talk about a digital future, about moving journalism onto the web, about innovation and saving journalism is just talk until developers are allowed to hack at the very core of the whole product.

And as Stijn Debrouwere writes,

The news industry needs to start thinking about journalism in terms of information and the myriad ways in which we can present that information to our readers.

The open web offers unique, as-yet untapped advantages to journalists. New types of newsgathering, new types of presentation, new types information and engagement. As our own Phillip Smith writes,

Many news organizations are still thinking about innovation (as pointed out frequently on [the MoJo community] list) through the lens of corporate IT… there needs to be a radical shift toward thinking about news as a problem of creating successful consumer Internet experience vs. filling column inches or news holes, press deadlines, and delivery trucks. That is where the innovation and potential lies, I would propose, not in a re-arrangement of the chairs on the deck of the corporate IT Titanic inside of news organizations.

For the final MoJo challenge, we’re looking to you for this kind of radical thinking. We want to work with you to develop new technologies to inform, educate, and elighten. We think that participation is the key. And we think journalism can learn a lot from the open web here.

Some Examples

In all our dicsussions during the first months of the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership, a few themes keep emerging. Here’s some ideas to get your brain spinning:

1. People-powered curation and editing. Instead of putting curation and editing in the hands of a single indidvidual, what would it look like to put it in the hands of many people? From sources and experts to those directly impacted by the story. Like a “Storify” for the people. What kinds of tools could be put in the hands of young people in the midst of a popular uprising to help tell their story?

2. Visualizing how stories evolve online. Where does a story start and end? What are the people involved in the story saying, and what are reporters and other trusted sources saying? How does that relationship, and the story, evolve over time and by geography? How can we give journalists and readers a context that goes beyond a single moment, site or page?

3. Interfaces that balance real-time information with deeper context. News organizations are struggling to find the right balance between the presentation of breaking news and more in-depth ‘explainers.’ And the larger challenge of making it all mean something. What possiblities open up when you bring ‘the people formerly known as the audience’ and new user interfaces into the mix?

4. Crowd-sourced verification and fact-checking. In breaking news situations, there’s often a rush to get the scoop. As new types of sources become more relevant, like micro blogs and social networks, new challenges are introduced into the verification process. How can these news sources be verified and fact-checked in real time with the help of people outside news organizations? What workflows would you build?

5. Community rewards and incentives. How can news publishers create “better readers,” readers that are more engaged and that provide quality contributions? What would rewards and incentives achieve on their own, and in the context of the many ways news organizations seek to involve readers across issues and across sites? Think of this as “Badges for news participation.”

These five areas exemplify problems that the web is uniquely suited to solve. Of course, there are many more challenges and opportunties in news the web can tackle—it’s up to you to define and propose them.

We’re not looking for marginal improvements that orbit legacy technologies like content management systems. We’re looking for ways to foster more participation in the important local, national, and global issues of the day. We’re looking for compelling news experiences, for journos and readers alike (after all, that distinction is blurring every day).

Mozilla focuses on those point where the Internet and people come together. That’s where this challenge lies as well: the place where news & people come together on the Internet. So, let’s hear your ideas!

Lots of people choose to share their creative work using a Creative Commons license, but don’t express that choice in the form of CC REL metadata. Without proper metadata, their sharing preferences are unknown to search engines, and it’s harder for users to give proper attribution. OpenAttribute is about making attribution easier: for creators, for users, for librarians, for everyone. By making attribution easier, we hope to encourage more CC licensed works, more machine readability, and grow the Open Educational Resources movement. And, hey, it’s the right thing to do!

The first stop on this journey was to create browser plugins for Firefox, Chrome, and Opera that display an icon whenever a CC-licensed object is present in a web page. But that required site operators to include the metadata in their pages, which wasn’t always easy.

Now, the OpenAttribute team of volunteers is shipping plugins for WordPress and Drupal that make adding CC REL metadata to posts a breeze. Give them a shot and let us know if you find any bugs.

The team has been laser focused on making simple software. But the software is just a tool to advance the mission. We’re interested in working on educational resources, direct outreach to cultural institutions, and other tools to expose CC sharing preferences to users and search engines. If you think you can help, get in touch!

Update: see Molly’s post on the new Wordpress plugin.

Right now, Mozilla is building some simple software to facilitate this kind of work. What we’re building is like OpenIdeo, challenge.gov or even 99 designs (arguably).  We want to enable simple, distributed brainstorming and problem solving. Emphasis on simple—the bar to participation needs to be as low as possible.

Our version of an open innovation platform will be built on top of Drumbeat.org, but it will be based on Django and fairly portable. At a functional level, this software will let an administrator define a challenge statement and accept responses over a set period of time. These responses can include text, arbitrary code, images, links, or videos.

One cool thing we’re exploring is how to do this in a distributed way. We’d like to solicit and syndicate submissions across the web, so that anyone can start a challenge anywhere, and partner sites can publish ideas that are coming through the cycle:

On the community side, we’re building in voting (thumbs up), commenting, and also some publication features (like automatically tweeting whenever someone files a challenge brief). Pretty simple stuff, but surprisingly, there’s no free/open software that does this well.

We’re hoping to use this to run our news innovation program with the Knight Foundation. But this software is going to be free and available for anyone to use/build on/hack/whatever. You’ll be free to use it to run your own challenges.

So, internet: what features would you want in a platform like this? What sucks about current platforms? What’s great about them? What are the human dynamics we should design around?

Maybe another question, if you’re feeling cynical: do open innovation challenges even work? (the author, fellow Mojo consiprator Phillip Smith, seems to think so. And I agree!)

The reality is that most people stumble into hacking and web development. There’s an accident or unprovoked realization that leads them down the path of tinkering, and they keep following that path.

A big part of Mozilla’s Drumbeat strategy is leading people to the path. It’s creating conditions for people to have their “Aha!” moments, where it all clicks, and computers suddenly seem full of possibility. This is what the Hackasaurus project is about. And in a way it’s what all Drumbeat projects are about: raising a kind of awareness in people where it didn’t exist before, and getting them invested in the parts of the web that make it so great.

Mozilla is working with The Factory this year, as part of a collaboration with the Zero Divide Foundation. The Factory is a youth media collective based out of Oakland, CA, and is part of the Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC).

The Factory works with local changemakers to create documentaries, PSAs, and other forms of media to get a message out. We’re teaming up with them this year to give their Summer Intensive program a leg up. Using open video tools in development at Web Made Movies, we’re going to create innovative video productions that live and breathe on the web. This isn’t just video pasted onto a webpage, but something much cooler—think Arcade Fire, for example.

We’re also doing some other things in the background. For starters, we’re getting valuable focus testing and real-world uses of the software in development at Web Made Movies. And more interestingly, we’re pioneering a new kind of skills training: hacking both HTML and open video. Our experience with the Factory kids will help BAVC and Mozilla prepare teaching modules to address skills most people don’t even recognize they need yet.

For our first meeting with the Factory this February, we showed up with four Mozillians and a rough game plan. Brett and Lukas have written about this experience on their respective blogs, and Atul has provided a play-by-play, so I won’t recap it here.

But I do want to share three “Aha” moments from the week. All three were extremely encouraging, and validate our theories about raising open web awareness.

“Aha” moment #1:

We’ve introduced the Factory group to the X-Ray Goggles, and shown them how they can not only inspect web pages, but also tweak and modify the pages they visit using HTML.

Within 10 minutes, one of the workshop participants—an older high schooler—is at NBA.com, changing the headlines to reflect his distaste for Miami Heat. “It’s over for you Heat!” reads the front page.

A few minutes later, he’s changing the rosters so everyone in the Factory program is playing pro ball (at least, according to NBA.com).

That’s an “Aha!” moment—you don’t need to take the web lying down. It’s eminently hackable, eminently styleable, like Magic Ink. You can build it and change it.

“Aha” moment #2:

A few hours later, we’re collaboratively coding an HTML page using Etherpad and HTMLpad. We’re going through this together on the projector at the front of the room. As we’re walking through the process of setting up a basic page, using tags like  <img> and <span> , we tab back to where the code lives, and see this text:

> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5P8lrgBtcU

One of the Factory participants has pasted a video URL into the page code, skipping ahead to the fun part of the lesson—video.

Of course, that markup isn’t right. So we navigate to the page, pick up the embed code, and it paste it in. It works.

That’s an “Aha!” moment—you can plug things into your own webpage, just like Legos. The web is made of Legos. Holy cow.

“Aha” moment #3:

Near the end of the day, we ask participants to share websites they visit frequently. Facebook, Wikipedia, and YouTube are expected. We visit these sites and check them out with the Web X-Ray Goggles. We also view the page source, trying to get an appreciation for how the pages were built.

We go to do the same for http://kanyewest.com, but there’s a snag: the site’s made in Flash. We can’t view source, and we can’t inspect with the Web X-Ray Goggles. It’s a big, unreadable <embed> element.

That’s an “Aha!” moment—unlike things made with HTML, you can’t look under the hood with Flash. The code is hidden and isolated. Flash is a black box.

—

None of these moments were planned—they couldn’t be. They emerged on their own, accidentally. This kind of learning is what happens when you get curious and walk down the path.

It’s working. All you need to do is lead them to the path, and curiosity takes care of the rest.

Though this workshop was officially about open video, it would not have been possible without the Hackasaurus tools. (I’m literally delighted at how well the different Drumbeat tools are working together. It will be amazing in 18 months’ time to see all Mozilla efforts—badges, software, programs, events—working with and reinforcing each other).

Keep an eye on The Factory and Web Made Movies as we continue our experiments together. Together with Zero Divide, we’re going to make a big splash later this year.

The Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership is a multi-year effort to drive innovation in the technologies that deliver the news. The program—and a slate of initial partners, which includes the BBC, the Guardian, Boston.com and Zeit Online—was announced last week. If you’re interested in learning more as the program unfolds, join the community list. Check out the screencast here, in which project lead Nathan James and Phillip Smith introduce the ideas behind the partnership.

There’s a strong values alignment between journalists and open web hackers. Both spend a lot of time in the marketplace of ideas. Exchange, dialogue, and the flow of information form a set of common concerns. And the open web way of doing things—write once, deploy everywhere—offers both cost savings and serendipity.

Cost savings, because open source means individual newsrooms don’t need to develop their processes in a vacuum. Instead of designing a module for visualizing a particular kind of data, for example—or even licensing some expensive technology—they can tap into open communities like processing.js or Protovis. Plus, developing using open standards guarantees the biggest possible audience. As creative director with limited resources, would you rather develop individual mobile apps for iOS, Android, and Blackberry? Or write one HTML5 app and deploy it everywhere?

Serendipity, because doing things the open web way leads to unforeseen sparks and synaptic connections in the news media. The blog post I write here might be quoted, linked, tweeted, aggregated, recontextualized, or scraped. It might be consumed on a desktop, latop, tablet, or smart phone. Heck, it might even get displayed on a microwave ticker, if I publish using open conventions. This open-ended design leads to all kinds of generativity: new audiences, new ways of focusing attention, new ways of harnessing the audience.

This open web way stands in stark contrast with emerging approaches like, say, The Daily. The Daily is a brand-new Newscorp publication. There’s only one way to consume the Daily—on an iPad. There’s a hard ceiling on The Daily’s potential audience—about 10 million, or the number of iPads in circulation. You can’t copy-paste from a Daily article, so there won’t be many reaction blog posts to Daily content. Most Daily content can’t be shared. And, perhaps the biggest strike against the approach is that it’s delivered through a controlled channel. That’s not just bad for audiences—it’s terrible for publishers. Unlike publishing on the web, publishing on these platforms requires permission, and sometimes even a 15%—40% revenue cut to the platform operator. We think the open web way wins hands-down, and we’ll be strengthening that case by shining light on what our news technology Fellows will do.

The next time there’s a news event that grabs the world’s attention, we want newsrooms around the globe using people, software, and ideas that came out of this initiative. Mozilla just so happens to have a bit of experience when it comes to great ideas, great people, and great software.

That said, this Partnership is not about solving the distribution or revenue challenges faced by the news biz. It’s about making sure the open technologies are the best ones available to journalists and publishers. There’s a huge, unfulfilled need for shared processes, workflows, and standards—as Phillip says, “there’s a real opportunity here to introduce a bit of the Mozilla MakerCulture into the news-technology space.”

Mozilla is already experimenting—with stuff like processing.js, popcorn.js, and Universal Subtitles—that can have a huge impact on the way we experience news. I’ll be blogging about this in depth, and I’m looking forward to helping connect the wires between the Knight program and the interesting work that Mozilla and Mozillians are already doing.

All that, one week!

The launch of OpenAttribute may seem like just another awesome proof point for Drumbeat this week, but for me it’s more significant. The OpenAttribute team—chiefly Molly Kleinman, Laura Hilliger, Pat Lockley, Nathan Yergler—have shown us a model collaboration. All Drumbeat projects should work this well, and I’ve learned a lot from this team.

In a nutshell, OpenAttribute is a project to make Creative Commons attribution easier. Giving credit where it’s due is the first requirement of using open content, but it’s surprisingly not very well integrated into the open web platform. This is one discussion emerged at the Learning, Freedom and the Web festival last October. Why not make it easier? How might we do that?

The answer would be a combination of direct outreach for creators and users of CC content, showing them how to add and use license metadata—along with the development of some browser add-ons to facilitate the process.

The project came together shortly after the festival, with an initial team that had a lot of library science and user interaction experience, but no development muscle. That’s normally a problem for Drumbeat projects with strong ideas but no magnetic, technical core. Thankfully, we were able to bring Nathan Yergler (a Drumbeat festival attendee and, heywaddayaknow, CTO of Creative Commons) on board. Nathan had long been working on a project called MozCC, and later mentored a Google Summer of Code project meant to supersede it. But it needed the right support and environment,  and a team to give it rocket fuel. Bang—Drumbeat collision.

Working with Nathan, a team of volunteers helped improve the design of the software, test for bugs, and engineer a release. Other developers—namely, rockstar Pat Lockley—joined in and ported the Firefox add-on to Chrome and Opera. The team launched the product this week, getting mentions in Boing Boing, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and many more.

Not bad for an all volunteer team working across the world (Molly and Nathan in the U.S., Pat in the U.K., and Laura in Germany). And it’s just the beginning. The team has its sights set on plugins for popular CMS systems and more direct outreach to CC creators and users.

Making open content a technical part of the web stack is a big priority for Creative Commons. Here’s another step toward that future from a team that coalesced through the power of community—almost like magic.

One of the things that’s connected most with people is Matt Thompson’s Five Dance Steps for Drumbeat. It’s a clear, straightforward how-to for starting a Drumbeat project. More than any other resource, the Dance Steps have helped people understand how Drumbeat and open innovation processes work.

This got me thinking: how can we offer more tangible things like the Dance Steps, but in recognition of different project’s unique strengths/paths to success? There are probably certain ideas for which doing the Five Dance Steps doesn’t necessarily make for a dance party.

Here’s a braindump of some resources we could develop and offer the Drumbeat community. Some of these are practical steps you can take—theories of starting a Drumbeat project, like the Dance Steps. Almost like “how-to” documentation. Others are little initiatives that people can plug into. Which of these are interesting to you? What are your ideas?

The Five Dance Steps
What is it: a guide to roadmapping and leveraging community participation
Who’s it for: Projects that have a strong lead/core of volunteers

The Snowball
What is it: a guide to accumulating interest over a period of time
Who’s it for: big-scale, visionary projects that need a lot of participation

The Constructor
What is it: a guide to building a project framework that people can plug into
Who’s it for: projects that have several moving parts

The Skills Exchange
What is it: a place to trade your skillset for help from others with different skills
Who’s it for: projects that need a specific kind of help

Geek Speed Dating
What is it: a monthly web meeting to rapidly meet and greet active projects
Who’s it for: people who want to volunteer time but don’t know how

The Innovation Showdown
What is it: a quarterly innovation challenge hosted by Mozilla. Enter to win fame, glory, and project support
Who’s it for: advanced open web warriors who want to compete to solve big problems

Big Brother/Big Sister
What is it: project proposals are matched to authors of Firefox add-ons and other volunteer developers.
Who’s it for: project leads who have a great idea and need a strong technical mentor

The Project Audit
What is it: an application for a one-on-one, comprehensive examination of your open web project
Who’s it for: project leads who want help evaluating project design, and need help identifying funding leads

Which of these resources click with you? What else can Drumbeat do to help projects get off the ground?

The new normal

If you spend a lot of time in classrooms, or conferences, or other audience settings, you’re no doubt aware of the “backchannel.”

If the speaker’s presentation is the primary conversation that’s taking place in the room, the backchannel is the secondary conversation. It’s the audience reacting together, sharing their questions, concerns, quibbles, reactions, and feedback. Sometimes, that secondary conversation can be more interesting and important than the primary one.

Perhaps the most popular backchannel in wide usage is Twitter. The Twitter conversation is increasingly a factor in settings with dense internet connectivity—college classrooms, tech conferences, and the like. Almost every conference has a #hashtag—an associational back channel.

But the backchannel, as a phenomenon, is certainly much older than the web. Students in today’s college classrooms may be creating their own backchannels using IM and email on their laptops. But as grade schoolers, they were passing notes to each other—an analog backchannel, but a backchannel nonetheless!

Backchannels are growing in popularity (and ease). And along with the growth of the backchannel is a growing unease, on the part of educators, conference speakers, and others who spend a lot of time addressing audiences: a fear that they’re not connecting. A fear that they’re competing with the backchannel.

But think through the audience perspective. Who wants to listen for two hours if it’s so easy to speak? Why sit passively through a lecture or conference presentation if the rest of your mediascape is so interactive and participatory?

I’m not mounting a defense for people who don’t pay attention in class. But backchannels are certainly a natural response to the frustration of one-way exchange—and they can bring the best parts of small group interaction and dialogue into large groups.

Why backchannels suck

That header may seem strange, especially after my spirited defense of the backchannel. But let’s face it: there are a lot of things about backchannels that suck.

First off, they can devour presenters who lack confidence. In the olden days—before Twitter, IM, and the like—you could choke. And when you choked, everyone knew it.

But backchannels can make it worse. They can create nasty, negative feedback loops. In probably the most infamous backchannel fail, Harvard researcher danah boyd was thrown off her game at the Web 2.0 expo when the backchannel went off the rails. Telling her side of the story, boyd summed up the problem: “The Twitter stream had become the center of attention, not the speaker. Not me.”

You might say, pointing to Cicero or Abraham Lincoln or Martin Luther King, that the best orators will have nothing to fear. Good communicators will always be able to captivate an audience, no matter how diminished our attention spans.

But Cicero never had to contend with a #caesarfail. And nobody was text messaging their friends during the Lincoln-Douglas debates. It’s unavoidable—when you put a big group of connected people in a room, and they’re forced to listen, it’s only natural that they’d talk back.

Which brings us to the second thing that sucks about backchannels—they’re “back” channels for a reason. They’re not designed with the presenter in the loop. Some folks have tried to bring the presenter into the equation, resulting in backchannel implementations that look more like tools for facilitating questions. Google Moderator is one example. But they’re not really useful at that point—they’ve restored the one-way, call and response dynamic that begs for backchannels in the first place.

Saavy presenters are adapting—here’s a guide, for example, on how not to get killed in the backchannel. But wouldn’t it be cool to reinvent the backchannel? To design it with the needs of both the presenter and the audience in mind?

How to improve the backchannel

Feedback can be useful. This is the simple, but important idea behind the Feedbacker. Feedbacker is about taking all that’s good about backchannels, and turning that into meaningful feedback for presenters.

We’ll be building several modules for Feedbacker—the first, called the Classroom Attention Barometer, already exists in prototype state, thanks to Sam Iglesias and Andrew First.

The Classroom Attention Barometer asks students to provide real-time, binary feedback—like registering whether they are following the presentation. (We’ll need to experiment with the wording and presentation here—giving students the opportunity to “grade” their teachers requires delicate balance).

By individually voting “up” or “down,” the class can give the presenter a aggregate, real-time measurement of how well they’re doing. The presenter gets a time series view, àla stock ticker, that she can use to either adjust her presentation on the fly, or review after the presentation.

The implementation is tricky—a lot of early feedback about the CAB so far has centered around the problem of troublemakers. “If I had to use this when I was in school,” said one friend of the project, “I would be down-voting constantly, just to be a turd.”

It’s possible that modules like the Classroom Attention Barometer aren’t well-suited, pedagogically speaking, to the needs of presenters. What do you think? What modules are needed?

Other modules in consideration might facilitate group exercises you might get in a statistics or economics class, like the Birthday Paradox:

Consider the following example: Assuming for a moment that birthdays are evenly distributed throughout the year, if you’re sitting in a room with forty people in it, what are the chances that two of those people have the same birthday? For simplicity’s sake, we’ll ignore leap years. A reasonable, intelligent person might point out that the odds don’t reach 100% until there are 366 people in the room (the number of days in a year + 1)… and forty is about 11% of 366… so such a person might conclude that the odds of two people in forty sharing a birthday are about 11%. In reality, due to Math’s convoluted reasoning, the odds are about 90%. This phenomenon is known as the Birthday Paradox.

A Feebacker module might be written to facilitate just this, collecting each student’s birthday in an efficient way and helping the presenter run this exercise with impact.

What other modules can you imagine?

As we ramp up the project, we’ll be soliciting advice, suggestions, and (gasp!) feedback about how to best meet this goal. Next step: we’re hacking away on our project roadmap, and setting our milestones for the near future. In the meantime, if you have a brilliant idea for a Feedbacker module, give us your napkin sketch.