Wednesday, August 11, 2004

Multimedia Blogs and e-portfolios

Reading our ADE blog site, I see that there is some discussion in the blogsphere about adding multimedia content into blogs and the potential for digital portfolios. Fellow ADE blogger Dan Mitchell wrote, "What it takes is someone to create the tools that permit bloggers to create, edit, and link other media types with the same facility that current blogging tools provide for text-based blogging. All the better if it can be done entirely within the browser.
And what better company to take the lead than the company that already has all the best tools for creating these media? Yes, you know who I'm talking about.

My response:
I think what we need for this to happen is an environment to maintain a collection of documents (a digital archive), in any web-accessible format, and to be able to access that archive and construct any type of multimedia presentation linking to any number of those documents. Right now, I can upload documents into my blog, but there is no easy way to meta-tag those documents as they are stored, nor is there a way that they could be retrieved easily.

I think we need an authoring environment with an interface like most of the iLife suite, that allows quick access to any type of multimedia artifact. The problem with the iLife software is that these are silos that are beginning to talk to each other (like being able to see the iPhoto and iTunes libraries in iMovie). But I can't combine media types in a single archive and I do not always want to create a digital video file. Sometimes I want to produce a presentation, sometimes a web page, sometimes a mind map. And my .Mac account isn't the answer.

1 comment:

Kathy Tarochione said...

I've been interested in uploading my Word documents and PDF files to my blog. I'm not sure how to do that. Can you help. It would be a good lesson for every beginner blogger.