Suggested Features

This section is a collection of the features we are considering implementing. This document forms the basis for the fleshing out of our Roadmap

Frontend Site:

  • Single sign-on: Create integrated registration between Ourmedia and the Archive.
  • BitTorrent support: Archive has given the OK. Work with participatoryculture.org, Torrentocracy and/or Drupal community to offer BitTorrent, especially for large or popular files.
  • Forums: Give members ability to create a new Forum topic (but not delete topics) in Drupal (currently, only admins can do so).

Information organization and meta:

  • Tagging: implement tagging on the site (Drupal 4.6 template already supports much of this) and tag clouds on all category pages and on front page. Make sure tagging services like Technorati pick these up.
  • Collections: Implement collections (sets) on the site, to allow members to group related items together and to batch-upload items. (Does Drupal support this yet?)
  • Ratings: Let members rate each media work. (Need to look into Drupal's ratings template.)
  • More robust search: Better search capability (provided by Yahoo?), including the ability to search by media type — video, audio, text, photos — as well as the ability to sort by key characteristics, such as license, image resolution or audio format. Now or later, extend search to partner sites as well. Pixsy is interested, i will be providing xml data dumps of image and video data.
  • Browse media: we need to bring the Browse Media page back, so people can browse Ourmedia by media categories and subcategories and not just have one somewhat useless list of all the recent media that has been published.
  • Related media: Implement "related media," with thumbnail images, on media pages to help with navigation of site.

User Pages:

  • Groups: Redesign and build out social networking functionality of Groups.
  • Favorites: new feature allowing members to add "my favorites" (favorite media pages on the site) to their My Page, including My Playlists
  • Email alerts: The ability to send an email notification to family members or friends whenever you upload media to the site.
  • Watchlist: a friends' watchlist to see what media items your friends have recommended.


  • Wish lists: Let members create wish lists from software and hardware products featured on the site, or offsite.

  • Gifting: Apple's iTunes 6 service has a gifting feature that lets users send songs and playlists to other people. We could do something similar with free media.
  • Blog import: Since most members don't want to create yet another blog, allow their personal blogs to display on their My Pages, or set up a separate area on Ourmedia so people can post to both their OM blog and personal blog at once.
  • Edit Media: Let users edit the media they have uploaded. Currently you have to: 1. edit offline 2. delete old file from site 3. upload new file. This is for reasons also relating to The Internet Archive's lack of editing features. (Update, 21.08.06) If technically somehow possible: (let users) automatically update an archive's media page after editing an ourmedia media page and vice versa. This could also be the solution for the possible challenge we face with wrong licences - (c) instead of (cc) - due to that uploading bug: a script could compare both media pages for all items on ourmedia and make a decision about which one has to be updated and then do all the work...

Graphical Design:

  • Redesign: Implement art director's redesign of site's front page, with inclusion of images module and playlists and more spare, streamlined UI. Probably led by Damien with help of art students at design schools.

Tools:

Upload/Publish:

  • New media types: categories to support the uploading of software and games
  • Integrate outside content into Ourmedia and vice-versa: Display content from NowPublic, the Conversation Network and other partners onto the site's front page. Look into integrating open source solutions from participatoryculture.org (DTV), FireAnt (RSS), playlists from H2O at Berkman, etc. Possibly work with Robert Kaye's Music Brainz and Sasha's podcast.com on a podcast directory or provide them with podcast creation and sharing tools. Jukeboxes and image albums may be a part of this. Perhaps set up a section of the front page for content partners, like BlogHer.
  • Multiple destinations: Offer members the ability to publish media to multiple sites, as BlipTV does. See [Cross posting].
  • OM Publisher: Update Ourmedia Publisher, make it available to other sites for uploading items to Ourmedia.
  • Suspect files: Block uploading of rar and zip files (with carve-out exceptions for software and games?) and MSWMM files (which contain only links to the source videos someone created).
  • Uploads: There is a temporary nameserver issue preventing the server from completing certain tasks like upload files, import nodes, getimagesize, etc. A workaround is to get the IP for the hostname from ns1.archive.org and connect that way if the regular way fails. Gaurav has said to give it a shot, so Jeff will be implementing this soon.
  • Email upload. It could be easier for some user to sent a preformatted email with media attached. Navigating the site could be a pain if you don't have DSL and sending emails could allows more users to participate.

Media Players:

  • Flash conversion: Look into offering Flash as a secondary choice for all video files (QuickTime or Windows Media videos still don't always play on all platforms). Or even better something based on open standards.
  • Interactive Media Module (eg, Flash): Not sure what this is, ask Jeff K.

MediaRSS module:

  • Though the code is the identical, the image feed can take a very long time to load.
  • Caching of the feeds is also badly needed.
  • Work with Apple iTunes team to make the feeds itunes compatible as they have contacted us about the incomplete feeds.
  • RSS support: Add RSS feed links to media subcategory pages such as nature photos, new age music, etc.

Feature request (from www.ourmedia.org/user/43223): editing capabilities for the RSS feed.

It would be great to have e.g. a "videoclips" and/or a "3d animation" and/or a "democracy player" feed that people can subscribe to instead of the "all published media" feed... Could this be done via tags like media:video:*animation*...? At del.icio.us http://del.icio.us/tag/system:media:video lists all video items from all users...

IA Module:

  • We need better IA registration integration. Jeff had to add a fix to prevent duplicate accounts, since drupal doesn't check that.

Groups module:

  • Add alphabetical browsing as the list is starting to grow fairly large. Add number of current members.

Other Ideas (that haven’t been categorized yet):

  • Remix Central: Integrate a media remix module (which Creative Commons programmers are now finishing up) into Ourmedia, but also build it out to access public domain works, to expose the best remixes, etc.
  • Video and audio clipping service: If this is doable, work with developers so that people can quote from, annotate or link to the middle of a video or audio segment.
  • Translations: Translations of Ourmedia into different languages (already have had volunteers for Hungarian). Help from Drupal community as well?
  • Ecommerce/micropayments: Consider VeriSign proposal for ecommerce capabilities, or whether to set up a for-profit side to Ourmedia, or neither. Also, consider contextual text-link ads on some pages, a la Topix.net.
  • Thumbnail images for video RSS readers (participatoryculture.org offered to pay for this). See [Thumbnail images] for more.
Links:

Comments and discussion: