Saturday, September 10, 2005

Aggregating (not aggravating) television news I've been enjoying the Fireant video player since its first release, when it was just called ANT (standing for "Ant's Not Television"). I also found the developers extremely responsive to comments I sent them about the first version, so maybe I'm biased... Today, Unmediated has an update on a new version of this video-feed "aggregator" that I haven't seen yet, and passing on the latest screen shots. Here's one of them: Screenshot: Fireant for Mac OS X Unmediated: Get Fireant: Find and Watch Video on the Web. Fireant's own Web address is not fireant.com, since enemies of a nasty insect got there first. Instead, you'll find "Ant is Not TV" at the amusingly ambiguous http://www.antisnottv.net, or at http://getfireant.com. (We'll know Fireant is a major success when some adolescent goes wild with a parody site at "prosnottv.net.") Fireant is available for both Mac OS-X and Windows XP. The program lets you subscribe to syndicated Web videos, such as the daily Rocketboom (not your grandpa's newscast) video blog shown above and the other sources in its "channels" column. And, no, I'm not grabbing that particular image from unmediated just because I want Amanda Congdon's smiling face on my blog. It also illustrates another of Fireant's (and Rocketboom's) features that I like: See the blue text under her picture? Not only does Fireant pick up the video, it passes along the text links that appear under each blog entry at the Rocketboom home site, so you can follow those links to the sites or sources Amanda is talking about that day. That would be a great tool for a video reporter who wants to give viewers access to material that works better as text -- a copy of the school budget, the agenda for a city meeting, or the full listing of contributors to a Katrina relief project. (I don't know how many video blogs benefit from this very webby feature, but Rocketboom and Fireant certainly go well together. In fact, their creators are old friends.) In another bloglike feature, Fireant says it now allows you to post comments back to the videobloggers whose video you're watching. Disclaimer: I haven't tried these new Fireants myself. I'm posting this from home, where I only have a dial-up connection. My own trials will have to wait until I'm back in the higher-bandwidth office. When I get there, I also plan to see whether any professional TV news sites have started putting clips in a Fireant-compatible RSS feed, then report back here. If you find any before I do, let me know! Showing a bunch of news videos through one interface in the classroom would be very useful when my students get around to broadcast news writing next month. So, back to second-hand info from unmediated: Its mini-review says the new Fireant plays all four major Web video formats, Quicktime, Windows Media, Flash and Real. Like iPodder and other podcasting programs, it also can feed downloaded files to portable media players, if you have one that plays video. And it uses Yahoo! video search to find you more stuff to watch. Footnote: If all this podcasting and videoblogging stuff is new to you, here's my quickly-aging overview page. 12:37:34 PM    comment []

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