Dare Obasanjo: We have a similar problem when importing arbitrary RSS/Atom feeds onto a user’s profile in Windows Live ... What I like about the first draft of Atom media extensions is that it is focused on the basic case of syndicating audio, video and image for use in activity streams ... The interesting question is how to get the photo sites out there to adopt consistent standards in this space?
If I may be so bold as to make a humble suggestion: implement them. Demonstrate the value. If WindowsLive, YouTube, and FriendFeed could join in on the discussion, this would be a slam dunk. Others would quickly follow.
If I may be so bold as to make a humble suggestion: implement them.
Of course, we likely won’t implement a standard that no one supports yet for a variety of reasons (opportunity cost, no real world testing, experience shows standard will be in flux until multiple implementations show up, etc).
If WindowsLive, YouTube, and FriendFeed could join in on the discussion, this would be a slam dunk. Others would quickly follow.
On the other hand, I’d love to be part of a discussion where we start formalizing some of these idioms. I know there is some insider clique thing going on at [link] but I haven’t seen any public statements about who is participating in the effort or any concrete specs come out of it yet.
we likely won’t implement a standard that no one supports yet
It still is a valid answer to the question you posed.
some insider clique thing
It is an open mailing list. Martin is hardly an insider. Would you consider James Holderness to be one?
I guess you didn’t follow my link. I linked to http://groups.google.com/group/activity-streams which is a closed list.
anyway, I’m already on atom-syntax and just started catching up on mail threads there. I didn’t realize that I already had these discussions in my inbox since I found Martin’s work via blogs. :)
I guess you didn’t follow my link
You are correct, I did not. I don’t know how active that list is, as I’m not an “insider” either, nor do I wish to become one.
It looks like the list is now publicly viewable.
Membership appears to be moderated primarily for spam control reasons.
I was on my iPhone when I posted that last comment, and I expanded my reasons for the group moderation in this post to the mailing list:
My intentions are not to keep anyone out (in fact, everyone who has explained their interest has been admitted to the group) — only to keep the group on topic and to welcome folks to the list.
I used the same process on the OAuth list when it was first starting out and I think it made a big difference in the quality of the discourse.
Once we gained momentum with OAuth, we moved to an open, first-post moderation model. It means that anyone can join, but your first post is moderated (to prevent spam — of which we get a lot once we get going!). I imagine we’ll do the same thing with this list once we hit critical mass; for now, given my experience, it still needs to be nurtured into a healthy, self-regulating community.
Robert,
I assume that ogg does not require anything special beyond any other container format, in which case the simplest case is just a normal Atom enclosure with a media type of “application/ogg” or some other supported type. If that works in Firefox today then it already has support for AtomMedia.
One outstanding issue, which I’d like to think is outside of the scope of this spec, is how to determine what codecs are used in a container format. In the case of ogg my understanding is that in fact they intentionally do not describe the codecs used, and instead use sniffing to determine the codec, so presumably this is not as much of an issue for ogg as it is for avi; I’d be interested to know how this works out in practice, but ogg isn’t really my area of expertise.
I think maybe somebody needs to write a good media-activity-stream verification engine.
Because right now, my gauge for if I’ve correctly implemented media syndication support is if FriendFeed will parse it....