PubForge Blog

Inspired by the WNYC’s flash player (or other xspf players) we were able to implement a flash slideshow player across all of the stories at KJZZ.org like the slideshow from this report on the Titan Missle Museum .

Unlike a program like SoundSlides, you can easily implement this player on the server side. You do not need to have software on the desktop to build the slideshow.

To do this, we used the XML Flash Slideshow program from flashnifties.com :

http://www.flashnifties.com/xml_slideshow.php

You can purchase this for $10, or they also have a free version.

While it’s not as integrated with the actual story, as described in the the Transom interview with Ben Shapiro here:

http://transom.org/guests/review/200706_ben_shapiro/

And while it is similar to the “Sound Slides” flash slideshow player

http://soundslides.com/

which NPR uses in any of the stories listed here:

http://www.npr.org/search.php?text=%22Audio+Slideshow%22

I think this will prove to be a useful tool for creating flash slideshows.

Tell me, what do you think? Is this merely a stop-gap technology towards creating videos?

What about the viral possibilities of this? Any ideas about the possibility of turning something like this into a “Slideshow Widget” to allow people to place on myspace or blogs?

What about the impact that this has on the page design? While I think it’s important to a photo with each story (which could also be distributed as part of an RSS feed) along with additional links, etc., how much do we place on a page? And how might this all be brought together into a more coherent whole?

Tell me, does anyone else have any experience with putting together a Slideshow using flash? What can you add to the discussion about your experiences?

Tags: PubForge, OpensourceBroadcasting, BeyondBroadcast