Concrete5 a concrete CMS

    Heard about Concrete5 in a podcast from twit.tv called Floss Weekly [ FLOSS Weekly 239 ]. Am currently using Podax on Android to retrieve and listen to my podcasts and gPodder on my desktop to manage the shows I want. That's a hole other topic though so let's get back to how awesome Concrete5 is, and how they have successfully utilized Open Source and Creative Commons as the basis for their business model.

    Concrete5 is a content management system that is free and open source, made for marketing but built for geeks. Concrete5 was designed for ease of use, for users with minimum technical skill can still make beautiful pages. It enables users to edit site content directly from the page. It provides version management for every page, similar to wiki software, so any edits can be viewed and reverted back to, also allows users to edit images through an embedded editor on the page.

Mozilla Launches Popcorn Maker

    Popcorn Maker is an HTML5 web app for combining web media with images, text, maps, and other dynamic web content. Its appearance is unique, but not unfamiliar, providing a timeline-based video editing experience for the web. Once created, Popcorn Maker hosts remixes as simple HTML pages in the cloud, which can be shared or embedded in blogs or other sites. Furthermore, every remix provides a “Remix” button, allowing anyone watching to become a creator themselves by using the current remix as a base project for their own creation. This “view source” experience for web media is a key aspect of Popcorn Maker’s goals as part of the larger Mozilla Webmaker project.

    On a technical level, Popcorn Maker is the combination of a number of separate projects, each heavily influenced by the “12 factor” philosophy: a node.js-based web service called Cornfield; a JavaScript framework for creating highly-interactive web apps; and Popcorn.js, with a set of custom Popcorn.js plugins.


Watch one of the creators of Popcorn Maker explain the project


See an example in action


Make something with Popcorn Maker today: Popcorn Maker

More info about the code and development team and process

Repositories
https://github.com/mozilla/butter
https://github.com/mozilla/popcorn-js

Bug Tracker

https://webmademovies.lighthouseapp.com/projects/65733-butter/overview

ChronoZoom

    More and more open source projects are sprouting into existence, and they are not just software projects they are hardware and educational resources as well. The ChronoZoom project is an HTML5 piece of software but is more then that, it is a new way to browse, learn and contribute to a wealth of knowledge. Even though it runs o the Azure platform this looks like a cool project, hope it gains momentum quickly.

ars technica - ChronoZoom takes you through 14 billion years of space-time

Click this link to open chronozoom, at the top left corner there is a film-strip icon, click it to show the introduction tab and select with or without audio

http://www.chronozoomproject.org/  - if the link doesn't work in Internet Explorer (your version is out of date), it will work in google Chrome, as well as Firefox 10.x and up.

The code is hosted on codeplex @ http://chronozoom.codeplex.com/

    The project is described as "an open source community project dedicated to visualizing the history of everything to bridge the gap between the humanities and sciences using the story of Big History to easily understand all this information."

    "With ChronoZoom," Saekow told Ars, "you can browse history, rather than digging it out piece by piece. Also, today with [fewer and fewer] students visiting the library, the serendipity of browsing for a book and finding another is something we hope ChronoZoom can restore. If you don't know what to search for, it's almost like that topic never existed."

Now comes the time in the project's development where open source comes into its own.

    "We envision a world where scientists, researchers, students, and teachers collaborate through ChronoZoom to share information via data, tours, and insight," the ChronoZoom team writes. "Imagine a world where the leading academics publish their findings to the world in a manner that can easily be accessed and compared to other data. We will be focusing on community development of features, capabilities, and content."