Australian Story Online - The first of many

Those who pay regular attention to KingLeonard - The Weblog will realise that things have been quite quiet of late. This has been as a result of;

• Two Weeks Holiday


• A superior workload upon returning to the job

And the first fruits of this week of work has paid off! Tonight we posted the first of what will hopefully be an ongoing series of Australian Story Broadband editions, including the entire program, extended interviews and Producer's notes.

Australian Story - One Perfect Day

I mentioned at the end of last year that we were working on this, and I made particular note of its importance, not from a viewer experience or as an enabler of "folksonomic interactivity", but from the publishing aspect. Well, while this episode has actually been quite a bitch to get done (albeit only taking a day or two from our end), the system is slowly being put into place to automate and streamline the process even further. Flash video plugins for our automated compression system are on order and further tweaks are being made to the ABC's publishing software. The issue here is to create a system that allows other program producers to create ongoing extended editions to allow viewers the opportunity to not only view the entire program at their leisure, but also see extra bits that just can't make it into the show due to the inherent shortcomings of scheduled content. By making this as simple and easy as possible it opens up all sorts of opportunities for these programs to get involved rather than be scared away by the prospect of "compression" and "servers".

Anyway, I took a few pictures to mark the occasion and here they are.

The "Fishbowl" - home of the Brains Trust.

Jessica Daly - She's the one looking after all the content. You can see Jess' small
screen debut at the start of the McInnes Pilot we produced late last year.

Tim Madden - Design Guru and all round genius,
telling his wife he's going to be home late.

Tim making sure the site is running before it goes live.

What better way to celebrate than wood fired pizzas.
"Ooh! Exotic Potato!"

I should mention, that guy with his back to the camera is
Martin Southgate, driving force behind the project
and uber-producer.

Martin and Jess check the site once it's live. Despite some misgivings from
certain southern naysayers, the Flash Server held its own through the peak
period following the show.

Jess "capturing the moment"

Martin and Tim checking the site through our "Off-Air" computer,
in the heart of the News Online offices.

The idea is that this computer shows us what people are seeing in their
homes and offices, beyond the boundaries of our proxy server.

So all in all a bit of a win. I'll be interested to hear feedback, which will no doubt begin tomorrow, but I think we did all right. Once again, kudos must go to Martin, Jess and Tim who have driven this project forward. Once it's fully operational I can see this being the start of big things for the future of the Corp online.