‘Tis the season….You’ve made your lists, checked them twice. You’ve crossed off all your to-dos. You’ve been nicer than naughty. In short, you done everything you were supposed to do this past year. So it’s time to reward yourself. Celebrate your restraint instead! Tell the whole world all the things you didn’t do that you’re proud of.

Introducing Tierra’s iDidn’t app, a first of a kind mobile lifestyle application dedicated to recording and broadcasting your virtuosity to the world. Immortalize and customize all the bad habits you’ve avoided and then tell your friends on Facebook and Twitter, all from your iPhone. Your friends will never be more impressed with you.

Download iDidn’t in the App Store now for FREE and start sharing your incredible personal victories from the comfort of your own phone.

We also formally announced Tierra’s WordPress CMS Toolkit website at WordCamp.  As part of our commitment to releasing all the project code to the open-source community, we launched the Toolkit site to centralize all plugins, templates, and other support info about this project.  The Tookit takes WordPress way beyond blogging and lets you use it as a full-blown content management system (CMS).  Using our plugins and templates your organization can easily design and build scalable and flexible media-rich websites with the ease of use of WordPress.

In addition to what’s there now, more plugins and code will be posted soon.   Dozens of WNET.ORG and other organizations have already taken advantage of the plugins for their sites.  We hope you find it useful and look forward to hearing your feedback about it.

Tierra customized WordPress as a CMS to make Online Publishing
more Efficient.

During the past year Tierra and WNET.ORG (PBS Channel Thirteen in New York) collaborated on a groundbreaking project that cut WNET.ORG’s costs, streamlined their web publishing process and improved the user experience on many of their individual program sites. At the heart of our solution was WordPress Multi-User, an open source blogging platform.

Publishing a dynamic website with frequent content updates is a must for many businesses these days. But this is easier said than done. There are a multitude of considerations, technical hurdles and business or marketing objectives that play into every website project. If you’ve ever created or managed a relatively complex website, you know what I mean. Now imagine that times 50.

That’s basically the challenge that WNET.ORG (PBS Channel Thirteen in New York) brought to Tierra this past year: Design and build a website platform that can scale to support the dozens of websites that WNET creates and publishes every year. And provide a single content management system (CMS) that lets anyone—from the most competent programmer to the most technically averse writer or editor—easily log in and publish on any one of those sites with very little support.

Tierra helped lay the foundation for a significantly streamlined publishing operation for WNET’s interactive group, from a careful discovery of technical platforms and design requirements, to information architecture, to migrating a decade’s worth of web content, to finally customizing WordPress Multi-User as a CMS. The new platform and tools let WNET.ORG focus on their core competency:  creating innovative and compelling educational content to support its on-air programming and extending it across the web.

The case study below describes in detail what WNET.ORG and Tierra accomplished with the project, how we went about it, and what the benefits have been for our client.  We also discuss how we customized WordPress Multi-User and some unique contributions we’ve made to this leading open-source software platform. We welcome your feedback and would be delighted to discuss our work with you.

Download the Case Study (PDF 2.6 MB)

Vote! Vote! The public’s answer may surprise you…

November 4-6, 2008 @ ~8pm

Click here to view the embedded video.

Have I or would I ever imagine myself dancing around in a Nico Nico Douga video clip? Not exactly. But life seems to imitate technology there and and technology imitates life. How refreshing. How unsettling.

Nico Nico Douga is old hat in internet time (1 year plus and already one of Japan’s most popular) and there are probably millions of people who think this is a completely normal way of interacting with technology and other people. I love learning languages and I love new technologies, but I’m a newbie here. Its fascinating to poke around a site I cannot read and very quickly understand how it works and what makes it so absorbing. There people are, dancing around on screen. And here I am writing on top of their dancing, or adding images and engaging in a conversation with other people doing the same. And it all happens in real time or in the past. You choose. People act out their inner rock star or anime character or whatever, and post it, and then we chat about it on the video. The conversation stays there and keeps growing until people move on to the next one.

Another useless website? Interactive graffiti? Political dialogue of the future? Who is singing for who?

Instructions on how to Register (if you don’t read kanji, like me, you can try using Google Translate as well). Too shy for virtual karaoke/chat/video? Read the recent article about Nico Nico Douga in Wired to find out what it’s all about.

Uma, uma, uma.

People have no problem sitting back and watching hours of programming on the web. Witness the sudden rise of Hulu over the past several months to become the number one online television viewing channel, already ahead of the TV network websites that have been broadcasting television and web video for years:

Great news for our business (more work!), but nothing new about this trend in general for anyone who’s spent hours combing YouTube for the latest cat trick clips. What is new is that there is a new player, a new streaming method, a new plugin, a new overlay format, a new subclipping feature, etc. every week it seems.

This may sound obvious, but I wonder whether any of these things really matters. At some point, web video technology and functionality will find some equilibrium point in terms of how it works, what it does, how ads are served. When that happens, these things need to become universal for web video to become a viable and self-sustaining advertising medium.

And when that happens, it’s the message that will count. I don’t remember what kind of television I was watching when I watched the most exciting hockey game ever – the USA-USSR Miracle on Ice at the Lake Placid Olympics in 1980.

Click here to view the embedded video.

But I sure do remember watching it. Ditto with the Challenger space shuttle disaster, the Chinese protesters facing down tanks in Tienanmen Square, and 9/11 among countless other video experiences, including advertising. (Admit it: you choked up a bit too if you are old enough to have watched those AT&T phone home commercials).  At some point, we won’t remember whether we watched something on a flat-screen TV, a laptop, an iPhone, “Surface” table, or something else.  But our memory of the content will persist.

Web video is about the the message it conveys, not the way it does it. We’ll continue to obsess over the latest development technique or player, or format, but it’s the production value of the content that counts now and in the future. Someone, somewhere will remember that stupid cat video long after we forget about YouTube.