New Media Notes

I’ll answer that. I think I should gain some web programming skills. But what?

Flash/Action-script? That would come in handy to produce some slick multilmedia packages like this one.

Drupal/Django/Joomla/Ruby on Rails? This would help in developing a custom CMS or a slick community calendar app. But it looks like that is time and programming intensive. Maybe a bit over my head. Definitely intimidating.

PHP? That would help us customize and tweak Wordpress plus if I add some XML in there we could do some database driven stuff.

I hate being in the position where I see a great web app and not being able to duplicate it or tweak it or customize it. For instance all the great APIs out there made available by Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc. As a news organization we do not have the personnel to do much of any of this. And we mostly likely will never have the staff to do it. So I feel like it’s up to me and in addition I develop a bigger skill set that will make me a more valuable employee/freelancer/entrepreneur.

Or should I just stick to content creation via video. Maybe I need to just expand my FCP skills. I admit my FCP skills are pretty limited - color correction is a big weakness. What to do? What to learn. My time is so very limited between work and family. I need to be prudent with what I pursue. What would you suggest?

I mean, what skills do I need to build something like this video player that lets you navigate to a part of a video by picking a spot on a transcript?