With 2011 just round the corner, we take a quick look back at the year in which Sourcefabric launched a new chapter after a decade of commitment to quality journalism and open source software. We also map out some of the exciting future plans for the next 12 months.
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2011 will barely have begun before seeing some major Sourcefabric action. January 17th will witness the launch of our next generation of tools for digital and broadcast journalism. We're keeping the exact details a secret, but sign up to our forums (http://forum.sourcefabric.org) and you'll see all sorts of activity as we gather feedback and ideas ready for the big launch.
We've spent most of 2010 meeting the people who use our software and work in our field in order to prioritise the features they want in a 21st century media environment. In January we'll have taken a huge step towards providing journalists with the professional, powerful and flexible software they need to do their jobs.
Congratulations should go out to our friends Resonance FM (www.resonancefm.com) who have just been awarded the Radio Academy’s Nations & Regions Award for London. We've been working closely with Resonance FM to improve Campcaster and build the radio playout and automation system of the future and look forward to a continued partnership in the new year. We're also proud to have been working with the free radio associations of Switzerland, Germany and Austria. Their tireless and innovative approaches to independent radio were further strengthened by the launch of the Cultural Broadcasting Archive (http://cba.fro.at) which is a great example of software working to make generating quality radio content easier than ever.
...to be followed by the New Year’s present shower in January is a Release Candidate 1 version of Campsite 3.5, our open source, free and multilingual enterprise publishing system for news websites. The new features in this release include:
… and many more. To get more information on this release and how to test it please follow this link: http://links.sourcefabric.org/cs-3.5-rc1
Douglas Arellanes, Sourcefabric Director of Clients and Services will be publishing a series of blog posts in the coming weeks, outlining the major features in the Campsite 3.5 release from a strategy and management perspective.
The first of the posts will be dealing with Campsite's new mapping features and why it's a bad idea for publishers to simply pass their geolocation information to Google for free. Here a preview of what Doug has to say:
"Publishers may be making a strategic mistake when they hand over their points of interest (the term for those dots on a map) to a third party (like Google). They may be cutting themselves off from future revenue opportunities. It will be harder to monetize that information, as Google and its competitors will likely be doing the monetizing instead. We believe that mobile content represents a major revenue opportunity for publishers, and that location-based information is one of the keys to mobile revenue."
Visit our site or follow our twitter feed to be the first to read the full post.
Finally, a huge thanks to everyone who been involved this year. Pop a bottle of bubbly! Your input and feedback has been amazing. Without the enthusiasm and talent displayed by our partners, staff, supporters and agile community of users, testers, translators and documentors we would not have progressed at this remarkable rate. We can't wait for 2011.... watch this space!
Work is being done on the redesign of the Campsite admin interface. We have a couple of interesting opinions on the first sketches in our forum. The new design is the latest scoop in a long series of improvements in Campsite’s usability and consistency.
Campcaster is undergoing massive heart surgery and will be released early 2011 with a scheduler based on Liquidsoap. First testing has been providing awesome results. Currently there is “no” skin on the development version of Campcaster, it really looks like Craigslist. But it works. On air, on time.
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