Common Craft's Cool RSS Video and Portable Media Devices

At the TCC 2007 Online Conference in April there was a session about one institution's use of "enhanced podcasts"--audio podcasts w/ ppts of visual models relevant to the audio content. One of the issues discussed was screen design and display challenges on smaller portable media players.

I was reminded of their discussion this week when I came across LeFever's delightful video about RSS feeds(referenced by both Robin Goode and Stephen Downe's blogs).

Click To Play

"There are two types of Internet users, those that use RSS and those that don't. This video is for the people who could save time using RSS, but don't know where to start."

I placed the cool 3.5 video on a couple blogs (View it above), but wondered how this video would show on a small screen of a portable media player (Ipod, Sansa). So I saved it to .wmv on my desktop and then moved it to may Sansa. Well my portable media play has a 1.5" by 1.5" screen. This particular session didn't do too bad, considering.

Screens w/ a bunch of print displayed poorly. I think this one would have done well on a larger display model, however.

While really good visuals complement rather than repeat text or audio content, more complex models may still be problematic for portables at this point.

I can think of something like art slides, or flashcard type screens as workable screen choices.

BTW: This video came from BlinkTV. The viewer can choose the video format for viewing. While the selection doesn't make a difference for posting to a blog, it made a difference for downloading the link from emailto a specific machine, and would make the difference for saving to Itunes/Ipod or Sansa.