"OK, you got chops, now get out of the way of the content... "

Brooklyn Revealed is an innovative history website that uses Flash to allow visitors to interactively explore a collection of historic photos on an attractive map interface. Which is why some people hate it.

The Metafilter discussion is really valuable in pointing out some of the big problems with Flash presentations, which boil down to the ways that Flash defines the user experience and limits true interactivity with a site. On Flash sites it can be difficult to download or make direct links to individual items. On the other hand you can get an exciting site with dancing colors and so on, so long as you do not try to actually do anything with those dancing images. As one Metafilter commenter wrote: "All of the natural web browser functions -- text searching, bookmarking, stepped navigation -- are essentially turned off in a Flash environment and must be either re-engaged or accounted for in other ways." To be fair Brooklyn Revealed does restore some functions. The Flash popups of the images include a link to static URL for each picture, and you can browse sequentially with the arrow keys, But it is still a crippled presentation compared to many other sites on the web.

See also my post, Flash Over Content: The National Archives Experience.

Webcasts from the Library of Congress

The Library of Congress is the topic of a series of posts that I will make this week. The topic today: this rich selection of webcasts of LOC lectures and other public events. Categories include Biography, History, Performing Arts, Education, Government, World Affairs, Literature, Religion and Science. I am watching this panel: "Indian Religious Freedom, to Litigate or Legislate?" right now. Other intriguing titles include End of European Colonial Empires, Robert E. Lee, and 1507 Waldseemuller World Map. There are hundreds more!

Sadly the implementation of the webcasts is not what it could be. They are presented in the odious Realplayer format. (What is wrong with RealPlayer? Well PC Magazine listed it as #2 in their article "The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time.") An unfortunate side effect of the choice to use Realplayer is that you can't easily download the webcasts onto a portable device for later viewing--you have to watch them online, at your computer. (There are of course ways around this.) These programs were put on at the taxpayers' expense and are free of copyright, we should be able to download them if we like. There are no interactive features, we can't leave comments at the webcast pages. And it is not possible to insert the webcasts into a blog or webpage, as I so often do with YouTube videos on this blog.

I am delighted by the wealth of material in these webcasts, but wish they had presented them differently. I wonder why the LOC didn't just get a YouTube channel?