Many of the folks we work with want to display video on their web sites. Hosting video on their own web servers has some obvious advantages in terms of control, but is often too resource-intensive and expensive. That’s when existing video hosting providers come into play.

Unfortunately, this is a great example of where it’s easy to follow the trends without considering some of the bigger implications, like the way our content is licensed, whether we want X company to profit off of our content, and generally what type of network we want to build as a community.

A friend recently pointed us to a post on wordpress.com entitled: Owned? Legal terms of video hosting services compared. It’s a great starting point for considering the privacy/licensing, ownership, and legal complaint recourse terms of the various big name video hosts out there.

Kudos to the article author, and here’s to all of us raising our collective awareness of these issues.

I had a great time at DrupalCampNYC6 today! I got in on sessions about mobile Drupal sites, the Token module, Drupal and the Semantic Web, and mapping and geocoding in Drupal.

It’s fun to get together with fellow geek open source developers and share experiences about our favorite content management system. It’s also excellent to start putting faces and real people with folks I’ve only interacted with digitally. Too bad we can’t make it to DrupalCon DC.

Many thanks to the event sponsors, all the session presenters, and Eric at OpenFlows and all the other volunteers who organized the event.

[EDIT 3/2: Check out the write-up in today's NY Times!]

The Drupal content management platform is a favorite tool of ours here at Dtek. The Drupal community continues to grow, and Drupal is powering more and more web sites out there. A few sites of particular interest to me personally have caught my eye recently:

• President Obama’s Official Stimulus and Economic Recovery web site (and write-up by Drupal project lead, Dries Buytaert)
• Human Rights Watch (and write-up by Drupal project lead, Dries Buytaert)
• World Food Programme (and write-up by Drupal project lead, Dries Buytaert)
• Mother Jones (and write-up by Drupal project lead, Dries Buytaert)
• Google’s Measurement Lab (and write-up by Drupal project lead, Dries Buytaert)
• Al Jazeera Creative Commons repository of video footage from the recent Gaza violence (and write-up by Drupal rockstar Robert Douglass)
• bobdylan.com
• And last but not least, Rhys and my alma mater, Washington University in St. Louis

We love Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) here at Dtek, and since it powers virtually everything we do, it’s crucial to our clients, too. But we don’t often have the chance to discuss it with our community, so I thought I’d write up a bit more about it here.

In the office, we use FOSS everywhere from the WordPress blog software generating the web page you’re reading now, to the OpenOffice software we use to author documents on the desktop, to the entire GNU/Linux operating system that runs on our office computers. And of course the Firefox web browser I’m using to write this is FOSS, too! As far as the services we provide, we build our web sites on a FOSS platform: from the operating system to the web server, database server, and scripting languages.

FOSS represents an entirely new model of collaborative production made possible by the advent of computer networks, and the Internet in particular. Crucially, the “F” in FOSS stands for “free” as in speech, meaning that anyone is free to see how the software works, and modify it as they’d like. (The fact that most FOSS is also “free” as in beer is nice, too!) And that’s exactly how it works: people all over the globe contribute to the development of FOSS, often making small contributions piece by piece. But the resulting software, as my examples above illustrate, can be excellent — rivaling and often surpassing similar projects produced in the more familiar, proprietary/closed manner.

It can be hard to wrap your mind around this idea and its implications at first, but it’s fascinating stuff and at the heart of our new economy and culture. At Dtek, it directly informs our professional ethos and fits our personal convictions, too. Ask us more about FOSS the next time we work together! And if you’re interested, here’s some additional reading we’d recommend:

• The Free Software Definition from the GNU Project, and the Free Software Foundation
• Open Source Initiative
• And for you economists out there, The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler

Standardista and web development community leader Molly Holzschlag pointed me to the “very awesome iJustine”, who posted this hilarious rap by m0serious about standards-based web design. User interface tips, semantics, accessibility — it’s all there! Perfect for nerds and gangsters alike… Molly and iJustine’s posts are complete with transcript, so educate yourself