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.

We recently completed a massive web site project for Australian United States Services in Education, or AUSSIE for short. AUSSIE is a New York based educational consulting company, with hundreds of consultants providing professional development services to schools around the country. AUSSIE’s old web site was a poor reflection of their forward-thinking and technologically-savvy work, so they hired us to help them build a new one.

The new site is powered by Drupal, our favorite content management platform, so AUSSIE has the power to do all of the day-to-day content and site management on their own. The site features blogs that will be available to all of their consultants, including audio and video content that will be streamed from the site and available in podcast form. The site uses SSL to encrypt the transfer of sensitive information like passwords, and ties in to AUSSIE’s event management service at eventbrite.com and PayPal account to handle online sales of their Teaching Comprehension CD ROM. Generally, the site provides AUSSIE the tools to meaningfully engage their huge educational community online.

On the the “front end” of the site, we worked with the graphic design supplied by an in-house designer to build a custom Drupal theme. The theme provides an engaging, attractive, and easy-to-use interface to the site, and of course it features code that’s semantic, valid, and optimized for search engines!

Lastly, importantly, we are providing thorough documentation and ongoing consultation to AUSSIE on how to use the site. We are excited to continue working with AUSSIE, both here at Dtek and at The Media Spot, where we are consulting with them on classroom technology integration. Check out the new aussiepd.com!

The Generation Connection is an action-packed Gainesville Florida-based summer camp that connects youth with senior mentors. Before the 5th annual camp last week we launched a big, bold, and beautiful new web site for TGC.

A fixture of each year’s camp is video production with the kids by The Media Spot. Have a look at our blog post on themediaspot.org to read about that. And of course be sure to watch all of the new "Clip of the Day" videos at thegenerationconnection.com!

We pride ourselves on getting to know our clients, and The Atlanta School shows why — TAS is full of great folks and fantastic educators that have been friends and colleagues for many years. But rebuilding TAS’ web site at theatlantaschool.com was special to us for another reason: the old web site was the very first that Rhys and I ever built together, back in 1999! Then known as DPC Productions, we poured a lot of heart into the site, if it was certainly showing its age by 2007…

The new site sports a gorgeous, fluid design that of course highlights the creative energy of the students. It has an integrated blog, powered by WordPress, and colorful galleries of artwork, photos, and videos.

The Atlanta School is also where The Media Spot got its start — Rhys made his very first collaborative videos with TAS students. Check them out in the Video Gallery!

We’ll always be grateful for the creative support from the folks at The Atlanta School that helped us get started. We hope their new web site serves them well!

EDIT: Belated thanks to TAS for the kind words on their own blog.

We have completely overhauled the website of Dtek All-Star and portfolio favorite, Oso Industries! Check out the new site with all of the old standards and videos, as well as slick new custom installations, furniture, additions to his furniture line, and more.

We created a photo-driven layout with a pool of background images that show off the texture of Oso’s troweled concrete surfaces. And site maintenance is simple… Oso can add new furniture, custom work, press, and videos in a couple of quick steps.