Hello World

Hi everybody,

My name is Ben and I am very happy to join this blog. I am also a designer/programmer (sometimes I feel there are too many of us in the world) but at least it’s fun… I am from Israel and I live in Tel-Aviv now, working freelance. I’ve been a while in Hamburg and worked in Fork, where I met Christophe and some of the rest of you… So hi!

To kick this off I would like to introduce a new project of mine, hope you find it interesting. It’s called ‘Autobiography of a City‘ and you can see it here. It is still a bit buggy and not much content is added yet, but hopefully soon it will be more interesting.

It’s basically an archive of videos made by people in Jaffa (an Arab city next to Tel Aviv) that document the history of the city as the residents themselves see it, and not as the mainstream media sees it. This difference in the point-of-view is especially important here, cause of the very painful history of that area.
The idea is to keep gathering the content from users, and it will be done by doing workshops in schools and social centers in Jaffa, and introducing people to the project but also to film-making and documentary in general, encouraging them to investigate their own families’ history.

Now for some cool-tech-stuff: When watching a video, whenever someone mentions a keyword in the interview, a list of all the other media in the archive that relate to that keyword pops up, and you can navigate through these lists, creating your own story within a story… at any point you can also save your track for future viewing (by other people too). It’s also tri-lingual with realtime subtitles to all three languages (a real pain in the ass since flash doesn’t support RTL languages) - I wonder how well it works on German machines (I would be happy to get feedback on this issue).

So anyway it’s still in development, not too many videos have been uploaded yet, but hopefully soon it will be better. This whole thing was more like a proof-of-concept, once they make a few workshops and get this whole process going we will probably do another round of design and development and make it into something better.

I guess thats all for now.