At CamViNe, our CODA system lets us put ‘albums’ of visual information onto an arbitrary number of ethernet-connected screens – we have several around the office.
We often use this for simple photo slideshows, but increasingly we want to display dynamically-generated information sourced from the web, so we created the CODA Markup Language (CML) which is easy to generate and produces beautiful antialised output for whatever information is currently of interest:
One thing the system can do is take RSS feeds and convert them to CML, so we have an ‘album’ of our favourite blogs and newspaper headlines on one of our displays. But in the last week or so everybody’s been talking about Facebook, so I signed one of my screens up to the status feed of my Facebook friends. Ta-da! An instant way to keep in touch with what my pals are up to.
This is fun stuff. Perhaps it’s the modern equivalent of having a pinboard with holiday postcards and change-of-address cards stuck to it…
RSS feed
Very cool.
(Am I the only one who can still read through the blur? 😉 )
Ah, CF – I always knew you were a clear-sighted individual!
Have blurred the names a little more to protect the innocent.