Last night, we pushed an exciting update to Zeega (photo of updating in action from our new storefront space!)

For those using the Alpha, you will need to update your bookmarklet. To do this, follow these simple steps:

1) Delete your current bookmarklet. In Chrome, you can do this via “Bookmarks Manager” under the bookmarks menu. In Safari, you can do this via “Show All Bookmarks” from the bookmarks menu.
2) Click “Add Media” from the Zeega header and drag a new bookmarklet to your bookmarks bar.

The main feature upgrades include:

New bookmarklet (aka “Add to Zeega”)

You can now add Flickr sets, Mapbox maps and YouTube channels. (For those interested in the code, the parser has now also been fully extracted as an independent entity).

New text layer

We realized this was a rough part of the tool, so we re-built it from scratch. It should work more smoothly and solve positioning and sizing issues, and set the stage for more advanced text options in the coming months (e.g. font choice, etc.)

General performance enhancements

We’ve performed a full-fledged re-factoring, which should result in better performance, and will make code updates and open-source contributions much easier to support.

Integration of popcorn.js

All of our time-based events are now running off Mozilla’s awesome popcorn.js library.

Upcoming updates

We will now begin pushing updates on a regular, biweekly basis. The next features you can anticipate in the coming weeks:

And in the coming month(s):

As always, if you have any questions, please be in touch!

We’re thrilled to welcome Andy Cavatorta as the newest member of Zeega’s core team! An MIT Media Lab alum, Andy has spent the past few years living in Brooklyn making musical robots for Björk. (See this recent Make: podcast for more on that). Beyond being a roboticist, Andy has a blackbelt in JavaScript/DOM/HTML5, has built custom servers of all kinds for about a decade, wrote experimental mapping software for the US Geospatial Intelligence Agency, and embedded systems for various museum exhibits. At Zeega, Andy will be working with the creative technology team to expand the core functionality of the editor and invent crazy, new, surprising layers.

Pejk Malinovski’s Passing Stranger: The East Village Poetry Walk has officially launched! We’ve been working with Pejk for over a year to imagine and design an immersive online experience to complement his incredible audio walking tour.

The project was recently featured in the New York Times and there will be a walking tour w/ Pejk and local poets on Sunday, April 15 at 4 pm at the Bowery Poetry Club.

We just moved into our new storefront studio space in the middle of Cambridge. As we’re sharing with others, planning on hosting events and engaging the community in other ways, we decided to create a general identity for the space. We settled on [ ] x [ ] (or square by square) to emphasize the space’s location right between Inman, Central, Harvard and Kendall Squares, and to indicate our desire to create a place for interconnecting the many makers and artists scattered throughout Boston’s squares.

To kick things off, we hosted a party for all of the producers and station representatives from across the country who came to Boston for AIR’s Public Media Lab to begin Localore. Photos below – YES! – that is a mobile brick oven on Broadway. Totally awesome. (thx posto).

I wrote this from an eerily warm Cambridge, saddened by the fact that I could not travel to Bristol for i-Docs. The group coming together was incredible, and while not physically present, I enjoyed following the conversation virtually. As a provocation, Mandy invited me to write a blog post on Zeega and I took this as an opportunity to begin some very cursory reflections on the relationships between our constantly evolving work on Zeega and some of the broader cultural questions percolating around documentary. Read Full Post >

During an event at Harvard’s Reischauer Institute of Japanese studies, the release of the alpha version of the Zeega-based Digital Archive of Japan’s 2011 Disasters was released. The site is still in production for a full public release in July, but the current version allows users to explore nearly 1 million records, from images to Tweets to archived websites to written testimonials, centered on an interface that couples a timeline and a map.

The launch of the site was covered in the Harvard Gazette.