The Otter Group is launching Swift, a podcast directory for conference organizers. Swift combines an iTunes-style directory system for managing large inventories of podcasts with peer-to-peer communication using web 2.0 services. Swift is integrated with flickr, Facebook, Wordpress. del.icio.us. and twitter so that users can manage photos, profiles and groups, blogging and tagging inside Swift using their accounts on these web 2.0 services. With Swift, podcast publishers can build powerful communities of interest and practice around expert podcasts

Swift solves significant problems for conferences organizers (publishers) and attendees (users): Swift provides a turnkey solution to conference organizers that allows them to upload and manage their growing content inventories into a simple, powerful directory system. Publishers can easily tag, categorize and publish their podcast content. Publishers can also use Swift to dynamically insert advertising messages from conference sponsors or other advertisers. Swift offers conference attendees a centralized resource to browse, search, and find podcast content of interest to them. Users can also register with Swift (providing lead generation to organizers) in order to add their own content, such as tags, ratings, and commentary to conference podcasts.

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Swift has been designed to be the web 2.0 solution for conference publishers and participants. Swift enables users to access material through they key functions: Find, Feature and Share.

 

Find

• Swift enables users to browse content across key parameters like highlights, most popular, newest, speakers schedule, and track.

• Swift uses a del.icio.us tag cloud to create paths to content.

• Swift organizes content based on user roles and interests. A CIO may be directed to one set of content in Swift, while a software engineer may find a different set.

• Of course, Swift also has full text search and RSS feed creation for subsets of information inside Swift.

Feature

• Swift enables organizers to publish featured videos to their “conference home page.” Users can cycle through video choices with one click.

• Swift also previews information found on the item page for each podcast.

Share

• Swift really rocks when it comes to integrating web 2.0 services in order to create peer-to-peer communities of interest and practice around events and expert content. The integration of Flickr, del.icio.us, facebook, twitter, and blogging transforms Swift into *the* web 2.0 service for conferences.

Blogging

Swift fully integrates a blog into its user interface. The blog supports a continuous conversation about the conference.

Flickr

Swift integrates flickr so that conference participants can publish their images and have Swift aggregate them into a unified view.

Twitter

Swift integrates twitter for social networking and SMS communication at the conference.

Facebook

Swift incorporates Facebook to manage user profiles, social networking, and groups. Facebook can also provide the foundation for a registration system for Swift-enabled conferences so that people can see which conferences their colleagues are attending and make decisions about registration based on activity in their Facebook networks.

Swift API’s
The Swift Platform is built on the notion that robust web services can provide users with better features and functionality than proprietary services. Swift interacts with web services by using their APIs. An application programming interface (API) is a source code interface that a computer system or program library provides to support requests for services to be made of it by a computer program. So rather than write a profiling system, Swift takes advantage of the Facebook API and allows registered Facebook users to add their profiles to a Swift conference or community, as well as to promote their own participation in a Swift conference to their Facebook network. The Facebook API tightly integrates Swift with the Facebook user experience and database of user and activity information. Facebook provides Swift with a highly viral distribution engine that enables Facebook users to inform everyone in their network of their participation in Swift-enabled conferences and communities. With one click, people in the network can join Swift. Through Facebook Swift integrates into an environment with 24 million active users. Fifty percent of active users return to the site daily. 100,000 new users join per day. 45 billion page views per month and growing. 50 million users, and a lot more page views, predicted by the end of 2007.

In addition to Facebook, Swift incorporates APIs for media mangement, ad management, speaker support, blogging, reporting and text messaging.

Here is an overview of the API list integrated into Swift:

Media Management

• Upload media to servers; add title, notes, tags.
• Publish media to Swift - includes conversion to flash player.
• Publish media to rss feed for addition to itunes

Ad Management

• Upload intro, outro, ads
• Define parameters of ad run

Reporting - via Feedburner and Google Analytics

• Downloads
• Bandwidth usage
• Page traffic

Blogging via Wordpress

• Provision blog for each conference

Speaker Support via Flickr

• Speakers upload slides to flickr slide show
• Publish slide show to item page
• User add photos to conference page

Speaker references via Del.icio.us

• Speaker’s talk references to items
• Shared conference tags

SMS via Twitter

• Create twitter for conference
• Post to twitter from Swift conference page

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