AJAX Feed API Slide Show Enhancements

I was at Google Developer Day last week and ran into an old friend and blogger, Robert Scoble, VP Media Development at PodTech. Robert and I were discussing how the AJAX Feed API could be used to engage customers more deeply. During this conversation, we discussed the characteristics of the feeds produced by PodTech. It turns out that each entry contains a photo associated with the article, an audio or video stream, as well as text based content and related meta data.




I told Robert that I would crank out some minor changes to our Slide Show Control over the weekend and then build out a little sample and gadget that would allow PodTech to tell their story on any web site.




A few minutes ago, we upgraded the Slide Show Control with a few callbacks that let you hook slide transitions, clicks, etc. This lets you wrap the control with code of your own like we have done in the sample that follows. This sample lets you in effect "watch" a PodTech feed, see the hyperlinked title of the story, the author, the published date, and, without leaving the page you can click on the image and play the associated audio or video stream. See below:

Those of you telling a story through your feeds might want to consider a model similar to the PodTech approach where every entry in every feed has a primary image reference, a primary media reference, as well as text based meta data and primary content. If you are a developer, you can read more about the Slide Show Control here. Or you can go right to the source of the sample...




As always, let us know what you think in the Google AJAX API developer forum.