The metavid interface is coming along nicely. You can preview the bleeding edge version. If you want it not to crash as much I recommend the “stable” version which in the future should be more stable than the dev version;)

The interface was inspired by the web2.0ish sites such as protopage, PageFlakes, or live.com. The virtual windows are styled via css classes and the and the content in the “virtual windows” will be web service centric. In these services online participants are asked to supplement the context providers modules in the form of an easy to script api for making “Gadgets“, “flakes”, or “panels” or in the case of metavid: overlays. Except in metavid your collective participation will be owned by the collective you, not the context provider ;)… given the openness of our application you won’t be restricted to running your overlays in our system under our “brand” as long as you don’t restrict others to do the same

Our development will focus on base overlays for US senate and house session meta data, but it will be interesting to see how this all develops maybe some serious group of folks will get together and standardize a library for web service widgets taking the form of a realtime scriptable wiki for shared versioned virtual desktop spaces..
The design is still being fleshed out but the basic elements are there. We used transparent png for arbitrary background drop shadows and a good set of creative commons icons for window operations but we could certainly use some more icons to flesh out the control structure for the core overlays, for example the video controls could use larger start and play button and things like “add this video to sequence” could be icons not text;)

The javascript still needs to be cleaned up I started with a somewhat dated script from “howtocreate.co.uk” but now that its been restructured to work with divs css classes and ajax updates I might as well rewrite some of the stacking functions as well as they don’t seem to be jiving well with the ajax state updates.

While were on the subject of ajax state updates lets consider what this will facilitate. Having the server set the overlays states should allow for shared “overlay” spaces. Meaning participants will be able to set conditions for who can see or edit their overlay set allowing for collaborative overlay set development and easy sharing of a particular mediation set. This is similar to the idea hinted at above and its definitely on the todo list