At the Crossroads of Web and Interactive Multimedia: An Approach to Merge the Two Realms

Multimedia and Web 2.0 can meet up. Despite the success they have obtained in last years, these two domains present some important limitations. In particular, current Web 2.0 based technologies, such as wikis, blogs, podcasts, commonly resort to sequential combinations of contents, rather than exploiting dynamic and synchronized compositions of discrete and continuous media resources. On the other hand, tools for multimedia content authoring and distribution usually lack cooperativeness, interactivity, use of adequate metatagging structures and application mash-up. This paper discusses how by merging these two worlds it is possible to inherit the advantages while removing their limitations. We describe a system exemplar we developed for the cooperative creation, manipulation and sharing of rich media contents.