Aman Ali, Bassam Tariq, and filmmaker Musa Syeed discuss a web strategy for their documentary during a hack day at Mozilla's office in San Francisco.
SAN FRANCISCO — Filmmakers and coders hunkered down for two days of creative collaboration here during a first-of-its-kind hackathon that explored the future of web video — specifically Popcorn.js, Mozilla’s HTML5 media toolkit designed to amp up interactivity.
“We always talk about this idea of how in the future, filmmakers will need a technology partner almost the way they need an editor today,” said Matthew Meschery, the director of digital initiatives at Independent Television Service. “So there’s kind of this social experiment around collaborating with a coder or technologist … This was an opportunity to put this into practice.”
On one such team: Steve James, the acclaimed director of Hoop Dreams, who brought his raw new documentary The Interrupters, about former gang members and ex-cons who try to stop violence in their neighborhoods. During the two-day event at Mozilla’s new digs in the Hills Bros. Coffee building, James worked with coder Rick Waldron and Anton Seals Jr., a Chicago community organizer who conceived of the interactive experience they’re building to augment the film.
Such nontraditional working groups are part and parcel of the Living Docs Project, a joint initiative from Mozilla and the Independent Television Service that offers a glimpse of how filmmakers could harness the internet to expand their creations in unforeseen ways.
Popcorn.js, which few outside the web-development world have ever heard of, could be the next big thing in internet video. It’s a simple — for coders, at least — framework that allows filmmakers to supplement their movies with news feeds, Twitter posts, informational windows or even other videos, which show up picture-in-picture style. For example, if a subject in a film mentions a place, a link can pop up within the video or alongside it, directing the viewer to a Google Map of the location.
Popcorn-powered videos work in any HTML5-compatible browser and are easy to navigate for anyone who has ever used the internet. The tools the Popcorn coders are creating could lead to far more interactive online experiences, not just for movies and documentaries but for all videos. Want to make a cat video replete with recent updates from Fluffy’s Facebook page and all the latest tweets tagged #cats? There could soon be an app for that.
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Wired.com is teaming with publisher Random House to give away one copy of 
YouTube Insult Generator Means None of Us Are Safe
The YouTube Insult Generator pulls the best slights from the video site's comments section.
Screengrab: Wired.com
Some YouTube commenters have turned rudeness into an art form, and a new “search engine for insults” lets you easily harvest the fruits of their ludicrous invective.
Why would you want to? Oftentimes offensive, poorly punctuated and riddled with misspellings, some might argue that YouTube comments are a sign of the impending end of the human race. But they’re also pretty funny. Sometimes. And when you’re looking for the right words to hurl in a comments section, coming up with your own worthy bit of mud to sling can be tough.
Now there is help: The YouTube Insult Generator.
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