I need some feedback for The Rome Report for AW. If you are familiar with my podcast anima vagula blandula, this will be an extension of that, and will feature text and video nicely wrapped in a Flash document and displayed on AW in the Forum Romanum section, on the main page of the Rome community. Rome Report Television. Flash is quickly becoming the most popular choice for Internet media. It is cross-platform and most computers already have the Flash plug-in installed. It is windows/mac certified and secure.

A beta version of the report is up and running and can be found HERE . If you do not have the Flash plug-in, or you have an older version (a new version has just come out) you should be prompted to install it.

I'm not asking much. Just go to the link and tell me:

• Can you see the video?
• Were you able to use the video controls?
• How long did it take for the video to start playing?
• Can you use the scroll controls on the text ?

Also let me know:

• What system you are running (Win/Mac) and what version.
• What browser (IE, Netscape, Firefox, Opera, etc.)

Leave your comments at my Domus (IClaudius Antonius).

*Note on the video

You may notice that when the video plays the first time, it may stop and re-start briefly. That's because the content is downloading progressively rather than waiting for the whole thing to cache before starting up. If you've ever seen movie trailers on the net, this is the same system. You can actually see the progress of the download as a darker bar in relation to what is being played, represented by the triangular marker. The advantage is that you're not sitting there twiddling your fingers for five minutes waiting for something to appear. If it starts and stops the first time, try hitting the play button again and the second time it should run more smoothly. That is, if you can stand me talking at you twice. Alternatively, you can hit the pause button until you see that the whole movie has loaded. The addition of video controls in Flash 8 is really wonderful.

If you would like to help in preparing a media-rich Rome Report please contact me at my domus. I need people who can gather news items from around Rome, provide pictures, music, videos, audio --- basically any kind of media.

Please help me in my quest to make AW a media-rich environment.

IC