I recently finished the course "Large Scale Databases for Social Networking Systems" and learned a great deal about Google's BigTable, Amazon's SimpleDB and Dynamo, Facebook's Cassandra, Twitter's HBase, LinkedIn's Voldemort, and other open source technologies including Couchbase and MongoDB, among others. For the tech journalists out there, media companies are also utilizing NoSQL technology, including The Guardian and The New York Times, just to name a few. I think it's extremely important to understand the basic strengths and weaknesses of this up-and-coming technology and when to choose one system over another. I never envision myself programming in them, but I do hope that one day I can make strategic decisions regarding a company's NoSQL implementation. Regardless if you are a programmer or a manager, hopefully my high-level overview of NoSQL and the major players will be helpful.

It's always fun to revisit multimedia projects at the end of the year when I create my 'top 50' list. As I do each year, I must stress that this is my list and not a definitive 'best of' list simply because I have not seen all multimedia created and thus cannot create a comprehensive list. Therefore, below are 50 projects that have inspired me most in 2011. A reader suggested last year that I better organize the sites, so I decided to pick 10 each from the five sectors: journalism, advertising, student work, philanthropy, and documentary. Thanks to everyone for the overwhelming inspiration and happy holidays!

All I can say is IT'S ABOUT TIME! I'm excited to introduce you to "AVE" (ABC Visualisation Editor). As I envision it, this may very well do for timelines what Soundslides did for audio slideshows. Read my interview with Sam Doust, Creative Director of Strategic Development at Australian Broadcasting Corporation, to learn more about this tool and when you can expect to test it out for yourself.

We deal with huge amounts of information every day. Most of it comes in the form of text, and video content has increased exponentially in the last years. But in today’s logic, users want more than access information -- they want to do something with it. News content as it is serves its purpose to inform the audience. But, with the use of interactivity and new multimedia languages, we can really take them to a whole new level from news consumers to real news users. My proposal is to define content characteristics that will make news more usable and useful.