Today we are happy to announce the public beta release of our latest collaborative experiment: a Cozimo WordPress plugin! That’s right – now rather than just displaying an image or a video as a static participant in your blog posts, you can use the plugin to enable a dynamic media experience where readers can chat, draw and comment directly on your images and videos. You can even use the plugin to collaborate in real-time with others and to synchronize the playback of a video so that everyone is watching the same frame at the same time.

We hope this functionality will open new opportunities for how blogs can be used in professional, educational, creative or just plain fun applications. Try it out for yourself! The beta plugin is available free of charge for installed versions of WordPress.org. You can get all the information you need to download and install it here.

Give it a try and let us know what you think!

This week we’re very excited to unveil a new collaboration project that we’ve been developing with Jeff Mottle of CGarchitect.com, a leading online magazine that caters to CG artists and production companies who do architectural design visualizations and rendering. One of the more popular features of the site is the gallery section, where CG artists can show off the latest examples of their work. In the past, these galleries have always been something of a one-way show but now we have added a whole new dimension to the experience by integrating Cozimo’s real-time collaboration tool directly into the gallery itself. Now visitors can actively engage and collaborate on any image, leaving markups and comments or even interactively discussing the work in real-time with other online participants. As far as we know, providing this level of collaboration is a first for any online magazine. We’re hoping this will be the first of many such efforts on our part to help promote and support more collaboration in creative online communities. We also make functionality like this available for integration into private websites and client extranets. If you’re interested to learn more about this feature please contact us.