What is a media developer?

A media developer is a web developer who specializes in creating web applications for user generated content. This includes mashup sites for bringing together RSS feeds, desktop widgets to deliver content to the desktop, web parts to consume XML and data feeds from Google APIs, Amazon APIs, etc. A media developer also finds solutions for automating the process of generating content like video which is currently very time consuming. There are many other forms of user generated content which also require some development work. For example, wikis have their own markup syntax so there is a need to convert existing content into wiki friendly format.

Media developers.

Application developers create Windows applications. Web developers create web applications. Media developers create applications that deal with media. Application developers are almost always dealing with business data stored in a database and delivering that data to the desktop. Web developers also deal with business data but they frequently have to deal with a variety of other data sources including XML feeds and RSS feeds. The media developer deals with user generated content which can include blog posts, wiki articles, podcast audio, and vlog videos.

Data feeds.

Data feeds are becoming an increasingly complex part of the Internet. Major web sites like Google and Amazon are providing a variety of data to be consumed by desktop applications, web applications, and mobile devices. Unfortunately these data feeds are not all based on the same format. I have encountered a wide variety of data feeds and data formats which have slowed down my development work due to the time consuming process of studying a new data format. While RSS feeds are standardized and generally don't require any special consideration, I have found that XML feeds tend to vary a great deal. Their date formats are all over the place so you frequently need to change how the date and time are formatted. Then there is JSON, JavaScript Object Notation, a lightweight data-interchange format that has become popular in combination with AJAX libraries due to the increased interest in JavaScript. Google has created its own standard for XML data feeds known as Google Data. They provide client libraries for dealing with Google Data and a help file which reveals just how massive and complicated their data scheme has become.