Rattle Blog

Week #1254

Hello.  I’m writing this on Saturday morning and my brunch is waiting, so I’m going to be brief (I’m hungry).

Frankie and Andrew were busy on three projects this week, one client piece and three pitches. Both proposals are really exciting, and I can hope they come off because they’ve put so much effort into them.  We’ll here about one on Monday, one probably by Tuesday, and the other is a longer burn. It’s an interesting, if stressful, time, with projects awaiting awaiting sign off and some about to go into production.

I spent two days this week planning on Folksy, our sister business.  Folksy has got to the stage now where it’s ready for the next stage of development; it’s proved it’s a viable business.  So Anne and I got together to plan out a schedule of work.  The work is all doable, the next thing we need to do is work out how to resource the work. This is where business development gets interesting, as we could frontload the work and look for external funding (something we’ve resisted until now) or we could do the work as and when we can afford to from the (growing) revenue streams.  I think we know which one is preferable and we’ll be deciding on that and scheduling the work, soon.  One thing that did come out of that meeting is an urgent need for more support staff, so if you know of anyone interested in making things, who is familiar with online community environments and has at least one day a week spare then do get in touch.  I also booked my ticket to LIFT10 after mulling over the conference calendar.  I’m thinking of running a workshop around designing for objects, or possibly the ‘fuzziness’ of time and space in design, both of which are thoughtstreams I’ve been reading around.

Rob continued to get Muddy, our in house term extraction and text mining service, up to speed with the latest release of dbpedia and create a more efficient server side architecture where we don’t actually require our own triple store.  We want to run a text mining workshop in the not too distant future, partly because of the knowledge we have around the subject, and also to start to explore some of the interesting datasets that organisations hold.  There seemed quite a bit of interest in doing this from the Guardian folk when we met them at the LinkedData meetup last week, so it might be a partner event. Rob is going to start planning that and it’s likely it’ll be platform agnostic and we’ll cover off a variety of different approaches and, crucially, the kinds of interesting things you can do.

Office banter this week revolved around:

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