Research & development for the social web
Week #1257
Hello. The end of March has seen us mainly heads down in project Barnstaple, a BBC project tackling some interesting social design patterns. It’s been a ‘meaty’ project which has seen us work intensively as a team for the first time in ages. Barnstaple ends next week.
In the bits of other time we’ve had this week we’ve seen 4IP confirm their interest in our Facebook proposal which from now on will be called Southwold. This is Anne’s postcard of Southwold (where Adnam’s Brewery is based BTW #trivia):
We’re working up project Southwold this week and hope to have the supplier spec in place in the not-too-distant. Not sure how much we’ll be able to say about this going forward, but if it does come off it will be our biggest commission and is likely to see us “deepend” for a while to give it our full attention.
Another project got sign off this week, again for the BBC, although this one involves lots of Universities. It’s not a huge piece but it is interesting and it plays to our strengths in UX. This project will from now on be known as project Mablethorpe. And here is Mablethorpe, again, courtesy of Anne’s postcard:
In other news, Rob went to the Talis open day (Frankie went a few weeks go too) as we see some interesting possibilities for Muddy in the RDF store it provides, and more importantly in potential interest Talis customers may have in text mining. Rob has also been working on project Cromer for Umbro, doing some backend work, playing with twitter. That’s progressing nicely.
My Life as an Object is in it’s second week of three. Last week we had the Yellow Chopper narrated via twitter (thanks Greg) which was really quite moving and poignant. We had lots of positive responses to that. This week we had a painting, Tea at Englefield Green by one of England’s foremost painters, Paul Sandby, dating from late 1700s (but of which very little is known). We’ve been experimenting with using Flickr to tell multiple pithy narratives of crops of the painting and we’re happy with the initial feedback. Next week we have another object coming to life and this is probably the most interesting from our POV. Frankie has a write up of both weeks on his blog. You can help contribute to the story on Flickr.
Unfortunately it seems there is a book titled My Life as an Object, an account of a Life Model, and it seems to have been flagged up as illicit content in many ISPs and damned our website as guilty by association by some stringent pornography filters. Funny.
Other projects:
Project Barry Island is on “amber”, awaiting sign off on a consultation piece around managing the data from three databases.
Project Largs kicks off in anger this week and is an extension of the work we did for the BBC around Channelography. We’ve had quite a bit of feedback on channelography from people who have come across it whilst searching for programmes. It does really well in search for long tail programmes. This week we had a technology presenter asking us to remove the prefix LARGE from her name in one programme that should have read OUR. Subtitle data can be quite flaky. And funny.
Images courtesy of Anne (all rights reserved). Buy the seaside postcards here.
This week’s banter has mostly revolved around:
- the communications black hole on the East Coast Mainline between Derby and London
- where the wood for the table came from as it smells bad (latrine?)
- Burnley’s chances of staying in the Premier League
- Apple vs. Google social design patterns
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