Research & development for the social web
Rattle Blog
Recent posts
The Newsography Experiment
The complaint of regional bias in news reporting is, more often than not, concerned with the media’s fixation on the capital’s institutions and populace. What basis is there for this argument? And is it possible to determine the extent of regional under representation whilst proving London enjoys near constant attention from [...]
Designing A History of The World
The BBC contacted us in Spring 2009 to help them think through different audience propositions for what is now A History of The World, a landmark series on Radio 4 produced in conjunction with the British Museum. The basic premise of the programme is to provide a history of the world through objects, including 100 from the British [...]
Muddy
The gestation of some projects is longer than others. The one we’re ‘launching’ today is elephant-esque in it’s development. Muddy is here.
Muddy is a data mining tool that, for a given web page or document, will tell you what the notable things are from which you can then grab extra information. It’s [...]
Muddy: Playing with the Powerhouse
We’re releasing Muddy in the next couple of weeks (as a web service complete with a range of APIs and also as an appliance you can rack).
It’s a service that indexes your content and finds ‘notable’ things and can tell you about those notable things (because the entities we identify are part of linked data).
This [...]
Blue plaques project update: How to create ‘guerilla plaques’
I thought I’d update you all on our blue plaques project, which has been pitched to 4iP.
The idea has evolved slightly. We’re taking it in a direction beyond simply making information about pre-existing blue plaques available on your mobile phone, and more towards building a service and a community where people can suggest new people, [...]
Pitching The Great Manchester Cultural Cookoff
We were at the Whitworth Art Gallery last week to give our final pitch in Manchester Beacon’s ‘Mapping Creativity‘ project, after being shortlisted in October.
Our proposal is for a social website and event called The Great Manchester Cultural Cookoff.
You can find out more about the project, by watching the video of the pitch, presented by [...]









