Research & development for the social web
Rattle Blog
Recent posts
Social Scoreboards
Hello, We’ve had another of our internal Hack Days today, and this time round we’ve created something we’ve called Social Scoreboards. The idea is simple enough. People use hashtags on twitter to represent different types of emotion and often give this a value. Recently my colleagues and my wife were involuntary players in the real [...]
Communicating stuff
We’ve just used the Newspaperclub newspaper to report on the learnings for a project we did called My Life As An Object. We think it works really well as a way to get people reading stuff, partly due to the form factor (people are used to newspapers, rather than A4 bound reports or Powerpoint print [...]
Terrace Tweets and modelling football
Hello. Today sees the launch of a service we’ve built for Umbro called Terrace Tweets (nee. Project Cromer). It’s a way to see the support for different teams and players around a football match and it gets its first outing tomorrow for the FA Cup Final (which for those outside the UK is the biggest and [...]
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 like an [...]
The Story to September
The business has now been going for over two years and it’s over two and half years since Rob and I met, initially to work on Folksy and then to do other projects we set up Rattle. It’s an arbitrary time to take stock but it also seems a good time to do so. Our [...]
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 [...]
Connecting concepts: joining up the BBC
We had a good session with the BBC last week looking at their work on linked data and creating dynamic semantic richness (that’s a mouthful). The BBC’s remit to link to external sources more often has provoked lots of thinking and doing in the area of dynamic linking. The problem with manual linking is that [...]
A Tale of Two Titles
Rob spoke at xtech earlier in the month with a title taken straight from the ‘keep-it-snappy school of speaking’. The talk covered some of the ground of Muddy Boots phase 1 and also the current work we’re doing with phase 2. We hope to say a little bit more about Phase II soon. We got [...]
Museum Memories
We’ve recently been working with the Science Museum to help produce the ObjectWiki. It’s described as : “The Science Museum ‘Object Wiki’ is a website with information about some of the objects within the Science Museum’s collections. To help improve the information, we’ve opened up the pages so that anyone can edit them.” It’s been [...]
Noob Chatter
Here at Rattle, we’re engaging in the early stages of an internal research project into teenagers and shared gaming. We’ve decided to create a blog to go alongside it. The idea is to a produce a transparent, open and discursive approach to the research project. The site will give you some insight into our thoughts, [...]