Research & development for the social web
Rattle Blog
Recent posts
Week #1271
This week started out in a reflective mood, we’re nearing delivery on project Largs but decided it’s not quite there yet. We’ve done some critical reviews and decided it’s a 0.1 but it really needs to be a 0.2. It’s difficult when you realise what you’ve produced isn’t quite what you expected it to be [...]
Week #1270
Last week seem to have disappeared and we put this down to the crack we saw in the wall: Apart from noting fissures in the Universe, the last week has involved work on project Clarkston for Sheffield University Students’ Union and project Elgin which is our own Rattle ID project. This is real Elgin, and this [...]
Week #1268
A football focused week, with Terrace Tweets for Umbro having it’s second outing, tonight, for the England vs. USA match. There were big technical challenges processing hundreds of thousands of tweets. I say big, but I only gauged this from the way Rob went quiet, chuckled when I mentioned odd behaviours in the app and [...]
About The Pretend Fan Machine
Today we’re launching a mini app we’ve built for the 2010 World Cup (which starts tomorrow, if you’ve not noticed the blanket seasonal marketing). The whole thing was conceived, designed and developed in a single day a couple of weeks back (with a few minor tweaks since then) as part of an “app in a [...]
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 [...]
Week #1267
As Rob mentioned in last week’s weeknotes, I’ve taken up the Pomodoro Technique of time management. I’m not sure that I’ve entirely mastered all the nuances and details of it yet (in particular I haven’t started keeping daily reports yet), but it does seem to work in helping achieve focus. The basic premise is to [...]
Week #1266
It’s been a fraught week in the Rattle office, mainly due to James’ cycling accident mid-week. He came off second best in a battle with a Sheffield Cab, resulting in a fractured skull, a cracked rib and an overnight stay in hosptial. He’s feeling somewhat better now and should hopefully be back in the office [...]
Week #1265
This week saw me focusing on fieldwork for project Clarkston, looking at how younger people make decisions and self-organise using social media. A pretty intense piece of work for a University which is going to lead to some design work in the next few weeks. Rob completed the replay action for Terrace Tweets the application [...]
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 [...]
Week #1264
Each weekday morning I walk past the factory where, in 1940, the silver plated cutlery set my grandparents received as a wedding gift was forged . A sub set of which I have inherited and is now bound by several perished, maroon coloured rubber bands, rolled up in a matt, unbranded, pale yellow plastic bag. [...]