November 2010 Archives

The release of Government spending data gives us a wealth of information about companies earning their living from the state. However, the ability to cross-reference it with data on the companies themselves is limited by the fact that Companies House keeps that state data behind a paywall.

It isn't very often I get to write "Here is something I blogged three years ago, and it has been proved right"...but..."Here is something I blogged three years ago, and it has been proved right".

At our last London IA night, Nic Price gave an inspiring talk on how analogy could be used during the digital design process, specifically talking about how the refurbishment of London's South Bank Centre resembled the rebuilding of an intranet.

Pretty much every time I finished a freelance contract between 2006 and 2008, I'd return to my adopted Greek home and tell my wife, "Right, now I'm going to start writing my book". I never did. Which in some ways is just as well, because having listened to Giles Colborne talk at London IA on Tuesday night, I realise that I was in no way prepared for how much work it would be.

We had, I thought, a really good London IA evening on Tuesday. It was a good turn-out with faces old and new in the crowd, and I thought there was a good vibe about the evening. In the run-up to the night we had been a bit more strident than usual about people letting us know if they couldn't make it. Here are some thoughts on why we did that.

As everyone is speculating again about The Beatles and iTunes, I thought it might be worth pointing people to three blog posts from the currybetdotnet archives...

Tyler Bell has written a piece for O'Reilly Radar entitled "Where the semantic web stumbled, linked data will succeed". He seems to comes out strongly in favour of the Lego-building kit approach of interoperable data from many sources, rather than the rigid approach of defining a perfect ontology to map everything to.

I had two awkward questions after my talk at the UK UPA's World Usability Day event last night. One was basically "Does journalism have a future? Discuss" and the other was from Ann Danylkiw. She spoke to me afterwards to complain that I hadn't really answered it, so here is a fuller more considered answer in a blog post than she got in the Q&A itself.

Last night Giulia Piu was talking about her start-up BuddyBounce at the UK UPA's World Usability Day event. Here are my notes from her talk.

Tonight I'm talking at the UK UPA's event for World Usability Day. Here is a list of the links and things that I'll be mentioning.

Yesterday we unveiled a brand spanking new version of our m.guardian.co.uk mobile site. As well as a fresh look, there has been a significant change in the back-end. I blogged earlier in the week about Mike Bracken's presentation to the Gartner Symposium, where he talked about how the Open Platform saves us development costs. m.guardian is an example of just such a product, built off our content API.

There was quite a bit of reaction to my article on The Media Briefing last week: "How the shift to mobile is revolutionising online news design".

At the risk of writing a blog post that looks like some very public sucking up to my boss, erm, you really should read the presentation my boss Mike Bracken gave to the Gartner 2010 Symposium in Orlando. The slides were posted on the Inside Guardian blog yesterday. I say it is worth reading because it has a long look at how getting key elements of openness right in your business can deliver real tangible benefits.

Short notice I know, but I'm very pleased to be able to say that I'll be talking at the UK UPA event next week to mark World Usability day. It takes place on Thursday 11th November at 6:30 at The Cumberland Hotel, and this year's theme is about 'Communication'.