February 2011 Archives

Last Monday I attended a Culture Hack Day debrief session at the Royal Opera House in London’s Covent Garden. The evening featured some exposition of why the institutions involved had taken part in the event, and some presentations from “hackers” who had attended the event. They were not just showing off their hacks, but also talking about what people could do to make their datasets more easily available to be worked with.

A few people recently have asked me “the secret” of my prolific blogging output, and a recent factor has been using the iA Writer app on my iPad which is enabling me to blog through my commute.

Over the last couple of days I’ve been posting my notes from a couple of sessions at The Guardian where Matt Wells and Andrew Sparrow were talking about how we do blogging on the site. There was some debate about unearthing the first live blogs, where the Edinburgh G8 summit, the 7/7 London bombings, and the fate of Shambo were touted as candidates. Matt also pointed to Leo Hickman’s claim to have been the first blogger on Guardian Unlimited. It prompted me to delve into our digital archive to find the first reference to “weblogs” in print in either The Guardian or The Observer.

At the Guardian we've been having a series of talks looking at digital products and services. Two sessions have had a focus on the way that we use blogs on guardian.co.uk. Yesterday I posted some of my notes from a talk given by blogs editor Matt Wells, and today my notes are from another session, which featured our key political live blogger Andrew Sparrow.

The louse & the flea blog had a post today entitled “The Guardian Newsblog and the Death of Journalism” which, somewhat naturally, rather caught my eye.

I’ve been sitting on the news for several weeks now about some upcoming talks and appearances at conferences that I’ve got planned, but since they all seem to have finally been publicly announced I can reveal my jet-setting plans for the next few months.

In recent weeks at the Guardian there have been a series of talks looking at digital products and services. I've given one myself, and also blogged about a talk on software engineering and datajournalism by my colleague Daithí Ó Crualaoich, and the visit of Dr Sue Black to talk about Bletchley Park. Two sessions have had a focus on the way that we use blogs on guardian.co.uk, given by blogs editor Matt Wells, and political live blogger Andrew Sparrow.

Last Wednesday was the second anniversary of me joining the Guardian on a full-time basis, and it turned out to be one of the best days I’ve had since I arrived. As well as seeing tech demos of three products that will shortly be going live which I am very excited about, we also launched our guide to the bands playing at the SXSW festival in Austin next month, which uses the linked open data of MusicBrainz IDs to aggregate content from elsewhere onto the guardian.co.uk site.

We've been holding a series of lunchtime talks at the Guardian's offices, with a mix of internal and external people talking about issues around digital media. A recent guest was Dr Sue Black, who was talking about how social media had played a role in the campaign to save and preserve Bletchley Park.

Last Wednesday we held the latest of our London IA events. As ever it was curated and organised brilliantly by Matthew Solle. I've already posted my handwritten notes from Relly Annett-Baker's talk - she banned the use of technology whilst speaking - and today I've got a rather more conventional blog post about Dan Lockton's talk.

We've been having a series of lunchtime talks in the Guardian about digital products and services, one of which was recently given by Daithí Ó Crualaoich, one of our developers. I've worked with Daithí on data-driven projects like the inclusion of MusicBrainz IDs and ISBNs in our Open Platform API. He has also worked on some of the high profile datajournalism projects that have appeared on guardian.co.uk in the last couple of years. In his talk he was addressing the software development part of datajournalism, and I though he made some very salient points about the relationship between the two cultures of journalism and programming.

A link to a New York Times piece on the world of SEO has been doing the rounds for the last few days - “The Dirty Little Secrets of Search”. If you've never really delved into the SEO world then it is a decent layman's introduction.

There has been continued fall-out from the BBC's decision to announce the closure of nearly 200 websites. The headline grabbing figure masked the fact that a lot of the sites were already 'mothballed', and represents to my mind the destruction of some uniquely valuable online content.

At the weekend I managed to pop in for a bit of the show'n'tell that rounded up the hackday that forms part of the Guardian Hacks SXSW project being led by Jemima Kiss. I expect several of the hacks to quickly become feature requests for our CMS!

In the last of my notes from Lightning UX, here is my take on Rory Hamilton's exploration of Masahiro Mori's "uncanny valley" theory and how it applies to service design.

Last week I was at the first Lightning UX night, and I've been blogging my notes. In this penultimate post, I'm looking at the presentation by Alex Horstmann, addressing how UX professionals should talk to the rest of "the business".

On Wednesday we held the latest London IA event and our first talk was by Relly Annett-Baker. In her second slide she issued an edict for no chewing, no running in the corridors, and no fiddling with electronic gadgets. That was my cue to do something I've been meaning to do for a while - a blog post that (almost) entirely consists of my hand-written notes.

There has been a bit of a storm in a teacup this week over whether the BBC is selling links on the BBC Sport site, prompted by this blog post from Sam Rutley. Lewis Wiltshire, Editor of the BBC Sport site, has utterly refuted the claims. Most news organisations are a little naive about the cash value of links on their domains.

This time last week I was looking forward to an evening of Lightning UX organised by Lee McIvor, a very welcome addition to the events calendar on the London UX scene. I've been blogging my notes from the evening, and this post is about Lucy Spence's talk on puzzles and mysteries.

Over the last few blog posts I've been sharing the notes I took at last week's Lightning UX event organised and hosted by Lee McIvor. Today it is the turn of Tyler Tate's talk about UI components.

I've been blogging my notes from last week's Lightning UX evening, and this morning posted my thoughts on Cennydd Bowles' presentation "The dip". Another member of the thriving Brighton UX scene is Dr Harry Brignull, and he was also talking at the event on Tuesday about "Dark patterns".

This weekend saw a wave of protests at the threatened closures to libraries across the country. I took the opportunity to visit my local library.

Last week was the first Lightning UX event in London, organised by Lee McIvor, and I've gradually been posting my notes. In this blog post I'll be sharing my notes on "The dip" by Cennydd Bowles.

Tuesday night was Lightning UX night, featuring 8 speakers delivering five minutes each on a variety of UX and IA related topics. The second talk of the evening came from Jonathan Kahn, and it was about the relationship between content strategy and UX.

On Tuesday night I was at Sapient Nitro's offices for an evening of Lightning UX organised by Lee McIvor. Featuring 8 speakers delivering five minutes each, it was a new event on the London UX calendar. Over the next few days I'll be writing up some of my notes from what was a great evening which I hope to see repeated, starting with Boon Chew's talk about "How a developer became a ux designer".

Three quick things about the highly enjoyable spat between Google & Microsoft over whether Bing has been stealing search results.

Over the last few weeks on the Guardian's Developer blog we've been publishing a series called "Tags are magic!". Written by myself and tag manager Peter Martin, it is based on the presentation we gave at Online Information in November 2010.

On Friday I was talking at an event hosted by digital agency PublicZone, who specialise in working with not-for-profit organisations. They were launching a new booklet, "The User Research Handbook", and one of the speakers was an ex-BBC colleague, Steve Rogers, who is now Director of EMEA at Google. During the course of his talk Steve gave several examples of where user research had informed and improved design at Philips, Google and the BBC.