November 2011 Archives

Today the Guardian announced some amazing usage figures for our Facebook app, and you can come and visit our offices to see a talk about how it was made.

James O’Brien was talking to the UX People crowd about the perennial problem of the relationship between agile development and UX practice - a relationship defined by the obvious tension between the two created by one of them insisting on “no big design” up front. Here are my notes from the session, where he described the relationship between agile and UX as “an abusive one”.

At last week’s Hacks/Hackers London meet-up, Stephen Grey was talking about the journalistic process behind his work to uncover the CIA’s network of rendition flights. Here are my notes from the session.

At last week’s Hacks/Hackers London meet-up Dan McQuillan was talking about “Hackovation: how social innovation camps, crisis camps and other hacker movements are trying to go beyond the headlines”. Here are my notes.

Like many people today I was shocked by the awful news of Gary Speed’s death. I watched him play for Leeds United nearly every game of their 1991-92 campaign that saw them win the title.

I’ve only joined in the Carnival of journalism once this year, back in March, when I wrote “News innovation isn't just about writing code, it is about how we use that code to tell stories.” I'll be much more involved in December though, as I’m helping to host it on the Guardian’s Developer blog.

Tonight is the last Hacks/Hackers London meet-up of the year, featuring Stephen Grey and Dan Mcquillan, but delving through a folder of notes the other day I find these I made on Alec Muffet’s Hacks/Hackers talk back in August but never got around to posting. So here they are.

We are planning to kick of 2012 with a different format for January’s London IA event - we’d like an evening of four talks, no more than fifteen minutes each, on a varied diet of topics.

The Guardian has just published the latest in our Guardian Shorts ebook series - “Who’s Who: Ressurection of the Doctor”. I edited the collection. And just as every episode of Doctor Who these days has a behind-the-scenes “Doctor Who Confidential” to go with it, here is the story behind the editing of the book.

Last week we held November’s London IA evening at the Sense Loft, sponsored by Zebra People and CX Partners. Mags Hanley and Vanessa Harden were talking.

There are a limited number of letters in the alphabet, and so, with the suggestion that journalists should be using “NT” to demonstrate a neutral point of view when retweeting, I thought we should just go ahead and define the entire alphabet of inept journalistic use of Twitter etiquette all in one go.

When I was at school, I can remember some pupils campaigning to be allowed to sell and wear the Peace Pledge Union’s white poppies, as well as the British Legion’s red ones. The school authorities refused, and at the time I thought passionately this was the wrong decision.

I still do.

But over the years, my perspective on the red poppy has changed considerably. Where I once saw them as a symbol of aggressive warmongering by the political classes, I now view them as an opportunity for reflection on the human impact of war.

Here is a miserable set of reading if you: 1. Like the internet. 2. Are a man. 3. Would prefer it if you lived in a society where it wouldn’t be acceptable for someone to threaten your mother, sister or daughter with rape and sexual violence for the dreadful crime of expressing their opinion on the internet.

At the weekend the Guardian became the first major publisher to experiment with Scroll, a new tool from a New York based start-up which promises to allow users to build magazine-style layouts for the web without having to know any code at all. Benji Lanyado put together a version of the weekend’s lead travel section article using it, and we published that in our new Guardian beta section, as well as publishing the more conventional version.

A couple of weeks back we held the latest of our London IA evenings. I’ve already blogged about Ben Bashford’s talk on “connected things”, and today I’m posting my notes from Jonty Sharple’s talk about arrogance in design.

At the recent Enterprise Search Europe conference where I was talking about search on Guardian Books and the future of search, the most entertaining and illuminating talk I saw was by Tim Gollins, Head of Digital Preservation at the National Archives. Here are my notes from his talk.