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New group recently set up and holding regular meetings to try to sort out some rules and tools around the measurement of the impact of social media usage in marketing
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…by Helen Lawrence from Dare Digital. Helen has managed to get in a quip about Will McInnes’ choice of socks so you know this is worth reading.
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I don’t like Facebook Chat but that’s just me. This is a good write up of their approach to using Erland and Comet to run a system that would most likely go from 0-70million users the second it went live.
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A recent collaborative animation made for Sony Vaio in conjunction with John Malkovich. Again from Helen Lawrence at Dare, it’s her day!
H3: Beginners Arduino workshop 6
If you’ve ever wondered about taking software and interfacing it with physical objects this could be a good start. Even if you’ve heard of Arduino and want a great introduction. I did this workshop back in November and it was WELL worth the money.
Put your house on Twitter
AndySC lives on the Isle of Wight yet I know how much electricity he consumes, when his phone is ringing and when he turns his lights on and off.
“Band In Your Hand” gets press
A slice of fried gold augmented reality idea from my colleague Hugh Garry finally hits the press. More of this kind of thing!
Yahoo! Media Player
It’s just too easy to use this, and it looks nice.
[Via Derivadow] Designing Your API - lessons from Twitter and Digg
Really want to work an API into the Introducing development. As I’m writing the ‘wishlist’ at the moment, this is good stuff.
Ubuntu AMIs for Amazon EC2
Most of my EC2 instances run Fedora, which is fine, I just prefer Ubuntu as a Linux option and Alestic has a large span of AMIs to use.
Four Factors of Agile UX
Quick fire article on approaches to bear in mind when working on UX on an agile development
A small bit of press (finally) for the Sound Index
I was starting to wonder why, months after it’s launch, there wasn’t more press about this potentially industry changing product. The Guardian sort of finds out.
Semantic Spend
The Economist suggests that close on $100m has been spent by smaller, new companies on the addition of semantic web technologies in the last 12 months
OpenCalais: Reuters semantic web service
They’re going for the Giant Global Graph. Wow, big talk. Nice service however, attaching semantic markup to any content you submit to it.
A question that I didn’t think I’d ever get an answer to. However, all of that changed this evening when everything I’ve been wittering on about on Twitter for the past 18 months or so was presented to me in cloud form!
Tweetclouds takes your Twitter feed and bundles the most used words into a cloud (see above for the collated joy of my past 500 tweets). It’s a nice, simple application that offered me more of a revelation than anything particularly useful.
In some ways it’s like being able to get some stats for your own life (if you care that much). I’m a big fan of any kind of data porn or visualisation and after seeing this I have to admit, I’d be interested in finding more ‘lifestats’ apps like this.
So, a slightly light hearted analysis of the cloud is in order, given that my tweets aren’t particularly focussed on any one topic, or really that focussed at all.
Here’s what I gleaned from the pulsing mass of blue above:
<beginanalysis>
I go places like the office to do some work or my house (to continue to work), mainly during the day. I am occasionally distracted by going drinking or thinking about which new, nice things I need at some point during said day. Whilst doing all this I have worked on some projects, ordered some pizza and possibly stopped some strange street stuff whilst being stuck on the District Line.
</endanalysis>
Revealing. I guess I should do it again about tweet number 1000 and see if my endless babble has changed in any way.
Edit: On a work tip, here’s the cloud for a sample of about 11,000 records played over the last year on BBC Radio 1: www.tweetclouds.com/user_pages/bbcradio1.html
Amazon S3 Library for Code Igniter Framework
I’ve been working with Code Igniter for a couple of weeks on a few projects. It’s been a joy and thanks to the active developer community bringing out libraries like this, I can use it more and more.
Flash Com Guru
I’ll be honest; I understand Flash, but stick me down in front of the software and I’ll stare at the screen until the building closes. It’s blogs like this that I find the most valuable when dealing with systems I’m not overly familiar with building for.
Edit In Place for JQuery
I’ve found the easiest way to get none technical people to update their own sites is to present them a version of it where every element that can be edited is simply a click away from being ready to update. Flickr do it amazingly well. I don’t… Yet.
Matt Deegan bigs up Radio 1’s Facebook usage
Notably it was the ‘gathering around 1 event’ aspect of Zane Lowe’s masterpieces that got his attention. It’s a great idea that will pick up for next time around. Other great FB usage is in the pipeline too.
Consistent Hashing
I’ve been hearing a lot about this recently and I do want to know more, but this document is so complicated I needed to save it for re-reading.
BBC Innovation Labs: Local and personal
Chris Garrett’s pitch from Innovation Labs. Personal and localised site content across platforms, intended for BBC Where I Live but could work well for Introducing on a similar level.
The state of the internet
[via James Cridland] Stats from the EBU conference in Geneva
