At the start of the week the News Linking team invited a couple of experts in to discuss how social media could play a part in increasing the amount of external linking we could do on News and more generally across the ±«Óãtv. Chris G was up to his ears in teleconferences, while Tristan slaved away editing an EU document. Struggling to keep up with the pace, Theo booked himself in for a fish pedicure.
With Vicky now based in R&D Media City Theo, Joanne and Nina Monet (from News) decamped there for the second half of the week to work on the News Companion prototypes. It was a great opportunity to check out the amazing new R&D North Lab. It must be a productive environment because by the end of the first day they had the prototype ready for testing.
Meanwhile Chris G attended another telco.
On Thursday the team used the R&D North testing lab ("posher than my living room" according to Theo), to run 5 sessions with volunteers from the campus. The findings from the discussions they had with each volunteer are being compiled to generate recommendations and further questions for the next prototyping iteration. A productive, fun time was had by all.
Back in Henry Wood House, Duncan, Olivier and I were working with a simple mathematical model I'd developed to explore some "what-if" scenarios around the News Linking. While we'll still need to check the model against another, larger data set, it proved rather useful in showing which of our ideas would be most likely to have the biggest impact.
Duncan took some time out to set up new work stations for our colleagues and who will shortly be joining us from other parts of the ±«Óãtv. It's important to make new starters feel at home with equipment that will be useful to them.
Sean spent the week wrapping up some of the RadioTAG work, which culminated in the for our implementation of the RadioTAG protocol. He had an interesting discussion about RadioTAG and its future possibilities with Andrew Scott and Nick Humfrey from the Radio and Music product team.
Chris N has been working hard on the next phase of the P2P/LIMO work, concentrating this week on using server-side javascript to deliver real-time updates to browser clients. He's been using , and . He's also been tackling the thorny issue of testing javascript - deciding in the end to build a test harness for the LIMO code using the .
Chris G and the producer team spent some time thinking about the upcoming workplan. Some of the potential areas that come up were "personalisation vs public space", "How can we extend radio on the web to actual radios, and vice versa?" and the rather exciting field of "ubiquitous connectivity experience design"! You'll be pleased to know that Chris G didn't let this get in the way of attending another telconference.
On Friday the engineering team made a lunchtime trip to Google in Victoria to meet our alumnus Sam Dutton and sample the amazing food at their canteen. We bumped into another old friend of ours. We had some productive discussions with the developer evangelists in the Android team and with Sam, who now fulfils that role for the Chrome team. George felt .
Friday was University of Manchester professor Rachel Gibson's last day in our office, it's been great to have her around and there's been a lot of interesting discussions as a result.
Interesting Links
- Microsoft Research in Cambridge have . It summarises some of their last 5 years of research and design work around why people communicate.
- Andy Rutledge produced an of the NYT, inspiring some interesting discussion around the problems in designing a large news organisations website from . Brad Colbow's deconstruction of newspaper websites was also interesting.
- is is an HTTP proxy / HTTP monitor / Reverse Proxy that enables a developer to view all of the HTTP and SSL / HTTPS traffic between their machine and the Internet. We like!
- We're excited that the low-cost, ARM-based has reached alpha stage, and are looking forward to getting our hands on one. Especially fun are the ±«Óãtv Micro-inspired product names.