Archive : June 2010

Transport for London (TfL) have put out a call for apps to promote London’s new cycle hire scheme which launches at the end of July.

This immediately caught my eye as it mixes two things that I love. Technology and cycling.

TfL opened up their cycle hire API earlier this month to allow access to information around bike hire locations and pricing.

I think this, mashed up with a few of TfL’s other APIs and a bit of smart phone magic would create an amazing mobile app service. It could help promote the scheme, encourage adoption and, vitally, aid TfL in defining future hire station locations and in adjusting and augmenting their current cycle path network.

Last week saw the second release of our engagement platform for Robinson’s Fruit Shoot: Ready for Ten. The build up to the release was short — only five weeks — but in that time we achieved an awful lot. A complete evolutionary turn on the visual design, plus introduction of new features for our members including a VIP Club, enhanced profile pages and most importantly, the Skillscape campaign.

Ready for Ten homepage

A few of us went to see Clay Shirky last night at the Royal Society of Arts. Some stuff we heard him talk about before, and some new stuff. I had sprinted from Embankment tube to make the 6pm start time, and I couldn’t face using Twitter — and so I tried the visual notetaking methods we enjoyed so much from SxSW (and some inspiration from awesomeist Len Kendall). My first attempts are a bit sh*t by comparison but I found it to be a much more thoughtful way of interacting with a talk than making snarky comments on Twitter. Not that this will stop me in the future…

A couple of weeks ago I had a little rant about the three things I think publishers need to do if they want to thrive in a beyond-print era. The survival of news media is a big issue right now, and so it should be — the quality reportage of news is critical to the health of our society.

In the time since posting my argument, I’ve spotted a few new developments I think are worth sharing. Unsurprisingly, they all have a lot to do with content and the contradiction of digital content: expensive to produce (or at least, the good stuff often is) but more often than not, free to consume. Highly valuable, then, but cursed with a changeable value.

Revisioning an economy around forces like these isn’t going to be easy, but I believe it can be done. Here’s what’s happening, and why I think it matters.

If you’re on a Mac an you haven’t tried out Safari Reader yet, you should. It’s a really simple but incredibly useful little feature that detects when you’re on a page with a lot of text, and offers to display that text in a reduced distraction popup. (Update: thanks to reader Tom Harvey, who points out that Safari is also available on Windows, and you can use the same technique to hack the reader display there.)

Safari shows this little icon when Reader is available.

I received this note with a product I bought on Amazon the other day. Leaving aside the horrendous grammar, I got to thinking about the algorithms behind Amazon’s product rankings that render buyers’ reviews and ratings so crucial to sellers (this note asks me to give a favourable seller rating, but I’d like to focus on buyer reviews). 

There’s nothing like a dose of Kevin Kelly to blast away any weak thoughts that might start creeping into one’s brain after reading something like this super-alarmist article in the NY Times.

A recent post by Henry Jenkins got me thinking about In The Night Garden as a Transmedia storytelling platform.

In his post, He-Man and The Masters of Transmedia he describes the way kids’ cartoon He-Man and The Masters Of The Universe and the many bizarre action figures it spawned as:

An authoring system which encouraged young people to make up their own stories about these characters much as the folk in other time periods might make up stories about Robin Hood or Pecos Bill.

And he notes that:

In some ways, contemporary transmedia is being produced by kids who grew up playing with He-Man to be consumed by kids who grew up playing Pokemon.

This set me thinking, as I have recently become a regular viewer of In The Night Garden.

Twitter’s new and native URL shortening functionality (t.co) is going to make other URL shorteners such as ow.ly, is.gd and bit.ly totally obsolete.

I guess those businesses could see it coming. URL shortening is fairly basic functionality. It would take a decent developer a couple of days (if that) to comp something together that works well enough. It seems morally bankrupt of large social networks to toss aside small apps that add value to their platform by blatantly copying functionality. 

I’ve read too many blog posts recently about pay walls and the future (or lack thereof) of journalism. With the debate raging and being nowhere close to resolution, I needed to remind myself of just how much online advertising sucks.