RT @olivierthereaux: How our work on web audio standards got us rediscovering 1960s radiophonic tech.

"So over the last few months BERG and Ericsson have been working in partnership to explore some practical and poetic approaches to networks and smart products. We have been developing concepts around the rituals and rhythms of life with connected things, and creating some visualisations based on network behaviours."

"BRONZE is a new way for music to exist, in which the recorded material is transfigured generating a unique version on each listening.

The first piece of music available in Bronze will be Flesh Freeze by Gwilym Gold."

"Exploring the work of Daphne Oram using a 3D interactive visualization"

"The Listening Machine is an automated system that generates a continuous piece of music based on the activity of 500 Twitter users around the United Kingdom. Their conversations, thoughts and feelings are translated into musical patterns in real time, which you can tune in to at any point through any web-connected device."

RT @fantasticlife: mps / twitter / dbpedialite > change of name, change of place, some foaf >

"You know what that “HTTP” means in your address bar (if you’re not using Chrome.) You know that behind the scenes, the Domain Name System translates your requests for domain names like techcrunch.com to numeric addresses like 76.74.254.121, and secure connections are encrypted by SSL. You know that web servers send HTML, the lingua franca of the Web, over the wires (or the air) to your computer, and that web developers write JavaScript to control what your browser does with it.

…Unless you’re actually a techie. In which case you probably already know that the above description — let’s call it the Classic Web — is increasingly completely false."

RT @bbcirfs: We've been developing a client-side recommender for programmes, for scalability and responsiveness

"Here’s a papercraft BBC News branded shipping container! (pdf link) It was made by a fan of this project our team was involved with a few years back."

RT @chrislowis: BBC - Research and Development: IRFS Weeknotes #106

"This version comes from Kenneth Roberts' novel, Northwest Passage, in which an uneducated but veteran Ranger explains Roger's rules to the narrator, a former artist who joined Rogers:

1. Don't forget nothing.
2. Have your musket clean as a whistle, hatchet scoured, sixty rounds powder and ball, and be ready to march at a minute's warning.
3. When you're on the march, act the way you would if you was sneaking up on a deer. See the enemy first.
4. Tell the truth about what you see and what you do. There is an army depending on us for correct information. You can lie all you please when you tell other folks about the Rangers, but don't never lie to a Ranger or officer.
..."

"...the new group is a more commercially minded extension of the R&D Lab that focuses on “how to scale and monetize, instead of what does a new user experience look like, or how does content evolve into new spaces.” In other words, the R&D Lab thinks of something new; R&D Ventures works to turn it into a product."

"The terminology we use internally is “individual” and “group” contribution skills. A group contributor’s job is to help other people be more productive, and in doing that you sacrifice some of your own productivity. It’s a higher-stress job and you get interrupted a lot more. People will do that for one project. They’ll say, “I really want to do this game,” and everyone will say, “Ha, ha, ha, you’re stuck with it now.” At the end of the project they’re like, “Gee, that was really interesting, but I want to go back and work individually on the next thing.”"

"The After the Flood Playbook is how we record and improve our methods. The playbook is a catalogue of interchangeable, constantly updated frameworks and processes that can be used to solve any problem you have. Currently running at 63 entries, we split categories into roughly three areas"

"Google Chrome extension. Add audio resolver/player links (e.g. Spotify, Tomahawk) to HTML track lists marked up with RDFa." e.g. bbc.co.uk/progammes

"Jekyll is a simple, blog aware, static site generator. It takes a template directory (representing the raw form of a website), runs it through Textile or Markdown and Liquid converters, and spits out a complete, static website suitable for serving with Apache or your favorite web server."

"We are at an inflection point, where TV becomes another corner of human civilization that has fallen into the black hole called the web. As a result, in the next few years — at least in the advanced economies of the world — the way we experience TV will be changed profoundly, and the meaning of the word will change in corresponding ways."

RT @bbcirfs: Weeknotes #105 from @andrewn go from the Arctic Circle via Budapest to Salford

Five years of glacier erosion in Iceland. Wow. (via @maggiekb1 on @boingboing)

Japanese prints

2) "Yahoo! reports that 25% of all web pages contain RDFa data and 7% contain Microdata."

1) "the median duration of a person being famous in the news has consistently been 7 days for the last century"

Things I learnt from @moustaki's notes from WWW 2012 ...

Descriptive Camera: A camera which prints out a text description of the image in the viewfinder.

Govt ID Assurance principles (alpha) as created with over a dozen privacy and consumer interest groups. @GovUK

RT @bbcirfs: Weeknotes #104 from @libbymiller; dynamic transcripts, global minds and virtual switches

Now it is clear that the Netflix Prize objective, accurate prediction of a movie's rating, is just one of the many components of an effective recommendation system that optimizes our members enjoyment. We also need to take into account factors such as context, title popularity, interest, evidence, novelty, diversity, and freshness. Supporting all the different contexts in which we want to make recommendations requires a range of algorithms that are tuned to the needs of those contexts.

"Complex stories spaghetti into branches, side stories, and intertwining narratives. In order to explore these stories, one needs a map to navigate unfamiliar territory. We propose a methodology for creating structured summaries of information, which we call metro maps. Our proposed algorithm generates a concise structured set of documents which maximizes coverage of salient pieces of information. Most importantly, metro maps explicitly show the relations among retrieved pieces in a way that captures story development."

A news drone, on Blue Peter, from BBC R&D and Southampton Uni

RT @dogwinters: Ze Frank does paper prototyping cc @tristanf @theoj

RT @bbcirfs: Weeknotes #103 from Olivier's last-minute tour round the office

Woah, an API for faces (via )

Tips on hackdays etc

"Since the BBC QR logo appeared, there have been many imitators. Most just slap an obviously out-of-place logo in the middle of the code. This Disney poster is notable for being more in the spirit of the BBC code.

There's a different way to put pictures in QR codes. Instead of scribbling on redundant pieces and relying on error correction to preserve the meaning, we can engineer the encoded values to create the picture in a code with no inherent errors, like these:"

oh, lovely. linked data storytelling. in a box. with a bow #radspam

I wrote up a hack from my #whereconf workshop: "Extracting a social graph from Wikipedia people pages"

In British schools they used to play radiophonics at us to make us dance. Really.

"For the complicated facial stuff, I’m using web services from face.com.

They have a REST API for uploading a photo to, getting back a blob of JSON with information about faces detected in the photo. This includes a guess at the gender, a description of mood from the facial expression, whether the face is smiling, and even an estimated age (often not complimentary!)."

Take a look at design priinciples here and please feedback, it's a work in process @GovUK

CCTV nesting box

"The project’s goal in developing a semantic, machine-readable database doesn’t just help push the web forward, it also helps Wikipedia itself. The data will bring all the localized versions of Wikipedia on par with each other in terms of the basic facts they house."

Weeknotes from @pete_warren start with George Orwell's dystopic moustache and then go…

"I like the principles of agile development, but I’ve never found it great at handling multidisciplinary activity, particularly when you are dependent on the talents of the people around you as opposed to the timeline or milestones. #

So, as a result, we just let everyone work at their own pace, doing what they can do when they can do it, united on a direction of travel."

RT @psychemedia: Sketches Around the Friends of @BBCRD [@fantasticlife @meeware]

Music-resolving music player

RT @bbcirfs: We've made it to Weeknote number 100! And this week we'e got guns, diarisation and tweets about the budget

BrowserQuest – a massively multiplayer HTML5 (WebSocket + Canvas) game experiment ✩ Mozilla Hacks

"MIT’s Open Documentary Lab brings technologists, storytellers, and scholars together to advance the new arts of documentary."

"Documentary filmmaking — the medium of Dziga Vertov! Richard Leacock! Werner Herzog! Errol Morris! — has struggled as much as any medium to find its place in the Internet age. Does the linear narrative have staying power in this crazy, mixed up, disaggregated world?

“There’s this perception that documentary is this staid medium,” said Sarah Wolozin, a longtime filmmaker and director of the new Open Documentary Lab at MIT. “It’s not. It is this place of innovation. And I think a lot of documentary filmmakers have lost their connection to that history.”"

"Privly makes it impossible for others to control your data. By simply installing our browser extension, you are able to keep your content, well, your content. For those who don’t have the extension installed, they see a simple link that sends them to your post, photo, video, etc. For those who do have the extension installed, they are able to see your post on the page as it was intended. That’s because the extension pulls the data from the other side of the link into your Facebook page, Twitter feed, etc, seamlessly, without supplying that data to data miners. Meaning your content stays, your content."

"What I envisage is that, instead of designing everything (and particularly computer software) on the assumption that ‘people are going to behave like machines’ — that is, without feeling, love, hatred, anticipation, intuition, imagination, etc. (the very qualities we think of when we ask what it is to be human) — we design everything on the assumption that people are not heartless or stupid but marvellously capable, given the chance, each and every one. I’d like to see machines, systems, environments of all kinds, made such that if they are to work well everyone who uses or inhabits them is challenged to act at her or his best and that there are no built-in obstacles to doing that. The main obstacles to this at present are not so much the machines and technical processes but the presence of our other selves, as paid guardians, ‘protecting’ every one of us from our ‘mechanically stupefied selves’ and enforcing rules of behaviour and design which assume that ‘users know nothing and producers know all’."

Chocolate patterns

"For Alice Stanley, streaming her favorite shows with Netflix on her laptop is convenient, but does it rob her of TV’s communal aspects? "

Fantastic stuff from @robinsloan - Fish: a tap essay

"Its a simple maxim, but you should always design projects that introduce users to the behaviours you’re looking for at the end. If you’re marketing a game, introduce them to the game mechanics in the marketing. If you’re marketing a film, get them involved in the story and characters. If you’re marketing a book, find a way to get people to read."

My last ever blog post for @notube! Beancounter user research part 2: reactions to the user interface:

Windows on Riding House Street

"To mark this occasion David Hall has placed 1,001 old televisions upturned in the massive space that is the Ambika P3 gallery. Even before you enter you can hear the cacophony of the TVs all tuned to one of the five analogue channels.

From above, the installation is a sea of bright colours and it feels like an assault on the senses. Visit the exhibition when the analogue signal stops and all you’ll see and hear will be static and white noise."

"When a product is connected to the network it has two brains. A little local one that can perform cheap calculation, and a big one in the network that can do potentially anything at all: massive facial recognition, searching all of Amazon, advanced artificial neural networks, whatever. "

Zooming timeline for "big history"

RT @robinsloan: Have you ever done… the flip-flop? Okay I'll show you how:

"Front page editors at major publishers like the New York Times and the New Yorker are masters at laying out content on their homepages, and the recommendations implicit in that layout are incredibly valuable. But more and more, we’re learning that recommendations from our friends can be just as useful.

So one afternoon* we decided to see what these homepages would look like if our friends were in charge…

Here’s how it works: Visit any website, click News.me Exposé in your browser’s bookmarks bar, and we’ll help you find the articles from that website that your friends think you should read. "

"Alastair Sawday, of Sawday's guides, picks 15 places to stay where the food is as wonderful as the surroundings"

"Collusion is an experimental add-on for Firefox and allows you to see all the third parties that are tracking your movements across the Web. It will show, in real time, how that data creates a spider-web of interaction between companies and other trackers."

"Whilst they are willing to share data about most of the things they do online (their activity data), as shown in the graph below, their preference is to share it only with those closest to them – i.e. their friends and family, not with everyone – or even with everyone in their social networks, as is the case with the current trend for frictionless sharing.
There is a strong reported preference for a high level of control over personal data: 94% agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “I want to be able to delete specific activities and preferences”, and 73% with the statement “I want to keep certain programmes I watch private”. Our workshop participants also agreed with these sentiments."

Hungry Birds (eating fat, pressing keys, sending tweets) (via @robertbrook)

Obligatory scooter shot

The Emperor Constantine in pieces

It's Rome, it's Professor Mary Beard!

Damn. Someone else wrote the blog post about domestic bias in technology that I've had brewing for years. ++excellent