So, with a few client calls to make and some artwork sign-offs still outstanding, I ambled into the seat at the back of the balcony of York’s beautiful Theatre Royal one last time and, almost completely out of charge in every conceivable way, settled in for the last talk.

The talk was from Jonathan Harris of Number27.org. Jonathan describes himself as “an artist working with complex datasets”, as you probably will have gathered from the tone of the piece so far that’s a bit like Caravaggio describing himself as “a bloke who paints Jesus and that”. Looking back on a lot of my past posts this year it seems I’ve been quite consumed by the idea of presenting information, and lots of it, in particularly beautiful ways and Jonathan certainly ticks that box in a big, fat way. Rather than hyperbolise much more about the man, he possesses the sort of profound, beat-poet Americana of Keroac, Dylan or early Woolf but manages to uniquely fuse it all with the sort of Bay Area timbre and vulnerability of a very modern geek. He is, in short, a pretty engaging guy. Personality cults aside though it was Jonathan’s work that I found the most interesting thing about him. You can see all of his projects on his website here but I’m going to just pick out a few highlights below.

We Feel Fine was the first thing of Jonathan’s that I happened across. It trawls the Social Web for mentions of the words “feel” or “feeling” to analyse and present fantastic infographics of the content. The really fantastic thing about We Feel Fine is that it presents its information back in such lovely ways, the realisations and the interfaces – of which there are many – are actually tagged back to human emotions. The database entries are also visually represented in a way which mimics the emotion they represent, so the “fear” entries act scared andthe happy ones group together. It even goes so far as to reference the weather in the person’s area at the time, mind blowing.

The Whale Hunt is a fascinating, if a little gruesome, project which uses tagged and Categorised photos to chart Jonathan’s nine day expedition with Inuit Whale Hunters using tagged variables like “blood” and “heart rate” to track the excitement – and also boredom – of the experience. It splits down in a number of ways like by cast member and chapter and you can also see a mosaic of all the images which really hits home the colourlessness of the ice and the gore of the blood when they actually catch the whale.

Lovelines works in similar territory to the We Feel Fine project, concentrating this time on the rawest of human conditions of Love and Hate. It uses the same data collector to harvest mentions of the words “Love” and “Hate” from blogs every few minutes, it then also collects the name, age, geolocation and any other data it can about the blogger and factors that into the presentation too. It’s formed through the three different themes of Words, Pictures and Superlatives and gives you an odd experience of being a detached voyeur.

Update: It would seem that the massive amounts of traffic my blog has sent to We Feel Fine has melted the servers. *cough* I’m sure it’ll be back up soon.

In the new political landscape of budget cuts and tight financial margins organisations are coming under increasing pressure to communicate more effectively with the people who use their services. The web contains some fantastic tools to help you both stay close to the people who use your services and publicise what you do to new people. Social Media can also be a fantastic tool for campaigners looking to get publicity for their cause without having the budget to launch a traditional media campaign.

The people involved in the Bradford event are all seasoned digital communications professionals who have given their time for free and will be more than happy to pass on their knowledge of how to get started in using the Social Web. Come along to The Gumption Centre on the 20th July, 5:30pm – 8pm. Click here to book your place.

Anyway, in the absence of having anything substantial to post I just wanted to draw your attention to a rather beautiful documentary. I’ve been, in retrospect perhaps a little ineloquently, excitedly babbling about The Semantic Web for what seems like an absolute age. Having had my head stuck in computers and the internet for most of my life, I find it absolutely thrilling that we finally seem to be getting to the point where using one is an intuitive experience. It’s not there yet, not quite, but we are getting there. When we do you will find computers, not to mention all other items of digital media kit, being used in a far more creative way by a far greater swathe of the world then they already are. So it’s pretty exciting, enjoy.

A story about the Semantic Web

Interviews with:

Tim Berners-Lee

Clay Shirky

Chris Dixon

David Weinberger

Nova Spivack

Jason Shellen

Lee Feigenbaum

John Hebeler

Alon Halevy

David Karger

Abraham Bernstein

All in all there were twelve different attendees and representatives from two different companies, not to mention three different parts of one company itself, and the spread throughout the room was impressively wide. We had everyone from Office Managers and Receptionists through to Production Staff, Program Managers, Comms Managers, Web Designers and IT Heads.

One of the really interesting things that came out of the day was the engagement levels of the attendees. The social graph was particularly scattered with some people only keeping up with children at university via facebook, others who eschewed the text based social space and preferred video chat, guys who use youtube as their primary channel and some people who used nothing at all. To top that off we also had some people in the room who had twigged on to the potential of the social web as a networking and professional development tool.

In Short then, a pretty excellent cross section of society.

I decided that, as there was so many different agendas from the attendees in the room, that to fill a six hour session with niche, techy, or geeky content was a losing strategy so I focussed the day loosely around three main themes:

• The characteristics of the Social Web: How sharing, rating and iterating changed everything.
• The power of the Social Web: How budget needn’t be a barrier and time vs. ROI.
• Promoting and managing engagement with the Social Web: Policy building to grow communities

I interspersed the session with some videos which broke things up nicely and ensured that I came loaded with biscuits to keep the sugar levels up. Also, I had a bit of a flash of inspiration at the very last minute and decided to add in The ABBA Challenge. Throughout the day I dropped in the titles of well known ABBA songs and the first person to ‘call’ these on the Ning network I set up to support the day got points which went towards the grand prize of £25 of Amazon vouchers. So it’s true what they say “if all else fails, try bribery”!

I probably delivered about half of the subject matter that I had actually prepared due to interesting discussions breaking out all over the place on copyright, the Digital Economy Bill, spam and how the Social Web impacts on brands. The main thing I learned from the day is to keep agile when doing training sessions of this size, be led by the group rather than your schedule.

Anyhow, I’ve already had some lovely feedback from the day and connected with some very, very interesting people. Thanks to Helen Philpot for arranging it all and I hope to be back across soon. Also, check out Channel7’s website if you haven’t already.

Adam Kimmel presents: Claremont

Claremont is the brainchild of Adam Kimmel, New York Suit Designer (and fashion label), who decided that there was no better way to publicise his new line of suits than to embark on a 60mph downhill skate. No? Me neither. Anyway, it hots up about two minutes in.

Tony Hawk, the 900

This video is pretty self explanatory. It is one of the most inspiring moments that I have ever witnessed in sport, watching live as he completed a trick he had been attempting for a decade. In case you were wondering, the 900 is a vert ramp trick involving two-and-a-half revolutions in the air. Tony completed it at the 1999 x games after 12 attempts.

Mouse, a film by Girl skateboards

This is a seminal film by Girl skateboards directed by now famous, but in 1996 very much less so, director Spike Jonze. It was as influential as it was referential, see how many other films you can pick off in the clips below. Also, if you are a fan of any of the Tony Hawk skateboarding games then you may recognise some of the settings.

Regular readers of the blog (of which, admittedly, there aren’t many) will probably have been wondering why the lack of updates recently. The reasons are many and varied but the day job has been pretty hectic, lots of important and creatively draining meetings have been distracting me, I’ve been doing some serious decorating on our ramshackle 150 year old house and also I’ve been on holiday – see the pic of me and the little terror on the beach for proof.

On the holiday front, the weather in Whitby, North Yorkshire, on a north facing bit of coastline facing the North Sea in September no less, was absolutely fantastic. I had envisaged some ‘Withnail & I’ style “We’ve gone on holiday by mistake” disaster. I have somehow managed to jam my way into booking the best two weeks of the summer off for my hols. Gloat.

Anyway, I had hoped to have some posts ready to come out of draft form and into the cold, hard, critical light of “teh internets” but sadly I have been too busy not looking like a Goth to finish them. Expect some Augmented Reality stuff, some comment and ham-fisted analysis on Twitter’s recent change to their Ts&Cs and a comparison of some of the most popular Twitter desktop clients.

Anyway, here’s a cracking video from Socialnomics09 that – as well as having some lovely typography – also sums up some of the potential for Social Media. Enjoy.

Cliffhanger 09 from Weekday Productions on Vimeo.

NESTA

To launch Reboot Britain NESTA are publishing 10 viewpoints compiled by a series of distinguished contributors and edited by the economist and writer, Diane Coyle. First to kick this thought piece decathalon off was Lee Bryant, co-founder of Headshift and all round very tall person, with a very well reasoned and thought through article here.

The article lays out some pretty classy ideas around how government can better spend it’s money advocating greater openess by sharing all data (bar the obvious commercially confidential stuff), conducting more policy in an open, iterative way and investing in smaller companies on an investment basis rather than going down the old ‘top four consultant reccomends massive IT contractor’ route which usually succeeds in creating nothing but content for Private Eye.

Working, as I have for the last five years, in the Public Sector and being of the bent that I am I find it hard to disagree with much of what he says. It’s pretty obvious that, just as in the constitutional government, changes are sorely needed to the way we work. The irony of it all is that – right now – there is little that anyone in the Public Sector can do about it. It may sound as if I am being apologetic for the sector’s failings and I’d like to be clear that I am not, the basic fact of the matter is that I have to work at home to post to a website, if I want to manipulate an image I cant at work, hell even if I want to research some potential Social Media application I am blocked from doing so. Either through a firewall that interprets the word “Social” as something akin to “Porn” or by a system so antquated it still runs IE6 (with no plug ins).

This would be the first baby step on the road to change, Lee’s article proposes some pretty radical things but they really need to happen.

Yorkshire Events, the guys I am currently working with, won their bid for the 2010 UCI Mountainbiking XC World Cup. I’m absolutely made up that we won it as I was desperate for it to get the recognition it deserves. The real kicker is that, particularly with bid stuff, nobody wants to know if you didnt win the event. This wouldve meant something I was very proud of would be the proverbial ginger stepchild.

Understanably the World Cup bid has been a bit of a long shadow on the horizon for me for a while. It’s been hovering over me like the sword of Damocles, having submitted the bid in late April and it’s actually one of the things that I am most proud of in my career, certainly the item of print I’m most proud of.  To say it was just print though would be doing it a bit of a disservice,  it was a very complex project made up of two bid books, a part CGI part live action DVD and a gorgeous presentation box. I had the pleasure of working with a slew of very good people who all pulled together in the right direction to pull it off.

I’ll post some of the beautiful stills as well as the excellent bid DVD in the next week or so.

Perhaps the most pertinent thing in all of this was that it is Microsoft that brought this project together, typically they seem to have wanted to keep their cards close to their chest. Maybe I’m doing them a disservice, maybe they cant align the system with Flickr’s API or something, either way though we are missing out and it’s a shame. Photosynth would be going great guns now.

As it is though it’s still a great tool. Check out these these lovely examples of the Rio Duoro in Porto (Look out for the bridge by Gustave Eifel), The Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium and Gorsdale Scar in the Yorkshire Dales.