Blog Stuff we're discovering, learning, reading, watching, enjoying...

Don’t mistake this for those childhood ‘colour by numbers’  books where each numbered area could be matched to a colour. Google Assaults Designers With Data is an interesting report from a recent talk by Marissa Mayer, “keeper” of the Google homepage since 1998. In her presentation, Marissa outlines just how much of “the devil is in the detail”, and how running a service with a simple interface is not a matter of sitting back and resisting adding complicating features, but of gradually fine-tuning, testing and iterating. It might not be the inspirational, creative approach to design that we all love to get excited by, but it demonstrates results and proves that versatile modern day designers need a toolbox containing more than just pure creative flair.

We’ve found recently that generating convincing dummy data early in the process of a web development project can catch issues a lot sooner than just using lots of test@test.com and lorem ipsum dummy data. Additionally it also allows you to start with a sizeable amount of data from the start, and to identify performance issues relating to database design and data relationships. The Generate Data website is an excellent tool to help create your dummy data “for use in testing software, populating databases and scoring with girls”, though we’ve seen no evidence as yet that it does actually fulfil the third requirement.

The Guardian’s recent availability of most it’s data via API was a pretty big announcement and is in itself an excellent demonstration of a on a large media entity embracing future platforms. Even better, in a matter of weeks it seems that the examples and tools to help you get up and running have been vastly developed and the Guardian Data Store is now an amazing resource even just to browse or to get tips from, let alone to actually use their data.

Nice to see Thumbprint, one of our newer projects, getting a reference on Tech Guardian and that it’s rightly referred to as “embryonic”. In his article on hyperlocal information, Victor Keegan looks at how smartphones have created micro-level location awareness, ranging from discovering photos taken nearby to retracing Shakespeares footsteps!

Before anyone cries “Mashups are sooo 2008″, check out the Mashable post listing five Flickr/Twitter mashups - all of which are highly enjoyable. If nothing else, it demonstrates what can be achieved with such a mass of accurately tagged/keyworded content - Flickr in the form of an engaged and committed tagging community and Twitter by merit of Tweets being so short that they can mostly be used as a bunch of keywords. Using this model, Flittr adds visual detail to tweets by taking the last tweet from a user and adding a mosaic of 16 Flickr pictures, usually with very apt results.

With Android app development now heavily underway here in the Common office, it’s currently our flavour-of-the-month mobile OS so it’s interesting to see MJelly’s round-up of some early Android statistics regarding mobile internet usage and behaviour.

Nothing is sacred these days. Not that Wikipedia should ever be considered sacred by any means but it’s bad news when the Conservative party leader David Cameron apologises over Wikipedia change because of a deliberate change just to win an argument.

As over half of the UK are now web users, the growth of new internet users is naturally slowing. However, as predicted for the past couple of years, mobile internet usage is now beginning to significantly increase. 25% more people accessed the internet using their mobile between April - Sept 2008. The increase can probably be accredited to improved handset capabilities across mainstream devices, higher awareness of mobile services, an increase in quality and breadth of ‘immediate’ information services and a growing focus on mobile from the key social networks such as Facebook and Bebo, along with simpler, inclusive data tariffs from the operators.

A recent report by internet research company ComScore examines how UK internet users are accessing the internet across both web and mobile.

The UK VAT reduction on Monday 1st December caused the ‘biggest ever online shopping day’ as it recorded the UK’s largest ever online shopping volumes, though overall the small spike did little to significantly impact the generally reduced consumer spend.

It’s not the first Twitter app and it won’t be the last but the simplicity of the twistori site is very pleasing to use and almost always returns interesting content within the first few lines. Choose from one of six feelings to filter Twitter messages [tweets] such as ‘think’ or ‘wish’.

Thank goodness for Google. Looks like they’re doing their bit to monitor and prevent the spreading of flu by using related search terms to map which US States are most affected by flu!

The forthcoming .tel domain will be used to present contact and communication information as opposed to hosting web content. Technically, the contact information will be stored as part of the DNS information rather than presented as part of a hosted website.

A potential benefit of this is that as there is no hosted content on this domain it will be less attractive to cyber-squatters because without hosted content there is no support for the usual pay-per-click advertising that cybersquatters rely on.

The main reason behind the new domain is to make contact information available in an agnostic format - presenting the information in whatever way best suits the computer, mobile phone or other connected device that requests the information. The .tel method presents an interesting alternative to the as yet under-utilised ‘microformats’ approach, which relies on marking up contact information in a particular way within the presentation of hosted content.