March at paulcarvill.com, the home of Paul Carvill on the web 2009 at paulcarvill.com, the home of Paul Carvill on the web
paulcarvill.com
Hi, I'm Paul Carvill and I'm a web developer. I am Head of Interface Development at LBi, Europe's largest digital agency.
I also like walking, cooking, Bollywood and rock 'n' roll.
Archive for March, 2009
links for 2009-03-16
Monday, March 16th, 2009links for 2009-03-15
Sunday, March 15th, 2009-
Comes with Spotify links and a handy widget to export a list of the songs you've heard.
links for 2009-03-12
Thursday, March 12th, 2009-
Gobsmackingly good visualizations of traffic density, extruded on a map.
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Some good data visualization links
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Bonkers but addictive iPhone game — your job is to keep harmony in an odd universe made of blendable planets.
More coverage of the Guardian’s Open Platform API
Thursday, March 12th, 2009Some more links to coverage of the Guardian’s Open Platform API announcement (some of these found via blogs.journalism.co.uk, thanks):
- Simon Dixon, former web chief of the Office for National Statistics, examines the Guardian’s Data Store, saying “I warned them [the ONS] that someone would come along, do a better job than they were doing, and supplant them as the ‘primary source’ .”
- Journalism.co.uk’s article
- Online Journalism Blog compares the openness of UK newspaper websites (laughably, most have T&Cs which forbid ‘unauthorised linking’!)
- NiemanJournalismLab says ‘the Guardian ups the ante on APIs’
- Jeff Jarvis talks of APIs being ‘the new distribution’
- NewsCred blog gets straight to the point: ‘The Guardian is embracing commercial usage of their content via the API. The New York Times is not.’
- Cass Sculpture Foundation is using the API to add more news coverage to its pages
What people are saying about the Guardian’s Open Platform
Wednesday, March 11th, 2009I’ve collected together some of the recent articles and blogposts about yesterday’s announcement of the Guardian’s Open Platform strategy and, below, some of the first apps that people have built:
- Guardian’s “Open Platform” Interface Looking A Lot Better Than The New York Times’
- Simon Willison on some of the technical details of the Open Platform API
- Jer has made some early data visualizations using Processing
- (Almost) code-free guide to visualising Guardian Data Store information using Many Eyes
- ReadWriteWeb’s blogpost
- Conversations on Twitter concerning the Open Platform API
- Yahoo! YDN blogpost
- How the Guardian’s API could let a thousand stories bloom
And here are some of the first apps that people have built using the Open Platform API:
Guardian Open Platform
Wednesday, March 11th, 2009There was exciting news yesterday morning, when we announced the next stage of the Guardian’s stated strategy to be the world’s leading liberal voice. The Guardian is opening out — making our content available for other people to use — and also opening in — allowing developers to build on our platform and deploy applications which extend its functionality.
So, the headlines from the announcement are:
- Open Platform API
- search, query, filter and discover content, keywords and tags from the Guardian’s archive
- contains full textual content of all Guardian articles going back to 1999
- currently in private beta (apply for a key)
- free for the first 5000 queries per day
- can be used for commercial purposes (you can make money by running ads with it)
- it will at some point in the future be ad-supported on pages using the full content
- Data Store
- a curated collection of data sets
- researched, verified and attributed to its source
- hosted on Google Docs and free to use
- covering subjects such as diverse as US economic data, environmental statistics, crime figures and religious information
- Data Blog
- accompanies the Data Store
- will provide information around the raw data: how we sourced it, why we use that particular data set, what the information might mean
This constitutes a wealth of information to announce in one go, and it may take people some time to digest it all. The really exciting thing about this move is that we’re putting the full content of our articles out there for people to use. The implications for data mining, linguistic research and deep textual comparisons are endless, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what people come up with. Having context to the data is really important, so people can do much, much more than just link back to our site using a headline or an excerpt.
The Data Store is also a really bold move. Simon Rogers, one of our News Editors, and the journalists here put amazing amounts of effort into research, and here we are returning the fruit of their labour into the community. Of course, we use that research to report and editorialise, but here we give you the opportunity to derive your own patterns and meaning from the same data. The fact that this stuff has been manually sourced, collated and published makes it mean so much more, and I’m sure people, including other journalists, will find it an increasingly useful source of information for years to come.
I’ve collected some useful links here which are specifically related to the Open Platform:
- Open Platform FAQ
- Open Platform T&Cs
- Open Platform API talk group
- Data Store talk group
- Open Platform blog
I’ve also collected some of the news coverage and blogposts about the announcement here:
links for 2009-03-04
Wednesday, March 4th, 2009-
Do web designers require an understanding of a software language to produce successful work? I don't think so, but what is important is that they understand the process of interaction a user of a web site goes through. And, even more importantly, that the software designers also understand that process. In a Venn diagram of understanding in a software development team, designers and coders should occupy the shared area.
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Read the entirety of Jeff Jarvis' What Would Google Do? online at the Harper Collins website.
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"There’s the stuff you want to do, and there’s the stuff you have to do before you can do what you want to do." Why apps should save your work, even if you haven't saved the document.
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The first graph here is actually a good example of how NOT to make an infographic. THe diagram offered does nothing to make the onformation easier to understand, and in fact muddies the water by using an ambiguous colour scheme and omitting a key, and also needlessly overlapping elements to fit into the given space. A simple spreadsheet would have done a better job here. The second part is much better — a standard graph of pending over time,
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Tenori-on style app for iPhone.
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More Tenori-on wackiness. I love a) Their name badges b) the podium dancers c) Paul O'Grady getting excited about having 'a rave'
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The Tenori-on, a wacky (what else?) Japanese musical gadget, makes everyone who uses it end up sounding like KT Tunstall gone a bit bonkers. And she did it all with an old-school effects pedal.
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Coxie reviews French film 'The Class'. Includes the phrase "hoist by his own confabulatory petard".
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Frankly stunning pictures of waves (although some of them are actually pictures of a man taking frankly stunning pictures of waves)
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Using the web browser, specifically its JavaScript engine, as a distributed system. Dunno about you, but the idea of anything 'opening a background tab to help you crunch a dataset or two' fills me with dread — my browser performance is bad enough as it is. And by 'my browser', I mean whatever browser I happen to be using at any given moment: they're all pretty inefficient, RAM-hungry and unpredictable.
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"To me, the question about companies like Twitter is: Do they fundamentally evolve as sort of a note phenomenon, or do they fundamentally evolve to have storage, revocation, identity, and all the other aspects that traditional email systems have? Or do email systems themselves broaden what they do to take on some of that characteristic?"
links for 2009-03-02
Monday, March 2nd, 2009-
On the unworkably high levels of false positives which will result from data analysis of 60 million people to find terrorist suspects.