Rattle Research · Design Research For Digital Media

Roberto

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 14:14:40 +0000

We're pleased to announce that Frankie Roberto is joining us from the Science Museum. Frankie does good stuff like this, which looks dry but is actually really, er, cool. It's no small move for him either as he's moving from London to the north, a switch which goes against recent policy thinking. Financially ruinous for him then but at least he'll now be able to get chips with gravy, a decent pint and (develop) a sense of humour :)

This gives me the excuse to play one of my favourite tracks of all time, from The Fall: "Leave the Capitol". Top stuff.

Rattle @ Euro Railsconf 2008

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 17:40:54 +0000

I'm pleased to announce that I'll be speaking at Euro Railsconf 2008 in September this year. The details of the talk are here, it's titled "Adding Semantic Markup to Your Rails Application with DBpedia and ActiveRDF", a little snappier than the title for my XTech talk :)

Euro Railsconf is in Berlin this year and I'll be trying to attend : Starling + Workling: Simple Distributed Background Jobs with Twitter's Queuing System, Modeling Denormalization - The Speed You Need, the Order You Crave and EC2, MapReduce, and Distributed Processing. I'll post the talk up when it's done.

Arduino workshop roundup

Sun, 01 Jun 2008 18:44:47 +0000

I'm just on the train back from the two day Arduino Wireless Workshop run by tinker.it. It was a terrific two days with lots of hands-on wireless hacking. We convered using the Bluetooth Arduino board and the XBee Arduino Shields allowing us to create wireless sensor mesh networks.

I concentrated on getting a wireless Bluetooth scanner working with my partner in crime, Camille. The Bluetooth board is a tricky one to interact with as it requires programming via Bluetooth which is notorious for interoperability problems. We resorted to programming it using an avr programmer which made it a snap to work with. Massimo helped us out with some software to run the scanner and we created a breadboard prototype :

Camille then showed his soldering skills and we moved the breadboard prototype onto an Arduino Shield which left us with a (semi) portable unit:

This is the fully portable version sitting in it's box :

There's also some shaky iPhone videos of it in action, you can see the names of Bluetooth devices flashing up on the LCD here (mp4) and here (mp4).

I'll be doing some more with this in the near future and it will be lurking somewhere in the office in a slightly different form, so keep an eye out if you come to visit !

A Tale of Two Titles

Tue, 27 May 2008 12:26:58 +0000

Rob spoke at xtech earlier in the month with a title taken straight from the 'keep-it-snappy school of speaking'. The talk covered some of the ground of Muddy Boots phase 1 and also the current work we're doing with phase 2. We hope to say a little bit more about Phase II soon. We got lots of good feedback and the general thrust of the talk, around creating semantic richness for a given piece of content from existing web resources, is topical judging by some of the other talks at xtech. Consistent and well architected data [e.g. wikipedia and its offshoots] are providing good building blocks and we seem to be finally all moving on from talking about the semantic web to creating [a loosely joined] version.

May also saw another BBC project kick off. Followme came out of the BBC Labs in Masham in April. Rob's thinking through a catchy, technical working title for the project at the moment :) More to come later in the summer.

Museum Memories

Tue, 13 May 2008 13:44:05 +0000

We've recently been working with the Science Museum to help produce the ObjectWiki. It's described as :

"The Science Museum 'Object Wiki' is a website with information about some of the objects within the Science Museum's collections. To help improve the information, we've opened up the pages so that anyone can edit them."

It's been quite an interesting project and we've even seen it used as a reference site on ebay which demonstrates the strength of the Science Museum as a trusted brand and also shows you can never predict how this kind of information is going to be used once it's opened up and made accessible outside of the museum.

The Science Museum are working on a number of approaches to make the data as available as possible, including licensing the content under a creative commons license and attempting to link the wiki to other sources such as Wikipedia. They have also opened up the mediawiki api allowing developers to build services against the WIki.

As a (small) demonstration of the kinds of things you can do using this, I've created a ruby script that posts the latest memories submitted by people from the wiki to a twitter account, allowing people to browse old submitted memories and get notifications as new ones come through. You can view/follow it at museummemories, let us know if you find it enjoyable ...

Arduino Wireless Workshop

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 21:13:14 +0000

Rob is going to be attending the Arduino Wireless Workshop at the end of May. If you're not familiar with the Arduino boards then go and have a look at the intro but basically we'll be looking at ways to communicate wirelessly with Arduino's (via bluetooth and xbee). It's going to be an exciting couple of days with Ben Cerveny from Stamen and Massimo Banzi from tinker.it leading the way.

Let us know if you're going to be there ...

Noob Chatter

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 14:58:23 +0000

Here at Rattle, we're engaging in the early stages of an internal research project into teenagers and shared gaming. We've decided to create a blog to go alongside it. The idea is to a produce a transparent, open and discursive approach to the research project. The site will give you some insight into our thoughts, methods, processes - what went wrong, what went well and what we can do to improve things. We're really encouraging feedback and suggestions on our ideas, methods and results. Go take a look!

See you at XTech

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 00:53:44 +0000

It's conference time again and we're really pleased to say that Rattle will be presenting at this year's XTech conference. XTech is billed as "... the premier European conference for developers, information designers and managers working with web and standards-based technologies. We bring together the worlds of web development, open source, Web 2.0 and open standards." I've attended XTech for the last two years and it's always been an eye-opening experience. With speakers like Paul Graham, Adam Greenfield and Matt Webb, it's guaranteed brain food.

Social Technologies and Stirrups

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 11:47:52 +0000

Given the surge in popularity of social network sites and the huge media coverage that these sites are engineering, it is not surprising that there has been a lot of sensationalist journalism about the negative effects that SNSs might/might not be having on our lives.

YUI Redux

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 15:40:57 +0000

So, I mentioned the Geekup special featuring Christian Heilmann of Yahoo and YUI fame. If you didn't manage to make it then you missed a great hoedown. Richard from Bluesky PR sourced some great Old Bear Beer and was also the resident barman ! Old broadcasting house provided a terrific venue and Christian brought along lots of Flickr goodies to give away at the end (some of which were won by I.P. Freely and Seymore Butts - I knew we should have asked people to put business cards in the bucket rather than names scribbled on paper !).

The lads at Northcrew videoed the entire thing, if you missed it you can catch it here.

Back to the labs again

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 13:17:14 +0000

It's that time of year. Rattle has been selected for the BBC Labs again. For those of you who don't know, the BBC Labs is a "project to develop innovative new products and services with independent New Media companies from across the UK". After last years success we're really looking forward to working with the BBC and other attendees to develop our idea - the journalism 'Osmosis Engine'.

Mapping Social Media

Wed, 13 Feb 2008 11:51:02 +0000

I came across this really interesting article by Gene Smith only a few days ago. Building on some work by Matt Webb, who assembled this list of the 8 most important elements to social software, almost 4 years ago now and Peter Morville's user experience honeycomb, Gene created the 'Social Software Honeycomb' below.

Geekup YUI Special

Mon, 11 Feb 2008 23:21:51 +0000

At this months Leeds Geekup we're relocating to Old Broadcasting House, where we'll be introducing Christian Heilmann who works for Yahoo! UK as a web architect. He'll be talking about the YUI Javascript library and other things Yahoo.

Christian is a member of the Web Standards Project's DOM Scripting Task Force and has written a number of articles and a couple of books on Javascript to boot.

If that isn't enough for you, then we'll have some fine real ale and nibbles to keep you going !

When : 6:00 PM Wednesday February 20th, 2008
Where: Old Broadcasting House @ Leeds Met, LS2 9EN

Muddy

Fri, 14 Dec 2007 17:57:31 +0000

We went Public via backstage with this ages ago. Too busy to say much about it at the time but it's a neatish prototype done for the beeb which provides external links for a given news story. Lots of stuff about using wikipedia as a CV / disambiguation DB there to be exploited... drop us a note if you want to talk about it.

Elves

Fri, 14 Dec 2007 17:06:32 +0000

Feeling Elfish. Thanks Nick :o