Prototyping Weeknotes #57
It's been a sunny week in central London, but a busy one!
The next iterations of RadioTAG and Watch Later began on Monday. Having spent a few weeks developing the RadioTAG spec, Chris L and Sean are now putting it to the test by building a live radio tagging service that links timecode and radio station with user accounts, pulling in programme metadata along the way.
Watch Later is up and running for the team, and already I've watched a few more programmes I would otherwise have forgotten. We're now working on making it a more public prototype, with Duncan upgrading Solr and moving the API from Sinatra to Rails 3 in preparation.
Chris N got back from holiday and straight back into LIMO for the , specifically building a timed interactive quiz demo using the latest LIMO metadata framework developed with the and the .
Theo and Tris spent Monday evening watching focus groups of Doctor Who fans talking about the Mythology Engine. As is often the case in user testing, some like it, some don't. Interestingly, no matter how much of a fan they purport to be, none thought they were qualified to contribute to a site such as this.
Chris L spent Tuesday morning in the Five Live studios, observing how the radio team deal with listener contributions during the breakfast phone-in, and has since been experimenting with Social Network Analysis algorithms using the R statistical programming language.
Chris G and George spent a couple of days in Paris to kick off an EU project we're due to work on later this year, while Paul continued to wrestle with algorithms. Olivier has been working on secret projects and going to secret meetings, but he is prepared to tell me how he's been looking with Matt from the Orchestrated Media team at how the standards world might benefit from the work on the Universal Control API, a super-exciting R&D project which, as I understand it, turns everything into a sonic screwdriver and brings us all one step closer to the .
There are a number of projects at various stages of development in the team that seek to identify and sync offline media, whether it's via tagging, or audio fingerprinting like Shazam, or so-called "watermark" technology, so it was with interest we saw the . "Any answers as to why you'd do this using video rather than audio?" Tris asked, and there were a number of suggestions from robustness to coolness. Eventually we agreed it was just a matter of time before you could download shoes from your TV.
Thursday saw another workshop on user-owned data, more post-its, and a milestone I don't think any of us thought we'd live to see: Theo finally finished his blog post on the design team's findings from our recent Autumnwatch experiment.
The whole process has involved laughter, a few tears, struggles with the Â鶹Éç's inhouse video publishing tool, one too many plays of the Autumnwatch theme, and, of course, the passage of autumn into spring. But it's done. And it's lovely.
Comments Post your comment