Great little article about how the flickr team manage thier worldwide online community. "The job always comes down to finding the fulcrum in the teeter-totter, the balance that benefits both the individual and the community," [link]
September 25th, 2008
New site for the Birmingham Conservation Trust
I’ve just set the new site for the Birmingham Conservation Trust live. I’ve advised on how it could work, and done the final coding and design.
The Trust is a charity that tasks itself “‘to preserve and enhance Birmingham’s threatened architectural heritage. … to promote an enjoyment and understanding of the city’s historic buildings’”. Most famously they restored Birmingham’s Back to Backs (now a National Trust attraction).
The site itself has been in the planning for a long time, but was held up when the Trust decided to go through a change of image. I’m pleased that the new look works much better on the web than the previous style.
The move to a WordPress based CMS and blog should help with keeping the content fresh — often a problem for charity sites (where everyone always had many calls on their time). That should in turn help the engagement of users with the site, and hopefully contribute to the efforts (physical and fund-raising) of the Trust.
by Jon Bounds | Posted in my projects, web development work | View Comments | Tags: birminghamuk, cms, design, my projects, new site, wordpress
September 25th, 2008
Ladder Consulting – bespoke Wordpress theme
Gavin Wray designed this elegant website for management consultancy Ladder Consulting, which I then turned into a Wordpress theme. The site contains a blog, as well as a number of hierarchical pages which are all controlled by Wordpress’ easy-to use CMS.
The site looks great in all browsers and is very accessible to all.
by Jon Bounds | Posted in web development work | View Comments | Tags: blog, gavin wray, wordpress, wordpress theme
September 10th, 2008
Round and round it goes – twitter -> blog – > twitter echo chamber
Further proof, if proof be needed, that pushing blog posts to twitter (and vice versa) creates nothing but echo. In this instance the only tweet archived from “yesterday” is the tweet announcing the previous day’s tweets (and so on and so forth):
A nothing perpetuating itself, filling up the internet and making interesting stuff harder to find.
by Jon Bounds | Posted in blogging, good practice, microblogging, twitter | View Comments | Tags: echo, morality, twitter
September 5th, 2008
How to podcast using your mobile phone – The London Biker
Ex collegue of mine Matt Cashmore is about to blog motorbiking to Russia for charity, some of which he'll be doing as audio by phone – here's his handy guide to doing just that (the phone thing, not the motorbiking): "Sound simple doesn’t it. Just find a way of leaving a message on something like skype, then get it to encode your audio, upload it to the server and generate the XML." [link]
September 5th, 2008
What are the People saying about Of All The People In All The World?
Of All The People In All The World is a unusual and fantastical piece of art/theatre created by Birmingham-based Stan’s Cafe. They have a grain of rice to represent every person alive today and the piles are continually re-arranged to represent different statistics – it’s far better that I’ve made it sound here, go and check out their site. After gaining plaudits around the world it’s finally being set up in Birmingham from the 13th September – 5th October.
Unlike some artists in this copyright obsessed age, Stan’s Cafe are encouraging people to take photos or video as they visit, and now to share them on the internet.
I’ve just spent a couple of hours finishing off a site – the rice show - with Nick Booth that attempts to collate everything said and any media made around the show — a sort of automatic collective memory, and also a great forum for discussion on the ideas behind the show.
It’s a lot simpler than UpYerBrum (which does aggregation, but also voting), it’s a lightweight WordPress installation, with a plugin to fetch RSS feeds and a little custom jiggery-pokery to make sure that everything sits up front. It fetches Flickr, YouTube, blogs, news, twitter activity and also Radio Rice - which is a super online version of the stats from the show.
Do go if you get chance — and tag anything you take or make thericeshow.
by Jon Bounds | Posted in my projects, social media, social media work | View Comments | Tags: Stan's Cafe, thericeshow, wordpress
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Blog for The Birmingham Post
When good feeds go bad
An old PA football story somehow finds itself published as new news on This is Croydon – to the ire of commenters. The very funny ire. Read the comments from the bottom-up to get it chronologically. [link]