We at Made by Many launched an experimental blog 10 days ago. Normally we create blogs, blogging platforms and blog-based communities for clients (other than our company blog), but this time an opportunity arose to do one for ourselves and to use it like a laboratory.

The opportunity was provided by my little brother Jonny Malbon, who set sail in a non-stop, round-the-world, solo race called The Vendee Globe. It’s the one that Ellen MacArthur almost won eight years ago. Only 68 people have ever completed it. Sometimes people don’t come back. It’s mad: the premise being “last one round the South Pole’s a sissy” and the race involves these 60 foot super-high-tech lightweight surfboards with too much sail area. It’s a formula one drag race round the planet that takes around 90 days and involves a long and lonely stint in the outer space of The Southern Ocean. The video below provides a good overview.

The ultimate Vendée Globe 2008 from Artemis Ocean Racing on Vimeo.

So what are these experiments?

Well, Jonny is at the head of a very long tail of content being produced, distributed, picked over and reassembled by citizen journos (blogeurs) and old media alike. It’s a feeding frenzy for a global community of die-hard yachties. Most of them are in France, it has to be said, but there’s a huge online buzz about this race: these are big floating gadgets after all, and practically the only way you can follow the race (bearing in mind that most of it happens way offshore) is through digital media created onboard the boats by the skippers, and consumed online in a thousand places. Most of the boats have big, expensive sites and some are very good, but we’re interested to see what you can do with a simple blog and by using all the free tools we can get our hands on.

One of the most exciting of these tools is Twitter.com, and in less than a week Jonny has gathered 78 followers at his TwitterStream. This, and the fact that we have linked various Twitter accounts with with Netvibes and various Facebook accounts has led to 35% of our referrals in the first week coming from these services.

Screenshot of Twitter. Yes, it’s been up and down. No, it actually isn’t cool and this is an annoying error screen.

Jonny is Tweeting live from the boat, which is a far as we know a world first - and, quite frankly, a much better use of Twitter than informing the world that your bus is late! We’re piping these updates from Twitter into the sidebar of the blog - but we’re also experimenting with how you can design this sort of content to encourage portability - see the image below that shows how a style we designed to display tweets at JonnyMalbon.com below is now finding its way into niche sailing sites, partly because it simply looks good:

We’re also thinking carefully about the needs of the super-engaged fans around the world who are trying to piece together what’s happening from many sources in (mainly) two languages. We’re providing summaries - we call them ‘info-bursts’ and ’round-ups’. They’ve been really successful.

Another thing we’re experimenting with is guest blogging and blog-swaps. We found this guy Michael Kingdom-Hockings, who writes a blog called New Freebooters about the Vendee, was commenting a lot at JonnyMalbon.com - so we co-opted him into our content team, and we’ve blogged at his site. I’ve never met this guy, we just found him by doing the blog and he’s written some good stuff.

And we’re collecting together multimedia (audio and video clips) from all over the place and re-posting it all in one place.

So, is it working? Well it seems to be. From a standing start with no marketing (aside from link-love and commenting) we’re up to 196 visits/430 page views a day as of yesterday and climbing. The weekend didn’t slow it down. Come and have a look and let us know what you think.

(cross-posted from Made by Many)

We went to mashup* Events Widgets last night. There were about 200 people there, four panelists and some people demo’ing new stuff. I went along to find out what is happening on the widget scene. I was hoping to hear about some concrete examples, and was interested in hearing how people, brands, media owners are making money from widgets. So was everyone else, and the audience attacked.

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No, not the little claymation chap who was Tony Hart’s imaginary friend. Morph is “concept device” created by by Nokia Research Center (NRC) in collaboration with the Cambridge Nanoscience Centre (UK) to explore the kinds of devices and benefits that nanoscale technologies have the potential to create. Have a look at this video (I will post it here when our video button is restored…). It shows how Morph can be a watch, a phone, a calculator and a beer mat. It can sense chemicals in the air; it re-charges itself from the power of the sun; it’s self-cleaning and it can turn into jewelery. The video animation depicts user benefits from a personal perspective: a young woman sits outside a cafe on a sunny day sometime in a future set to lame chill-out music. Everything is perfect. Can’t wait.

(cross-posted from Made by Many)

(the logo on the left is cooler…)

Everyone’s going on about the Semantic Web. It’s tipped to be the big thing in 2008. It’s all you can hear in the cafes and bars. Semantic this… NLP-that… It’s hard to get a word in edge-ways, and don’t even bother going out if all you want to talk about is simple keyword extraction. Keywords don’t tell you sh*t. (thanks Mark)

Until now, all the talk about a new age of context and meaning has been largely that, just talk. And unless you could afford big technology and million dollar license fees this stuff was way out of reach for the little guy. The arrival of two interesting new services indicates that this may now be changing quite rapidly. People are excited. They talk about it at dinner parties. It’s palpable.

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If you worked in user experience during the lifeboat years, you’ll appreciate this from the awesome new Online Journalism blog:

People read websites very differently to how they read newspapers, watch television or listen to radio. For a start, they read 25% slower than they do with print – this is because computer screens have a much lower resolution than print: 72 dots in every square inch compared to around 150-300 in newspapers and magazines (this may change, but usage patterns are likely to stay the same for some time yet).

Via the Mashable Twitter Feed comes news of a new life-tool: Inner Twitter. The service sends you a ‘chime’, a meditative phrase for you to ponder upon. It’s up to you whether sign up to receive a ‘chime’ every 15 minutes, every hour or every day… (I suggest starting with the daily chime). When you receive the chime, the idea is that you:

Listen. Pay attention to your breathing. Pay attention to what is before you. Really look at what is in front of you. Forget yourself and become whatever resonates, like stillness, peace or beauty

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Just signed up for a free ‘Matterbox‘, an idea I heard about via Lloyd Davies on a Seesmic video post. (I wrote two posts about Seesmic yesterday: I’m already dangerously addicted and just found myself checking in whilst waiting for an airplane).

Matterbox is an imaginative joint venture between Artomatic and Royal Mail. In a world of increasingly intangible stuff, they’ve set up to champion the physical: ‘real’ things you can hold and touch. As they say at the Matterblog.

Sure, this will take time, but if digital media continue to dominate even more aspects of our lives, there’s going to be a growing demand for the need to get to grips with things. Matter is a long-term project,

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JP Rangaswami has been talking a lot about about the way loosely joined up tools and services like SMS, Twitter, TwittyTunes, tinyurl and the Facebook mini-feed can work together. About the way it can be annoying for other people (err, yeah.. sorry to the victims of my BlogFriends feed btw). He has a great way of talking about this emerging Web of Data.

We’re not dealing with firehoses any more. We’re dealing with capillaries, as I discussed in my post yesterday. And these capillaries carry and distribute information nutrients, and process and eject information waste and toxins. The real power of all this lies in the increasing transportability of context.

JP’s found a beautiful way to talk about the potential (and the potential downsides) of the services we use becoming fluid quicker than we can work out how to cope with them.

I played with a new one this evening: Seesmic. It’s a video conversation site, like Twitter but up close and personal. Currently in Alpha, but you can sign up for an invitation. It’s an important one and it’s worth trying out. Be prepared to lose some time.

Today I heard someone say that before the Web all communication was one-way, top down: from media producer to passive audience. I know what he meant but it prompted me to start a list of pre-Web forms of conversational folk-media. Please let me know if you can think of other examples and I’ll add them to the list.

So, to kick off:

• Graffiti
• Speaker’s corner in Hyde Park
• Telephone phone-ins and talk radio
• The Soap-Opera Press
• Letters to the Editor
• The Jeremy Beadle platform
• Citizen’s Band radio
• Public noticeboards

The Telegraph continues to re-invent itself with bleeding-edge web technology by announcing yesterday that it plans to become an OpenID provider by the end of February. The newspaper will be the first in the world - and the first British media company - to provide OpenID logins and the news came on the same day as Yahoo! announced their plans to do the same.

What this means for the Telegraph’s users is that they will have to remember fewer passwords in future and find it easier to move seamlessly between other OpenID sites (other sites include the well-known conservative hang-outs Digg and Blogger). OpenID provides users with a sort of passport (not be confused with Microsoft Password, which was an earlier, proprietary and therefore evil attempt to do this).

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