NESTA invited me along to the launch of a report on User-Led Innovation (ULI) by the University of Brighton’s CENTRIM and University of Sussex’s SPRU research centres.

The insightful, and timely, report focuses on how users, at individual and community levels, are changing the rules of innovation.  Though user-led innovation is nothing new, proliferating digital technologies and networks are serving as tools for users to power further innovations, and to connect with each other to share tools, techniques, ideas and feedback, to an unprecedented degree.

Focusing on video games, music, social networking and music software industries, the researchers have explored case study firms that are harnessing ULI through close and collaborative relationships with extensive user communities, such as music notation software company Sibelius, or that have emerged directly from communities of user innovators, such as games developers Splash Damage.

With companies based on ULI, such as Bebo and Last.fm, being sold on for millions just a few years after their creation, it’s hard to argue against the commercial value that ULI can potentially generate, and the social and public value of ULI is pretty easy to grasp too. However, the report’s authors go on to argue that policy-makers remain somewhat sceptical about the importance of ULI, noting that UK policy still suffers from a linear model of formal R&D ‘hangover’ and has only just begun to recognise the importance of users in innovation.

Realising the extent of user creativity and invention can perhaps only begin by adopting a policy of promoting ULI or, at the very least, thinking creatively around issues such as copyright law that currently serve as barriers to its take up.

Download the report here.

Welcome once again to another spirited read-through of the screenplay that is the Cogapp internal blog. Let’s kick off scene one with a mash-up.

These boots were made for walking
Spotted by Ian.

A fabulous Google Maps mash-up (what, another one?) which lets you plan and calculate a route on foot. Simple, useful and nifty.

Get your pedestrian jollies at: http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/

Shiny image fun in your very own browser
Spotted by Sam

Now a lot of us at Cogapp Towers are generally suspicious of super-flashy-yet-purportedly-useful browser plugins, but this one is pretty cool.

PicLens lets you zoom around a wall of photos pulled from sites like Flickr, Google Images or Facebook. It’s slick, and actually quite useful for image searching - we’re not just gimmick-mongering here.

Try it and you’ll see - flying around endless panels of images and videos is really quite addictive. You can even navigate through Amazon this way, which is quite an eye opener…

Oodles of Doodles
Spotted by Gavin

Always trying to organise meetings with people and can’t find a time that works for all of you? Then maybe you should Doodle it!

Doodle is a simple and easy to use online group calendar - think Google Calendars but without the fuss. For example:  if you’re trying to arrange a meeting with a lot of people, you send them a link to a calendar you have set up (which takes 5 minutes), and they tick the days/times they can attend.  When everyone has done this you can see which times everyone can make it and arrange your meeting. Particularly useful if you’ve got people from multiple organisations or departments.

Again it’s a simple but powerful idea, well executed. Doodle doesn’t do much, but what Doodle does do  Doodle does do well. Try saying that ten times quickly on a late Friday afternoon.

And finally…

Let’s be honest. We have lots of ‘and finally’ candidates on our internal blog. Too many to mention here, but here are a few tantalising whistle wetters…

Making movement complexity visible, spotted by Tristan - http://www.moframes.net/

An oldie but a goodie, spotted by Tristan - if Microsoft designed the iPod packaging.
Ah it gets better every time I watch it.

The legendary Johnny Lee returns with intriguing thoughts on flexible display surfaces, spotted by Joe - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhSR_6-Y5Kg

And if you’ve really not got enough things to do today, spotted by Joe - 65 things that look like Pac-Man

And that’s a wrap, people. We’ll be back soon with more somethings from the Cogapp something (it’s late on a Friday, can you tell?)

Yes, it’s that time once again when we roll up our sleeves, plunge our hands expectantly into the digital tombola that is the Cogapp internal blog and pull out exciting prizes for all…

Social networking for your Gran
Spotted by Gavin

This is from a research project created by Middlesex University. In their words the project - known as Jive - is ‘a range of devices that you buy your grandparents. To let them keep up to date and stay in touch with you.’

An intriguing idea linking physical objects and digital communication and one that could clearly be adapted for museums and galleries. One to watch!

‘I’m looking for the mouse’
Spotted by Tristan

According to the always interesting Clay Shirky, that’s what one little girl said when asked by her father what she was doing rooting around behind the telly while watching Dora the Explorer.

Listen to this heartwarming - and thought provoking - story of a digital native, and other thoughts on the ‘cognitive surplus’ in this video from Web 2.0 Expo 08:

Web apps make anarchy easier
Spotted by Gavin

With the current petrol shortage (see how up to date we are?) what better way to find out where the juice is running low than this nifty Google Maps mash-up:

Social hysteria aside, it’s a good example of audience engagement and collaboration and at a very low cost.

And finally…

From Gizmodo, a good example of why you should always take your digital camera with you, spotted by Ian. It’s a twister!

http://gizmodo.com/5016814/why-you-should-carry-a-digital-camera-at-all-times

That’s it for this time. We’ll be back soon with more winning tickets from the Cogapp raffle.

e! Science News is a revolutionary website where absolutely everything is fully automated by harvesting content from other websites RSS feeds, article tags, reciprocal links, and no doubt many other techniques: http://esciencenews.com/

At the fully automated extreme it’s a fairly niche idea (as most organisations will want at least some control over their content), however it could certainly be a powerful framework to use for a single section of a website.

Here’s a little more information on how it works: http://esciencenews.com/about

This is the second part of an article looking at the authorial voice and what we can and can’t do with it.

Okay, deep breath…

So you’re a major cultural institution; you’ve got fantastic content and you’re an authority on it (well, as much as you can be these days). What happens when your most precious commodity leaks out online and starts appearing all over the place? What happens when the general public start to - gulp - edit it?

What can you do? Luckily there’s a simple answer to this one: nothing. You can’t do anything at all. Once it’s out there, it’s out there.

We can’t control the content other people generate, even if it borrows heavily on our own work (although certain ultra-rich authors might disagree with that). The cost involved in having staff trawl the web for doctored content and then try to fix it would be enormous - and pointless.

So if we accept that we have no control over this unauthorised content, we must ensure that there exists a definitive set of our ‘official’ content. If a Wikipedia article on a famous painting in your collection is wrong, that’s clearly not great. You can try policing all of those articles wherever they crop up but it’s probably easier to paint numbers onto waves. Better to provide tools that enable wikis and others to link back to your site - where you can provide your definitive guide to the work. You can’t really do much more than tell users where your opinion is held - and protect that site like a fortress!

Case in point - on a previous blog I wanted to include an image from a major institution’s collection, clearly mark it as their copyright and provide a link back into their online collection. But it turns out I can’t do that without emailing them, waiting for a response and possibly even paying them. I simply don’t have time for that, and of course there are lots of similar (free) images around. Result: they lost a link and free publicity.

We can’t stop people taking our content and doing what they want with it. And so the easier we make it for users to legitimately use or reference our content - in a way that you can control e.g. an object widget that users can embed in their own pages - the more likely they are to do so. A great commercial example of this is the iTunes Music Store. Why pay for a song that is wrapped up in DRM when you can ‘borrow’ one from peer-to-peer networks? Well, using those networks can be difficult (I am told) you have no guarantees as to the quality of the content you are accessing, download times vary, connections often drop… and the result is that Apple sell billions of songs a year. In this case - for the majority of users - it’s more work to break the law than to follow it.

So be as open as you can with your content but know where to draw the line. And User Generated Content? Well it has a place - although personally I’m not that interested in what Bernard from Skipton-Under-Lyme thinks of Marriage a la Mode - provided there is no confusion between users’ opinions and the curatorial one.

Rather than harvesting individual opinions it is perhaps more interesting to find out what society in general thinks of art - or as large a section of it as you can canvas. With that in mind do have a look at Brooklyn Museum’s forthcoming exhibition, Click! in which they are creating a public-curated gallery based on online submissions and voting. Anyone can vote; the process is simple, effective and quite eye opening. It could be a triumph, it could be a disaster - but it’s a fascinating experiment and one which I will watch with interest.

And he takes another breath at last!

For me, Shelley Bernstein from the Brooklyn Museum was a highlight speaker in this early session.

Shelley spoke about the agile and creative online projects that the small team at the Brooklyn Museum are creating to attract new audiences.

Cutting through some of the user research demographics, she simply stated that the Brooklyn Museum treats their online audience as a “single, credible group that has value in it’s own right”.

This was supported by the quality of projects they were producing such as the Facebook app Artshare: a new way for users to share their collection and display their favourite art works in their Facebook profile.

She went on to present the results from their youtube competition launched in October last year. The quality of the content was superb, fresh and low-fi. Shelley noted a good point about the importance of clear rules for their online competitions and the importance of letting the user know what the brief is and what they are being asked to do.

The Brooklyn Museum seems to be a small, confident leader in this field, where larger museums find it harder to be reactive and agile in such a high octane web 2 environment, Shelley and her team seem happy with the model of “begging for forgiveness when the project has launched” rather than “pleading for permission to go ahead”…

A refreshing and confident attitude that is attracting a credible, sustainable and engaged fanbase.

http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/click/

The BBC’s new home page has recently come out of beta and is available for all to see. It’s great to see an organisation like the BBC moving forward with this approach but I think it raises some questions:

1. It’s interesting to note which elements are customisable and which are not, most notably the large banner area near the top right hand corner of the page.

2. Whilst you can choose which news feeds you view, you can’t sort them in any meaningful way - I’d like to see this in a future release.

3. The BBC iPlayer widget seems redundant (on my poor Mac at any rate)

4. It is good to see search so prominently placed in the middle of the top navigation bar.

5. As potential downside to this approach: does it set users’ expectations too high about the rest of the site? Click on any link and you leave the whizzy customisable home page for a distinctly non-customisable destination.

Updating a site of this size is like painting the Forth Bridge (using old-fashioned paint) and it will never be completely uniform in terms of features and design, but I think it raises an interesting question of how much a home page should set the tone of all following pages.

Finally, as an old person I welcome the 1970s clock in the right hand corner. Completely unnecessary, a whimsical indulgence - but let’s hope the web always has room for these. I’m now waiting for the test card girl to make another appearance - as long as it’s not the scary one from Life on Mars…

You will almost certainly have solved one of these in the last month, if not dozens:

The uptake of CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) has been swift and widespread, as they offer a straightforward and directly effective method of determining whether the user is a human or a computer. Their success rests on discovering something humans are extremely good at, and computers are extremely bad at - interpreting the content of images. Until computers get better at doing this, spammers will continue struggling to overcome the CAPTHCA barrier without having to somehow involve organic brain power.

It takes, on average, 10 seconds for a person to solve one before they continue submitting whatever they are submitting. Just quickly enough for it not to become too disruptive or inconvenient, so long as you don’t have to do too many. But what may only be 30 seconds a week for you, is actually 1,050,000 hours a week for mankind. The inventors, Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas J. Hopper and John Langford, were worried about how much time their creation had begun wasting. Just think what could be done if a year of CAPTCHA-solving time was put to some other use, they recently thought….

Then they had a brilliant idea.

The benefit of computing limitations for spam-stopping is also a frustration for the good honest people who want to digitize the heaps and heaps of written text we cannot yet search, download or cut and paste from. OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is used to automatically render printed text as machine-editable text, and has been put to work scanning the millions and millions of pages we want to make digital. But, as Stuart will tell you from his recent experience, it’s a highly imprecise method, returning a mixture of well-rendered passages and absolute nonsense.

Enter the reCAPTHCA Project, turning 150,000 hours of wasted human labour into something dazzlingly efficient and useful. The words that computers can’t figure out when digitising texts become the CAPTCHAs, and we do what we are good at - interpret images. But wait! How will it work as a spam-filter if the makers don’t yet know what the words are?! You translate 2 words - one a designed CAPTCHA, the other a word OCR mangled somewhere. If you get the CAPATCHA right, your answer to the mangled word is returned as being correct. The same word is then given to a few other users to improve the accuracy of the result allowing everyone to help digitise the world’s written history, something otherwise predicted to take 400 years.

Well done, aren’t you clever?

Last Saturday saw Brighton’s first Hack Day, organised by the Farm collective as part of the Digital Festival, with the venue hire (and sherbet flying saucers) sponsored by Cogapp.

Around 40 assorted coders, thinkers and designers turned up at the Brighthelm Centre for a day of hackery: after a brief introduction by Paul Silver, it was time for everybody to ‘tag’ themselves using specially created stickers to indicate their abilities and requirements. Then we went round the room with each person saying who they were and what sort of thing they’d like to work on.

After that, we all divided into small groups to work on our chosen projects. I worked with Paul Perrin, Jonny Cross and Georges Panis to create a Facebook app called ‘de-facer’ which allows you to scribble on any of your friends’ profile pictures using a Flash interface, and to have the resulting picture saved as an image and uploaded to a Facebook album. It’s still distinctly a work-in-progress, but if you’re interested, you can try it out by adding it to your Facebook profile.

There followed 6 hours of coding, interrupted only by lunch (sponsored by Magpie), and then it was time for the demos of the final projects. Apart from our own, the projects that were presented were as follows:

• Real-world text adventure by the Coding Dojo group
  A crazy Heath Robinson unholy mashup. A text-based adventure game was enhanced to allow real-world interaction, such as pouring hot coffee on a temperature-sensing chip, or scanning cards embedded with RFID tags. Extremely inventive and successfully delivered on time - a testament to Scrum and the the agile programming techniques that they used.
• Jokes by Tweet by Paul Silver and others
  This group used the Twitter API so that when you follow this ‘person’ it tells you a new joke every hour.
• In-browser bluescreen compositing by Jamie Campbell
  Jamie harnessed C++ and Python to allow you to mix bluescreened photos with other backgrounds within your browser.
• Semantic web friend finder by Tom Morris
  Tom created a PHP class to allow you to query RDF data to find related friends across different social media networks. This will be released as open source, and in a variety of languages shortly.
• ScOolBOok by Stamati Crook
  A web application to allow school children to upload and manage programmes they’ve written in scratch. The design aim was to be a ‘Facebook for 8 year olds’

All in all Hack Day was a great success. There were loads of interesting and passionate people there, which made for a great atmosphere. Here’s to another one next year!

Links:

Hack Day blog

Photos on Flickr

    &    

Hot on the heels of barcamp comes another techy unconference, and this time we’re sponsoring it! Yes, it’s Brighton’s first Hack Day, which will take place on Saturday 17th November at the Brighthelm Centre.Hack Day is organised by local freelancer collective The Farm, as part of the Digital Festival.

Details are sketchy at the moment, but the basic idea seems to be that people from all walks of life (well, designers, developers and ‘ideas people’ at the very least) get together and spend the day in small groups creating fun projects.

Tickets are free, but limited to 80 places, so keep your eye on the official site at www.farmhackday.com to make sure you get a place once registration opens.

If you’ve got any ideas for projects that you’d like to see us work on, please leave a comment.