Puffbox

A public thank-you to the numerous people who have been in touch regarding possible download or purchase of the Puffbox NewsMap app. Jeff Jarvis mentioned it on his blog on Friday, and since then we’ve had a steady flow of people looking at our ‘about’ page, and feeling like they’d like to know more. It’s genuinely flattering (as is being mentioned in the same post as Mr Holovaty).

The app was never really intended to ‘go global’, but it’s becoming obvious that there’s a demand for something like this. We’ll need a little while to fine-tune what we’ve done, and make it easier to install and set up on systems we aren’t already familiar with. Plus we’ll need to think about nasty things like licensing and commercials. We’re also experimenting with a potential new ‘polygon creator’ feature… but we’re not necessarily sure it’s a useful addition. (Would you want it? If so, let me know.)

By the way, if you’re interested in the app and you haven’t seen the explanatory page on Puffbox.com, have a look. It’s got a new visual showing the page in Puffbox branding, and showing the ‘sidebar’ functionality which Sky (so far) haven’t implemented.

It took a few weeks, but Wales has its minority administration, the Assembly has its first Minister… and the BBC’s Welsh political correspondent, Betsan Powys is finally granted permission to have a proper blog, having plugged away at the Election 07 blog for much longer than she must have expected.

A word too, incidentally, for Vaughan Roderick – who is bashing out several politically themed postings per day, and in Cymraeg too. Vaughan, in case you didn’t know, is Golygydd Materion Cymreig. So that completes the set of BBC regional political editors. Who’s next?

There’s a new feature in the sidebar of Nick Robinson’s BBC blog: a list of ‘Blogs linking here’. It’s quite a nice feature, with a couple of extracts from particular blogs (selected and extracted manually), plus links off to Google Search and Technorati searches.

I’ve done something similar with a couple of projects recently (see here), using this as a proxy to Trackbacks (which are questionable at the best of times). Comment Is Free does likewise, with links to preconstructed Technorati searches for every article it posts… just click the green Technorati logo. It wouldn’t be a huge stretch to pull in the Technorati search results via RSS, and display them automatically on the page… but that becomes a huge risk.

I confess, I wasn’t expecting this: the Daily Telegraph has just unveiled its own RSS-reading website, an extension of the existing My Telegraph blogging platform. Shane writes:

First of all we’ve chosen the feeds for our readers. Purists will argue that this goes against the spirit of RSS, which is about choosing whatever you want. However, while the first half of My Telegraph, community, was about bringing blogs to people who had never tried them before, so the second half, personalisation, is about bringing news feeds to novices.

By limiting choice, we’ve taken most of the hard work out of setting up an RSS reader. My Telegraph members can choose from more than 100 feeds in eight categories and the site will automatically remember their preferences for the next visit.

The next release of the site will add a customisable category, with fifteen empty slots for any feed you like. We’re holding it back to let people get used to the feed reading concept first.

Not sure if/when I’ll get time to play with this – besides, I’m definitely a purist on this one. But I tell you what: selling solutions based on RSS to large corporate clients just got an awful lot easier.

Less than a week ago, Puffbox handed over our map-mashup tool for journalists to Sky News. Sky went live with it on Monday, as part of their Crime Uncovered week. Today:

One of Britain’s most wanted men has been arrested after being featured on the Sky News website. Police had been hunting the 62-year-old man in connection with the murder of a woman in Cannock, Staffordshire. Detectives said that the arrest came from people looking at our interactive map, which forms part of our Crime Uncovered section.

You don’t mess with Puffbox. Guess we’d better add ‘crimebusting’ to our list of consultancy services. 😉

I’ve put enough money into Bono’s pockets over the years. I might try to get some back. 🙂

(To my shame, I can’t immediately think of a better U2 pun, based on a better known song. Anyone?)

I mentioned last week that we’d delivered our Google Map mashup mechanism to Sky News, for use in their Crime Uncovered week. You can see the first output from it here – but as I said last time, bear in mind the really clever stuff is on the back end, as a non-specialist journalist puts all this together.

Presenting the first run of official Puffbox business cards. Basically it’s the company logo in all the various palette colours, plus a few ‘special editions’. I’ve got half a mind to ‘open source’ the second run; so get your thinking caps on. 😉

It’s a big day for Puffbox, my own little web consultancy. Today we officially delivered our first ‘built from scratch’ product: SkyMapping, a map-based mashup mechanism we designed and developed for my old mates at Sky News.

The idea came to me in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings. It was a major news story confined within a very small geographic area, with lots of eyewitness accounts, some accompanied by photos and even video. But you didn’t really get a sense of how it all pieced together. What happened where, and who saw what? And where exactly is Virginia Tech anyway? The BBC has quite a nice visual treatment of the events, but it’s basically just a static aerial photo with embedded links to content lower down the page – very ‘web 1.0’. I had an idea that we could do more.

Having lashed together a few things with Google Maps (like a map-based view of MPs’ activity driven by TheyWorkForYou, or this one using BBC football headlines), I knew there were ways we could use the Google Maps API to identify a particular aerial view, mark points on it, and add rich HTML content into the pop-up ‘speech bubbles’. With a bit of extra coding, you could create a notional ‘sequence’ of points, with each one linking to the next, letting you tell a proper flowing narrative. Plus of course, inherent in the Google application, you can click around a bit to ‘get your bearings’, or switch from ‘map’ view to ‘satellite’.

Any geek could have told you this; many geeks could have built it too. But the really clever bit has been the usability on the ‘back-end’. We’ve made it a doddle for a non-geek journalist to throw a ‘flowing narrative’ mashup together in a matter of minutes. To position a point, there’s a draggable map with a crosshair over the centre: place the crosshair exactly where you want the point (with all the usual Google zoom controls), and press ‘save’. To create the ‘sequence’ of points, it’s a couldn’t-be-simpler drag-and-drop interface.

The first use of the application will be next week, as part of Sky’s Crime Uncovered week. Viewers are being invited to make their own video clips, and upload them to Sky’s YouTube-style site, SkyCast; the newsroom team will pick them up from there, and plonk them on the map. From the front-end, it won’t look a lot different to Sky’s last foray into Google Maps, for its Green Britain week. The concept doesn’t really lend itself to the ‘flowing narrative’ model, so the more advanced functions probably won’t be used. But this is only the start.

Since I started on the project, there’s been something nearly every day which lent itself to map-based presentation. Today for example: the trail of Polonium traces round London in the wake of Alexander Litvinenko’s death; the continuing search for Madeleine; Blair’s farewell tour; the daily review of the local evening papers; I could go on. But it’ll really prove its worth next time we have something like the 7/7 bombings. Lots of media which can be plotted to a particular place; and put together ‘live’ by journalists, not designers or developers.

Dan Gillmor blogged earlier this week: ‘It’s mind-boggling to me that more news organizations aren’t taking advantage of (maps’) possibilities, or, in most cases, even bothering to learn what’s possible.’ I like to think that our SkyMapping app may open some eyes in Osterley. Particular thanks to Hugh and Simon over at Sky; and my boy Gareth, who did most of the hard work. We’re great.

It came as a bit of a surprise to see former BBC reporter Clarence Mitchell popping up on camera out in Praia da Luz. Tony Hatfield has been digging around, and it transpires that Clarence – whose day job is heading up Whitehall’s Media Monitoring Unit – has been temporarily seconded to the Foreign Office to handle ‘media relations’ out there.

In my view, it’s entirely appropriate for the Foreign Office to offer consular assistance to the McCanns… and given the unparalleled media interest in their plight, it’s entirely appropriate for that consular assistance to include the services of someone with significant media experience himself. But I’m intrigued as to the extent of his role. Someone is clearly doing a spectacularly good publicity job for the McCanns – they’re still a ‘top story’ nearly a month after Madeleine’s disappearance. Is this Clarence? Normally you’d expect the ‘family liaison’ job to be about keeping the family away from the media…