Hemlock is Mint's toolkit for building Flash applications that support real-time many-to-many interaction. Hemlock is open source. We hope to release it mid-February.

Thursday's mashup* event is about the 'Realtime Social Web'. We will be demoing two Hemlock applications there to show the type of application it inspires.

I've recently discovered e-mint. It is a Yahoo! Group that discusses how to run online communities.

They are a friendly bunch, as shown by the warm welcome I received from Tamara Littleton of eModeration:

"We worked with a Mint Digital application on a very successful social network for ABC Family over at Disney [Virtual Rush], we love you guys :)

Not everyone puts as much care into the moderation tools. They're often an afterthought so it was good to work with people who thought about how moderators would use the tools."

It's reassuring to see that e-mint possesses the very features of online friendliness that it exists to promote.

Mint is working on a new project. It's about wisdom. I can't say much more than that right now.

Today, I stumbled across a new book. Wisdom. It is "inspired by the idea that wisdom is the greatest gift one generation can give to another."

Andrew Zuckerman, the author, says:

"My whole life I've looked up to older people. It just seemed logical to me that these are the people that have done it. They've got all the secrets. Why wouldn't you ask them?"

Thanks Andrew. You've created a wonderful piece of work. Mint is inspired.

When Ned Canty from NYTVF approached Mint about hosting an event, he was keen to avoid the typical panel format. He wanted something that focused on the creative challenges of producing cross-platform entertainment.

Inspired by Wikinomics, I thought I'd try an open source approach to the ideas development process.

Creativity Live was a mass-participation brainstorm between three sharp digital minds (Ian Schafer from Deep Focus, Paul Kontonis from For Your Imagination and Tom Ajello from Poke NY) and 150 audience members.

Last month was 2gether08. The stand-out speaker was Russell Davies who gave a wonderfully counter-intuitive talk on how being clear often runs counter to being interesting.

Also Julian Baggini was great talking about his Welcome to Everytown experience. At a technology conference, it is easy to forget how important locality is to most people. Two thirds of Britains live within five miles of where they were born.

Mint was proud to premiere Web 2.0: The Musical. It looks like we'll perform this nonsense again. Watch this space.

Also, I made a speech on How to be Generous. Here's the Guardian's take on it.

Today, on August 1, 2008, both the UK and US offices of Mint Digital internationally celebrated the first Ron DeVera day. Simply put, Ron was the first employee hired by Mint Digital to sport a mustache. Since his arrival at Mint, he has ascended to near legendary status through his relentless work ethic, peerless HTML/CSS/JS skills, and his total domination in all company award categories. All these traits are personified by the tasteful choice of facial hair that has endeared Ron to Mint.

In the quest for the secret to the DeVera mojo, Mint Digital requested that all employees cultivate what is known simply as "the look". All the entries have been digitally documented and uploaded to Mint Digital's photo challenge site which was developed at this year's WebApp Weekender. Anecdotally, Mint has found that the mustaches have improved the collective morale, increased individual productivity, flattened the learning curves for difficult technologies, enhanced creative output both qualitatively and quantitatively, and have provided numerous unspoken benefits outside of the office as well.

Personally, I must say that I was confronted with aesthetic choices of uncommon weight and subtlety. When I fashioned my mustache early this morning, there was a temptation to be outlandish, a seduction towards the theatre of the garish.

However, I reflected and stopped myself immediately. This was no banal mustache-growing competition one might find in some underfunded regional circus.

This was Ron DeVera's day.

Sometimes Tom likes to work in private.

I have just come back from Digital Hollywood where I spent the whole of last week. Highlights included:

• Listening to Chuck D, founder of Public Enemy speak. I reckon he might be the best speaker on digital publishing that I have heard. Some highlights included:
• Don't worry too much about contractual terms and other barriers to getting stuff out there. If you have a good idea it's most important that you just get it out there. The deal will fall into place;
• When somebody compared UGC to McDonald's and said that people prefer editorially selected content (fine restaurants where people were prepared to spend big money) to UGC (McD's), Mista Chuck pointed out that whilst nobody ever reheated a Big Mac, if you bite into a fresh one, it tastes really good (and so it is for UGC).
• What was most special was that Chuck D used 10 words when most people would have used 100 and he clearly had not just read a bunch of blogs and regurgitated the consensus. Maybe not surprising given that he has a track record of innovation in music. Afterwards I got the chance to trade a few stories with him from back in the day (him from Long Island, me from the Swansea Valley) as per the photo (apologies for picture quality but this was taken on a 59p hamburger of a camera phone);

Just in case anyone is looking for something to print off and read in the park, here are two articles that have inspired us Mints recently:

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus by Clay Shirky. Is Mint trying to solve this problem or make it worse?

Sign Up Forms Must Die by Luke Wroblewski. We've been designing flows along these lines for a little while now. It is nice to see someone voice this approach.

The last two days were demanding. On Thursday each team worked on the presentation of their idea.

Friday was pitching day. It ended on a high. The BBC commissioned Different and Mint to develop the "Doctor Who: In Parallel" idea.

We've just launched the Lonely Planet Desktop Countdown.

It's a neat little app that counts down to your holiday. Every day it offers you a local tip and tells you the weather in the place that you are travelling to.

The app is part of the promotional campaign for the Lonely Planet Encounter city guides. Over the next few weeks, the Desktop Countdown will be promoted on coffee sleeves at 14 locations in London, banners on Yahoo! Weather and on London Underground posters. The total reach of the marketing campaign will be to over 3.6 million people. We snapped this Lonely Planet Desktop Countdown poster at Vauxhall tube, round the corner from our office.

From a technology point of view it is pretty cool. It is the first time Mint has used Adobe AIR. AIR is Adobe’s platform for creating desktop apps. It brings the web closer to our desktop. It blurs the boundary between online and offline. In short, it opens up a bunch of new possibilities.

Have a read of 6 Adobe AIR Apps to check out to see what other uses people have been making of AIR.

I'm at the BBC Innovation Labs in Yorkshire this week.

The Labs are made up of 10 teams, five mentors and one Development Producer from BBC Research & Innovation. Five BBC commissioners arrived today.

We have got a vacancy for someone to dream up and develop mass-participation web ideas.

Well, a few other Mints and I are just back from Scotland on Rails and what a good time we had! First, it's always good to be back in the homeland. Second, it was a great conference.

What made it for me was the size. It was big enough to have decent talks but small enough to get to meet everyone you wanted. Out of the talks I saw, the JRuby talk, on Saturday was particularly interesting. I've been meaning to give this more attention for a while and this has definitely reinforced the reasons for doing so.

Jonathan Weiss gave an interesting talk on Rails patterns which crossed over with our work at Mint. It's great to see someone else talk about ideas we've been playing with internally. Image processing and asset storage are things we deal with in almost every project.

We also had a great post-conf meetup in London on Tuesday. I wasn't aware at the time but it was actually a music and Ruby hacking meet. Writing Ruby to make music anyone? Combining two things you love is always good!

Anyway, a great conference all round and I'll be back next year (if it's on!). Well done guys. Check out the photos.

Added by Andy Bell: Two Mints were speaking at the conference. Paul Dix was speaking on collective intelligence. Thomas was speaking on high-performance rails apps. I added the photo too, in case anyone is wondering why Thomas is posting pictures of himself.

Mint has just returned from a long weekend in the Dorset countryside. We split into three teams and spent four days competing to build the best web application.

As well as drinking loads of booze, we created some pretty cool apps.

Oh!Creative is a platform for freelance designers to showcase their work. It also allows people commissioning that work to manage their workflow and scheduling.

All Mints together (first time for 18 months!)

We've just launched the Skins website for Company Pictures.

There were two things we were aiming for.

Firstly, to let fans get closer to the show's production process. Skins is written by a team of super-talented young writers, working with a bunch of experienced professionals. SkinsLife mimics this process and expands it online.

Secondly, to combine web and real-world activity. A key part of SkinsLife is a party tour. Big-name headliners (soon to be announced) mingle with SkinsLife members showing off their talents. This collision of web and real-life talent will make the parties burst with energy.

The site is striking visually (thanks, Tal!) and offers our slickest usability yet (I especially like the multimedia commenting, a new BloomBox feature).

On the web, words are key. It has been fantastic working with a red-hot drama team who know how to write sentences that zing off the page. Combine that with their deep empathy for their audience and you begin to understand why Skins feels so very different.

We are really proud of SkinsLife. Hope you like it too.

I've just returned from Crossing the Void in Bristol. There was an interesting session on Picture This, a cross-platform photography project.

The discussion was between Preloaded (the web producer) Renegade Productions (the TV producer) and Channel 4 (the commissioner). Here’s some notes:

• "I had hoped the web and the TV would be more integrated" said Alan Hayling from Renegade. This frustration was echoed throughout the team. He said that budget had been part of the problem but also there had been a conservatism on the part of the TV production crew. He would fight that harder next time.
• 11.4% of web sessions are 30 minutes or longer. The average session includes 14 page views. These stats are helping when Channel 4 considers whether to recommission.
• A community web site is a supportive environment. A modern TV show is conflict driven. It was hard to reconcile this tension. Flickr, who provided the web infrastructure, had to be handled with care. The TV show ran counter to their corporate belief that "no photo is better than another".
• Flickr were keen to keep all branding and traffic off their core site. They care passionately about their community and wanted their members to have to deliberately opt-in.
• Preloaded repeatedly iterated designs with target users (in "lab conditions"). One surprising discovery is that many potential users were intimidated by Flickr and felt their work is somehow "not worthy". Armed with this insight, Preloaded focused on making the website approachable, constructive and friendly.
• The plan for one sequence was to film the judges and the mentors reviewing web photos, and to incorporate this footage into the TV show. This didn’t work well in the edit. So it evolved into this budget being spent paying those people to comment directly on photos on the website. This proved popular.

On the train home everyone agreed that Katz (b.TWEEN), the organiser, is a great "curator of people". In particular, it was inspiring to meet Monterosa (mass-participation TV) and Team Rubber (viral marketing).

I just spent 4 days in Las Vegas at the Consumer Electronics Show. It was a spectacular event.

With over 140,000 attendees, CES is the largest trade show in America.

In addition to the latest gadgetry, including the biggest and thinnest plasma screens and the smallest HD cameras, CES also hosted Digital Hollywood, a conference program dedicated to content, entertainment and technology.

Despite some interesting topics, the sessions consisted of the usual industry rhetoric and hyperbole. Cutting through this, one panel made some predictions for how digital media will evolve in the coming year:

Eyal Hertzog, Founder, Metacafe: “More content owners are going to realize the value of the long-tail and make their material available online. There are still millions of hours of content out there and there’s no reason not to make it available.”

Just before Christmas I watched all 20 episodes of the web series Rush’d< on ABC Family’s Virtual Rush social website.

Mint built Virtual Rush to support ABC's Greek. At the end of each show the stars laid down a challenge to the audience.

And boy did the audience respond… The amount of original and compelling content uploaded has been phenomenal. Over the 10 weeks of the show, a gargantuan battle to be crowned one of the six Virtual Rush finalists ensued.

But what happened since then is even more interesting. Once the six finalists were chosen, ABC Family flew them to LA from their homes in Ohio, Chicago, Florida, North Carolina, Wichita and New York. They were given the week of a lifetime. They hung out amongst the stars. They took acting lessons. They even met the cast of Greek.

Rush'd is a 20-webisode series charting the finalists' journeys. It makes great viewing.

If you are a regular on Virtual Rush, you feel like you know them. You have a deep affinity with them as you have been with them since the beginning of their journey.

This is a genuine cross-platform, 360 degree (call it what you like) format. There's been lots of talk, yet I am not aware of a single social website that has spawned a mini-series (talent and all). If there is another one, please tell me I'm wrong. ABC Family are true innovators in this much talked about space.

Note: Virtual Rush is geo-blocked outside the US. Europeans will have to take my word for it!