So, I spent the last couple of days learning about 'the future' at the Future of Web Design conference in wonderful New York City. It was great fun. There were lots of interesting topics and inspiring people. Here is a brief run down:

Day 1

There were talks on a wide range of topics including designing for mobile, flash design, AJAX, finding inspiration and CSS3. My personal highlights were Ryan Singer's (37signals) talk on web usability, Ryan Sims' (Virb) and Keith Robinson's tag team approach to redesigning a site like IMDb. Also Jeffrey Kalmikoff skinnyCorp had an excellently presented chat about community-centred design.

The evening finished off with a Media Temple hosted party in the heart of NYC offering free booze and three floors of DJs. I chatted to, amongst others, Tyson an awesome designer at Virb and Keegan from The Big Noob.

Day 2

The day was made up of two workshops. In the morning Ryan Singer talked through his approach to usability for web apps. The main theme was focus on keeping the design as close to reality as possible. For instance, no lorem ipsum, keep the content real.

In the afternoon, I went to Lea Alcantara's branding workshop. This touched on many things I was already aware of from the web design sphere, but it was interesting to hear it from a branding perspective. A highlight was having to interview her as an Italian chef.

All-in-all it was an inspiring couple of days. I look forward to future events arranged by Carson Systems, along with getting back to a good round of Photoshop back in the UK.

We've just launched a new version of the mobileAct website for Orange, SonyEricsson and Channel 4.

1500 bands initially applied. This was whittled down to 50 when the show started and now twelve. Bands can upload video and pictures and write blogs - building their online fan base will be crucial as the series progresses.

Watch the show on T4, 12.15 Sundays.

I've just returned from Cross Creative in Glasgow. It was interesting to hear Andrew Chitty discuss Illumina's approach. In some areas it is quite similar to Mint, in other areas quite different.

For Empire's Children, Illumina built a map for users to submit their histories. Illumina felt it was important to bridge the gap between professional quality of TV content and amateur quality of much web content. From what Andrew showed, they did a good job of this.

When Wall to Wall saw the site, their immediate reaction was 'it would have been great if we'd had a tool like that when we were making the TV show'. Currently they are working together on a project to make that happen. That elusive 'genuinely 360 idea' edges closer.

Recently, Illumina have taken on some projects for museums. Like TV, museums group people together by shared passion. Unlike TV, museums exist in the physical world. This is interesting. Lots of the most interesting 360 ideas in advertising (e.g. Nike's RunLondon or Innocent's Fruitstock) exist mainly in the real world (and only secondarily online). I think this trend towards the real world will extend into TV cross-platform ideas. The MobileAct project we are working on for Channel 4 has a massive real-world element.

For the new Centre of Cell experience, Illumina created a website that you need to visit before and after visiting the museum. The museum itself becomes one part of a bigger experience.

For Kew Gardens, Illumina noticed there were 4 million photos on Flickr tagged 'Tree'. This shows a tremendous level of interest. Illumina's aim building the new site is to bring this conversation within the Kew site.

This half of Illumina's work is about user-generated content and the participatory web and is similar to what Mint do. The other half involves narrative and video production and is a whole different world.

On November 8th and 9th, the TV, digital media and advertising industries will converge on the Future of Television forum. Speakers include executives from Fox Interactive, NBC, ABC and Endemol USA.

Mint is one of the main media sponsors. The Future of Television builds on the success of UGTV and NYTVF’s Digital Frontiers panel to promote discussion about the creative possibilities of cross-platform TV.

We've recently made some changes on Islandoo.

The Islandoo casting system is now open to anyone casting for TV, film, music, adverts or theatre. (Previously, it had been exclusive to the Shipwrecked team). In the first week, 8 shows signed up.

We designed the system to help casting professionals. There is a slick interface for managing the casting process. Each opportunity gets promoted to Islandoo's 38,000 members.

The community gets what they are looking for: lots of chances to shine.

Here's what the tech blogs say: Techcrunch, Mashable.

In collaboration with Channel 4, we are hiring a trainee web producer.

To apply, visit 4careers site and enter reference 4T TWP.

Just back from RailsConf Europe. These were my three top moments:

1. Jason Hoffman's session on scaling was really superb. Over the last few months we've had to deal with scaling a Rails app urgently. Jason had sound advice and interesting perspectives.

The headline is scaling isn't a Rails problem but a network and hardware issue. Interesting things Jason suggested:

• Use multiple asset hosts to get more connections to the browser (e.g. most browsers will open only 2 connections per host, if you set up media1, 2, 3 and 4 for assets even if they all point to the same box, the browser will open up to 8 connections.
• Use DNS in a major way.
• Make separate apps for each controller and keep them on their own boxes/processes. This may sound strange, but Jason said most apps could have the following DNS (either on the same box or different ones):
  • Dynamic (domain.com)
  • Static (assets1-4, 5-8)
  • Uploads (break into separate app)
  • Downloads (unauthenticated to static servers, sixty secs urls for authenticated)
  • Admin

2. Evan Phoenix spoke well on Rubinius the new Ruby virtual machine. It was a really fun talk with some carefully made up graphs and stats. The bottom line is that it is much faster, takes less memory and is much easier to fix bugs or extend as most is written in Ruby.

3. For me, the real highlights were the events surrounding the conference. Both Bratwurst on Rails on the Sunday and Reject Conf on Tuesday night were great places to meet with loads of interesting people, including the guys from SoundCloud and my fellow countrymen from Scotland on Rails.

Thanks to everyone who came to UGTV London. Here's some pics.

The event was described as "excellent" by Colin Donald and "very interesting" by Mark James Bowness.

A more sceptical note was sounded by Ved Sen.

Coming up tomorrow night: UGTV New York.

Last year we ran an evening conference call UGTV '06. It seemed to create some worthwhile conversations. (At the very least, we enjoyed it and met some interesting people.)

Since then, this whole area has developed rapidly. There is growing understanding of the the types of project that are likely to work and those that aren't.

On a Mint Digital level, we've recently opened a New York office to better service the needs of two big American clients we are creating social applications for.

To celebrate, this year we are running events in New York and London. We've got a great line-up of speakers and good food, so they promise to be enjoyable and informative evenings. To request an invite, please go to the relevant page. Hope to see you there!

Thomas and I popped along to the FOWD conference last week.

3 highlights from the day.

1. Denise Wilton from Moo spoke about how to add character to your web app. She asked the question, "how do you want people to *feel* when using your web app?". This is a great question. We talk about users a lot. We sometimes forget that they are people, with feelings and emotions. Denise encouraged the audience to think about language and typography. Just look at the Moo sign in page. Chatty language and friendly type makes me feel welcome here.

2. William Rosen works for Leo Burnett, the company behind the 'Verb Yellowball campaign'. The idea: 500,000 yellow balls were dropped across the US in an attempt to get children moving. Each ball gave kids three simple instructions. (1) Play with them. (2) Blog your stories. (3) Pass them on. I loved this idea. No fancy technology required. No fancy UI required. Just a great idea. Only made possible by the connective power of the web.

3. Andy Clarke, Creative Director at Stuff and Nonsense showed everyone his cool wall. He took the piss out of Dropsend and claimed it was uncool. For Mr Clarke, Google and Flickr were the only two sites that deserved to have the tag 'sub-zero'. That's cooler than cool!

......................................

See FOWD photos on Flickr

An interesting quote from Julian Michon, Director of New Faces at Models 1:

"Scouting for new models used to involve hanging around shopping centres and airports. Now the best talent is online.

"The modelling industry is moving very fast, competition is very high. When we came across Islandoo, we were blown away! The site allows us to see a lot of people quickly. It means we are more likely to find the next superstar."

Other news:

• At Mint HQ, the consensus is that Say Everything is one of the best articles on social media we've read for a while:

  "As younger people reveal their private lives on the Internet, the older generation looks on with alarm and misapprehension not seen since the early days of rock and roll. The future belongs to the uninhibited."

• A new version of the BloomBox website is now live, designed by new Mint recruit Tom Harman. Welcome, Tom!

I've just returned from Future Media.

On my panel, everyone was running social media sites. Some interesting perspectives:

Celia Taylor from Trouble Homegrown is working hard to get advertisers and musicians (including Gwen Stefani, Justin Timberlake and Oasis) more closely involved in the creative challenges that Homegrown promotes. Reading between the lines, it sounds like Trouble are seeing similar opportunities to the ones we are seeing with Islandoo.

Patrick Uden from Four Docs noted that it is remarkable how their community responds to constraints. When Four Docs launched, there was concern that four minutes was too short for a decent narrative. That has proved no problem. Recently Four Docs had a great response to a Mini Docs competition which invited members to create 59 sec documentaries.

Simon Gunning from Yahoo described how Yahoo Video is a giant mass of content. Advertisers are only interested in getting involved in parts that are closely monitored and editorialised (for instance The 9). He also enthused about the important of competitions - as witnessed by Bix. (Bix is like a giant Kittenwar).

In other news:

• Adrian Hon said Perplexcity is being taken in a web 2.0 direction. It will be interesting to see what that means.
• In their talks, both Claire Tavernier (Fremantle) and David Fischer (MySpace) mentioned Islandoo as an example of exciting developments online. :-)

We are looking for a super talented designer. Someone who doesn't just make things look nice, but who also thinks deeply and cleverly about user interaction. If you know someone who fits that bill, please point them to this job description.

The lucky candidate will be working on Islandoo and a couple of exciting BloomBox projects in the pipeline. In my biased opinion, it would be hard to find a more exciting, interesting and challenging job if you are a designer with a passion for the opportunities of the social web.

Last Tuesday evening, a slip of the keyboard accidentally sent 500 emails that soft-launched Islandoo, the first BloomBox-powered website.

Islandoo lets you apply for Channel 4's hit reality show Shipwrecked. Shipwrecked gets tens of thousands of applications. Islandoo uses Web 2.0 techiques to let the fans filter the best candidates to the top.

A couple of BloomBox features we are particularly pround of:

1. The user can upload photo or video in pretty much any format. If a photo is uploaded, it is centred, resized and converted to jpeg. Video can be uploaded in over 160 formats. It is resized and converted to Flash. The user can then choose between 6 frame grabs to use as the thumbnail image.

2. The profile page makes extensive use of Ajax techniques to improve the user experience. Comments and fans can be added without the need for a page refresh. We've been amazed by how much the inhabitants of Islandoo communicate with each other and how friendly they are. The slickness of the Ajax interface must take much of the credit for this.

Here's what users say:

"This site it more addictive than crack!" Burnsybaby

"I'm literally just doing this and making a cup of tea roughly every 45 minutes... MySpace has already got me by the balls, and now this!" Gabsy

In the internet spirit of 'release early, release often', there are parts of Islandoo that aren't to our satisfaction. However in a week we've learnt a huge amount about how users interact, and we are working hard on incorporating that thinking into future versions.

One thing we are struggling with is how to make 'popularity' as good as possible a measure of who should be on Shipwrecked. If you've got any ideas, we'd love to hear: andy@mintdigital.com.

Our latest session interviewing MySpace teens turned up a bit of a different pattern of MySpace usage. Check out the contrast with a previous, perhaps slightly male-dominated session here.

Main use of MySpace The girls we interviewed this week said they spent around 70% of their time on MySpace looking at the profiles of and communicating with people they know well. They communicate through private messages, public comments and a bit through their blogs.

Minor uses They spend about 20% of the time finding new bands and listening to music. The remaining ten percent or so is divided between surfing profiles of those they don’t know at all and keeping in touch with those they know vaguely offline.

No time spent on profile, then? They put absolutely minimal effort into their profiles. So they either have a profile with basically no information and no design, or have a more complex one that they did put some time into originally but now don't bother to modify. Despite (because of?) being good-looking in person they have only jokey, appearance-obscured photos on MySpace.

Jokey eh? In fact irony and in-jokes play a huge role for much of the time they are on the site. Sarah described what they do on MySpace as “just joking, just messing around. The comments we leave are pointless, really”. Katie echoed this, “It’s just a big joke. We use it out of boredom”.

So why not just use email or SMS? MySpace is seen as being more convenient for communication. Also, particularly leaving a friend a public comment is seen as more enjoyable than, for example, an SMS text. One of the group, though, still uses email as much as MySpace for communicating with friends.

What’s the most important thing on a profile? The song… although that can be a joke too.

Attitude towards MySpace? “If everyone keeps themselves to themselves then its great” said Sarah, “I am wary, but that goes with everything on the internet”. This group didn’t feel guilty about spending time on MySpace. The feeling was that although from one perspective using MySpace could be thought of as a waste of time, at root it is good fun.

Will you still use MySpace when you are 30? “Probably. It’s a fantastic way of having a laugh… plus I’ll use it for music”.

MySpace friends? Meeting people through MySpace? They would never communicate (now) with people they haven’t met. All get a steady stream of friend requests from strangers, but either delete them without looking at them or leave them unopened. “In the early days” (i.e. 8 months ago), one girl met someone who has now become a collaborator in music and good friend offline, but that could never happen now.

Other social-networking sites? Bebo had never been used by any of them. Faceparty and hi5 had been used for a little while but no longer: “MySpace is where my friends are”.

"So, the thing you do most on MySpace is check out profiles of people you don't know. Do you ever communicate with any of these people?" "Never!"

Notes from a recent session interviewing teens about MySpace.

Breakdown of time spent on MySpace (figures are percentages, names are changed)

	Charlie (19yrs)	Lucy (18yrs)	Fred (18yrs)
Modifying own profile	5	10 or 15	5
Communicating with good friends	25 or 30	25	25
C-ting with people they know vaguely	15	10 or 15	10
Communicating with MySpace friends	0	0	10
Surfing profiles of known people	5	25	15
Surfing profiles of unknown people	45	25	35

[However all said they spent a lot of time setting up profile initially]

Attitude towards MySpace? People are slightly embarrassed/ guilty about spending time on MySpace. A few hours spent on MySpace is seen as wasted time. Someone might sarcastically joke when going home from pub, “I am going on MySpace now”, because its kind of a sad thing to do. Charlie feels he has kudos from having deleted his MySpace account.

Meet new people through MySpace? Very rare. Only Charlie met someone for real having first met them on MySpace, and that was something to do with music. Fred spends time communicating with MySpace-only friends, but could never imagine meeting them in the flesh.

Develop peripheral friendships through MySpace? This seems to be a way MySpace changes peoples’ offline lives. It’s possible to develop a friendship with someone you met briefly at a pub/club. Phoning would be too much. But you might become friends with them through communicating on MySpace.

How do users surf? Often/usually they spend time looking through friends’ networks of friends and then those peoples’ friends, with no interaction. Usually limit it to people in the same geographic area. So if they reach a profile of someone who lives far away, they will retrace their steps to return to profiles of local people. Mostly surfing seems to be about checking out how good-looking people are.

What’s the most important thing on someone’s profile? Definitely the photo.

Useful tools? You can save as ‘favorites’ profiles you like to look at (without the people who own those profiles being informed). Fred didn’t know this but was very excited on hearing about this tool. Also, they thought being able to see number of times a profile has been viewed would be a good feature.

How realistic are profiles? Users very selective about photos they use. People always significantly less good-looking in real life than on profile.

MySpace also used for? Charlie said the one thing he will miss is not being able to keep track of club nights and bands on MySpace. Lucy used MySpace a lot to check out clubs and pubs; what’s on, opening hours, entry price.

Attitudes towards businesses using MySpace for marketing? Not worried about it at all. No feeling of intrusion. Users often hear about things being marketed through ‘bulletin’ on MySpace homepage (e.g. X-men), but easy to ignore.

Use MySpace in 10 years time? Charlie said “I don’t have time to have a life and be on MySpace”. They indicated they only used it because they had a lot of time on their hands. None could imagine spending much time on a social networking site when they are 30.

Other social networks? Basically they just use MySpace. Charlie and Fred thought Bebo maybe for younger people. Lucy hadn’t heard of Bebo.

Emails enticing you to join social networking sites… Considered really annoying. Charlie said if he received such an email he will delete it straight away and make a point of not joining the site concerned and advised us, ‘Stay away from emailing people’.

Promotion of social networking sites in other ways? They were of the opinion that either a site would work organically, or not at all. Advertisements for a site would make no difference.

Use of MySpace forums and chat-rooms? None of 3 used these.

On 19th July, 100 or so interested parties from broadcasters, TV production companies, web firms, newspapers and advertising agencies travelled to UGTV '06 from as far as Germany and Spain to meet, chat, eat, drink and discuss. Some highlights from the speeches:

Gavin Newman, Deputy Head of Interactive, Trouble TV

Gavin talked about Trouble Homegrown.

Trouble Homegrown is a website that gathers and makes available for view user-generated video clips. It is part of Trouble TV which is a British satellite/cable channel aimed at 15/24 year olds.

Trouble is one of four channels owned by Flextech, which is itself owned by Telewest.

Gavin was charged with making Trouble first-to-market in the UGTV field.

The thinking behind the website was to give viewers/users as broad a brief as possible and see what kind of video they came up with.

So far footage uploaded to the Trouble Homegrown website has been used in continuity slots on the TV channel, but soon there will be a half-hour programme every week showcasing the best of the submitted clips.

Also the website is being used to select contestants for "Bump & Grind", a talent show on Trouble TV.

He said making the website "was not easy". It could not just be bought off-the-shelf [...at that time, he hinted that if he was starting the project now he would use BloomBox - Ed] and so had to be made bespoke.

Another point he made was that the technical quality of clips has not been much of a problem - the clips on TV "look great". In fact, that they are a little low-fi and not glossy works well.

All uploaded video is screened - in fact watched all the way through twice - by outsourced moderators Tempero - before being put up on the website.

At present there are 5000 clips on the site with another 200 being added every day.

Matthew Kershaw, Head of Interactive, MTV Networks UK & Ireland

Matthew Kershaw (standing in for Angel Gambino) said MTV, with its upcoming major user-generated initiative, is basically 3 months behind Trouble TV.

MTV aims at the same demographic as Trouble and so he was heartened by the apparent success of Trouble Homegrown.

MTV has been a pioneer of viewer-interactivity, via texting and message boards (for example, one show has a presenter who reads out a lot of message board content).

Up to now MTV has had websites about channels (and it also has MTV Overdrive, a website which is a channel) but having a channel about a website is completely new.

He reckons the key is to be a facilitator - a crucial part of the success of MySpace is that it hasn't tried to dictate what its users do.

Also, Matthew related hearing a 14-year-old talk about how a video-game triumph seemed meaningless because there was no one watching him do it. "Kids don't want to do anything without being watched".

He talked about how we are now seeing a 'long-tail for celebrities' or 'niche celebrities'. There has been a proliferation in the number of celebrities in the last five years and perhaps user-generated content can be expected to accelerate this trend.

Nevertheless though its great to be famous in an underground community, people would much prefer to be famous on TV. That's still seen as real fame. In the same way even though the Arctic Monkeys had a high profile on MySpace, they still wanted a mainstream record deal. Getting your footage onto a channel is like getting into the VIP room of a club.

Matthew talked about the legal problem he sees UGTV as having. He said ripped-off content is not such a big deal for websites, which can just take the offending clip down when notified, but it is a big deal for broadcasters. Once such a clip has been shown on a TV channel, the rights' holders will be owed possibly a lot of money. Equally, he said the RIAA is "on the warpath" right now about publishing rights violations in all the user-generated videos that involve lip-synching.

He said UGTV is not just a fad. He brought up the example of talk radio, which has stayed with us despite all the competing forms of media. He said ultimately being able to create your own content taps into a fundamental human need, the need to communicate.

Tim Morgan, Commercial Director, Mint Digital

Mint's very own Tim Morgan explained how producers and advertisers can easily solve the technical side of any project involving user-generated footage by using BloomBox. I'll limit what I write about this speech for fear of casting doubt on the objectivity of this blog, but suffice it to say that it was pithy, uproariously funny and extraordinarily well-received.

***

A big thanks to Dug Falby from Donkey on the Edge. The three smaller photos are taken from his UGTV '06 Flickr photoset.

We've been bowled over by the enthusiasm for UGTV '06 and have filled the venue. (There's a waiting list in case people drop out, email events@mintdigital.com if you would like to be added.)

Confirmed attendees include executives from: Ogilvy, Mindshare, Wieden + Kennedy, Grey London, Tequila\, TMW, Emap, SonyBMG, BBC, Channel 4, ITV, The Guardian, Variety Magazine, RDF Media, ThamesTalkback, Endemol and Monkey Productions.

"We should share what we have in order to become less narrow and frightened and lonely and self-centered people."

David Foster Wallace isn't writing about user-generated content but I really think he could be. By uploading or watching you can't avoid making connections with other people. You are no longer an atomised soul detached from the rest of the community being anonymously piped entertainment by giant corporations. Engage and the world becomes a warmer place.

Robbie Stamp of Stamp Bros had been closely involved in the Hitchhikers Guide across many platforms. He said:

Focus on one media and make your idea as good as possible on that media. Then think about rolling it out.

That's exactly the opposite of what we are doing with Buried Alive and BloomBox. We think (hope?) that his advice doesn't hold for ideas that are intrinsically multi-platform.

John Booth of Sony Entertainment said their research showed that three things consumers don't want (on playstations or PSPs) are:

• linear media
• technology for technology's sake
• editorial control from above

That's more like it. That fits with the BloomBox vision.

Mark Rogers of Market Sentinel said Rupert Murdoch's great skill as a businessman is seeing the choke point. In the satellite era, his key purchase was NDS and their encryption technology. Mark asked who will dominate the new media landscape. His answer: aggregators. What was Rupert Murdoch's first significant purchase in the internet era? MySpace.

Hallelujah! BloomBox is a tool for creating aggregators.