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.

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.

MobileCrunch has a nice review of the Thumbplay community site we just launched.

They say "this is for those who want to record those special moments on their phone and share them for the world".

Nice to see they understand the mobile aspect of what we are building.

At the end of November, Mint is dividing into two teams for a long weekend of coding. Each team has four days to build and launch a web app.

We thought we'd do this to:

• Spur creative thinking
• See what we'd come up with
• Have the fun of starting with a blank sheet of paper
• Focus on a project in a small team

The rules are:

• Max 5 people in a team
• No .net*
• Stop working at 5 on Sunday - what's live then gets judged.
• Before the Weekender you can spend as much time as you want brainstorming and researching the concept. Also, you can register a domain name and set up the plumbing.

Does anyone else want to join? We thought it would be interesting to open it up and see what other people get up to...

I'm imagining each team would work separately. We'd have a wiki so that teams can report back progress. We'd meet on the evening at the start of the Weekender for a drink. At the end we'd have a party. We'd find some neutrals to judge. We'd invite a celebrity (probably Cameron Diaz) to present the prize.

If you'd like to get involved, email andy@mintdigital.com

* Joke! You can if you want.

Update: This got postponed. It will now happen on the 28th Feb - 2nd March.

We've just launched a community site for US mobile content provider Thumbplay. The community section has tight integration with the rest of the Thumbplay site (using BloomBox's RESTful API to share content). Also, it's the first BloomBox site with mobile upload and download.

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!

A few weeks ago we launched Joseph Choir Search, a new BloomBox site for the BBC. Running in conjunction with Any Dream Will Do, the website is a nationwide search for a school choir to support Joseph on the TV finale and at a West End charity gala performance.

A fortnight ago, traffic took off like a falsetto. As the deadline for submissions approached, more and more choirs uploaded their entries. For every choir that entered, there's an army of pupils, parents and teachers behind them. It was not uncommon for local radio and newspapers to get involved, further fuelling the traffic. Grassroots marketing was driving traffic to a degree we simply hadn't imagined possible.

Then we got linked off the BBC homepage, one of the most trafficked pages in the UK...

The Joseph BloomBox installation took a battering.

But it kept alive.

Last week, we had to disable voting to decrease the load on the database (we'd had 250,000 votes in 48 hours). Since then we've added more hardware, improved caching and made a heap of other optimisations. Since last Monday, we've resumed voting and Joseph Choir Search is performing smoothly amidst the voting frenzy.

The energy that's gone into the competition is amazing. It is well worth checking some entries.

Joseph Choir Search is a standard BloomBox installation. There are a couple of innovations worth mentioning:

Audition room We were keen to ensure that the best choirs rise to the top. We were worried that large schools would be able to mobilise more parents and teachers to vote, distorting the rating process. To counteract this potential problem, we implemented an 'audition room' concept.

The audition room means that you can't follow a link to vote for a choir. Instead, if you want to vote you enter the audition room, where you are shown a random stream of choirs (including the choir you initially came to see). This decreases the incentives for ballot stuffers and increases the value of the contribution from dispassionate amateur judges.

Looking at it now, the audition room concept does add a certain burden to the usability of the site. However it also seems to be helping ensure it is the best choirs that rise to the top.

Using JavaScript to create personalised, cached pages One of the technical challenges of building many-to-many publishing sites, like Joseph Choir Search, is that every page is dynamic. This means there are more hits on the database and the sites are harder to scale.

With BloomBox, we've developed a technique whereby we cache versions of each page and then use JavaScript to figure out the dynamic part. This has been a key reason in why we've been able to serve many millions of dynamic pages, off a relatively small hardware installation.

Finally, I'd like to say thanks to Jo, Ted, Dan and Kate at the BBC. Firstly, for commissioning this project. The more we work on it, the more it seems genuinely innovative in the way it reaches out to and connects with its audience. And secondly, for supporting us as we've developed the site. It hasn't been the smoothest process (we've made a couple of big mistakes along the way) but there's been a genuine sense of teamwork as we have all strived to deliver a project that has turned out far bigger than any of us had initially anticipated.

Mint Digital has been shortlisted for the MIPTV Content 360 competition in Cannes this April for the second year running. If you are coming to the festival, it would be good to meet up (email tim@mintdigital.com to get in touch).

The competition drew 449 entries from 36 countries. Our proposal is one of 25 shortlisted.

Last year Mint won its category with Buried Alive which was described by Gary Hayes, of Laboratory of Advanced Media Production, as:

"the best project from all the pitch sessions as it really combined user-generated content, community, rich media and potentially mobile."

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!

A new BloomBox-powered site is live. Get Seen Get Heard is a new talent initiative that calls out to the nation's up-and-coming music stars to get involved for the chance of recognition on MTV.

From a design point of view, we think the quality of the gigs shines through. Logistically, we are pleased to deliver the site in 12 working days (design and build). It is testimony to the BloomBox platform that we are able to turn the project round so quickly.

(We used the BoxOver tooltips to do the rollovers on the front page. It is a great open-source tool with lots of options. Thank you, Swazz!)

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. :-)

Islandoo has been getting great press.

Paul Kelbie in the Independent says Islandoo is 'an internet phenomenon to rival the social networking site MySpace'.

Emiko Terazono in the Financial Times says Islandoo 'has developed into a full-blown social networking site'. The article contains an interesting quote from David Alberts, chairman of ad agency Grey London:

'What you've got is 18,000 people who are desperate to promote themselves, impress people and be outgoing. What we're thinking about is actually using the site to encourage the entrants to make their own Nokia ad or their own Clover ad.'

Update 27 October

TechCrunchUK says of the Nokia ad idea:

"this sounds either like a sick joke from yet another marketing person who knows nothing, or a very clever idea, I haven’t quite decided yet."

I think there's at least a chance it's the latter.

Also, a nice, perceptive comment from Will McInnes' blog:

"Islandoo proves that the development of crazy cool new online communities is just starting, and that it's totally do-able for the right client, the right project, the right niche. YouTube and MySpace and Bebo and SecondLife aren't the peak of this web2 interjoinedness. They represent the start. Islandoo is brilliantly executed... A huge well done to the Mint Digital team for this achievement - fantastic."

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.

It has been great to see the favourable reaction to the Islandoo launch. For one thing, it makes it much easier to explain what we are trying to do with BloomBox. Here's some posts: Mashable, The Stage and, my personal favourite, the Selsius Real Estate Blog drawing lessons from Islandoo for the real estate industry.

It is famously difficult to predict how a community will interact with a piece of software. What has astounded us is how friendly Islandoo is. As I write, our newest islander (our 9744th) is a girl named melodyblue. She joined Islandoo 12 minutes ago. She already has 12 comments and 9 fans.

Our recent research suggests MySpace is like a pub where most people chat to their existing friends, boys ogle girls and occasionally you bump into someone new at the bar. By comparison, Islandoo is the world's friendliest party. As soon as you open the door, dozens of people want to say 'hi' and start a conversation. It is great buzz (and, anecdotally, a great way to meet people).

The flip side of this is "fan spam". Islanders have quickly realised that a good strategy is to fan as many other islanders as possible - there is a good chance you'll get fanned back, increasing your prominence. We are currently working on a couple of solutions that should reduce the noise of fan spam, but still maintain the community's friendliness. Interesting new features coming soon.

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.

Mint is planning a world tour of Munich and London. We'll be talking about:

• our research into how teens use MySpace
• ideas of how media firms can harness UGC to generate hits
• case studies of BloomBox in action

And much more.

Catch us live at:

Media in Transition Media Content Management Andy Bell 7th September - Munich (20% off with partner code: UGTV06)

London Media Summit Topic TBC Andy Bell 27th October - London

Digital Hollywood Web 2.0 - Blogs, User Generated Media, Mashups, Social Media as Agents of Change Tim Morgan 1st December - London

TV Outlook 2007 User Generated Content - A real cash cow? Andy Bell 1st December - Munich

More dates coming soon!

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.