(Originally published at NextNYers.)

We've just started a semi-regular round table for New York people interested in social media. Hosted at the Grand Sichuan, we can guarantee the food will be hot.

Thank you to everyone who made it such an interesting night: Paul Kontonis (For Your Imagination), Caroline Waxler (The Glasshouse), Tania Yuki (KIT digital), Adrienne Steinberg (biga Consulting), Juliette Powell(Gathering), Shay David (Kaltura), Max Haot (Mogulus), Adam Devine (GreenSQFT) and Caroline McCarthy (CNET).

Looking forward to the next one!

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.”

We are happy to announce the launch of Menthol TV. We are delighted to announce that Jeremy Lee, formerly Series Producer at Ricochet, will be Director of Programmes.

Jeremy has been involved in some of the biggest factual entertainment formats of recent years. Credits include Supernanny, Risking It All, It’s Me or the Dog and Can You Live Without? Menthol TV will specialise in Factual Entertainment and Entertainment formats, many with a multi-platform edge.

Jeremy says:

“Menthol has a unique understanding of how the web and TV can interact to deliver genuine cross-platform entertainment. In a year where we will see advances in TV production and the way broadcasters commission, Menthol TV will be leading the way with a new generation of break-out hits”

Over the last few years Mint has developed lots of cross-platform ideas (some of them award winners). It has proved difficult to take these further. A big problem has always been the number of stakeholders involved in making these ideas a reality. Over the last year, many key broadcasters have unified their cross-platform commissioning structure. Menthol TV means we have unified the delivery mechanism.

Press: Supernanny's Lee joins Mint Broadcast Mint Digital breathes life into entertainment TV Guardian

Note: Menthol TV was initially Mint TV. Then we realised there was already a Mint Productions and we didn't want any trouble.

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!

We're very excited to announce that Paul Dix has joined Mint. We're going to be helping him with his super-cool Tahiti project. He's going to be lending us his super-hot Ruby skills.

He's already survived his first hot pot. This is becoming the initiation ritual both in the UK (welcome Jeremy and Adam!) and in the US (welcome Ron!).

The votes are closed. Envy and Other Sins are winners of Channel 4's mobileAct.

Phew... Everyone at Mint can breathe again. This was Channel 4's first online vote since the TV voting scandals earlier this year. We had to adhere to a super-strict set of new guidelines. We built a system capable of recording hundreds of thousands of votes a day. We've withstood penetration testing by a bunch of Channel 4 employed hackers. We've logged votes in two separate ways and securely transmitted them to an independent adjudicator at Olswang for analysis.

But this is rock'n'roll. It's about the parties. And it's great to know that Alex Zane (seen here carousing with Thomas Pomfret, VP Technology) digs our web technology.

I have just returned from the Sheffield Documentary Festival where at a glittering awards ceremony on Saturday night we scooped the Crossover Prize.

The idea entitled ‘Museums of our Future’ (then renamed ‘Tomorrow’s Today’) was the output of a week working with Diarmid Scrimshaw from Warp Films and Anna Higgs from Quark Films at the UK’s first ever Crossover Lab.

A few things that stand out for me about Crossover/DocFest:

1. I love our idea

As well as loving my team, I love our idea. It works beautifully across three platforms (TV, web and real life). We are going to work hard to bring it to a screen, laptop and event space near you soon.

Happily the idea was not spawned by some elaborate ‘let's all think about the future’ type of brainstorm. It emerged from a meeting of minds over dinner one evening. An intellectual debate ensued, a creative match emerged and, hey presto, an idea was born.

2. Creative environment

The Crossover environment was really conducive to thinking. We were literally locked up in a hotel for a week (okay, not literally). At times it was all too much but ultimately all the teams developed inspiring ideas.

3. Great people

It was a pleasure to meet loads of creative people with different skills and experiences from around the country. The mentors, commissioners and, most of all, the other participants really rocked da house.

Three things that I learnt from the experience were:

• Go with the idea that you are passionate about. If you don’t love your own idea then nobody else will;
• Run it past anyone who will listen. An old colleague from my accounting days had a screensaver that read “Feedback is the breakfast of champions”. Hard to apply in the world of auditing but a great maxim for devising crossover documentaries;
• When it seems like you have hit a brick wall - keep going. Give yourself a deadline by which time you have to pitch something. Otherwise great ideas can be written off as soon as they reach the first 'this is difficult' moment.

On a more personal level, I found the whole experience quite emotional. I sometimes act like a 'cold as ice small town likely lad' (although, like many Welshmen, I burst into tears at the opening bar of a male voice choir or watching the rugby at Cardiff). At Crossover, I experienced a sense of hiraeth. Normally this feeling is reserved for Neath, Swansea and Port Talbot area but now I must add Skipton to that list. Very odd.

Marvellous memories, inspiring ideas, but most of all firm friends.

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.

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.