So 2006 is over, BlogRadio is still down and Apple never did fix my laptop (don’t ask) but on the plus side I’ve travelled more in the last six months than I have ever travelled before; I finally managed to visit my own personal Mecca, Silicon Valley, and now find myself employed by Yahoo! as a fully fledged Interaction Designer. If that wasn’t surprising enough, I’m also moving to Sweden to work in mobile with the recently acquired Kenet Works team. No, Yahoo! didn’t buy Chatsum, and no, we haven’t forgotten about it - we just haven’t had a chance to work on it what with commuting between London, Stockholm and Sunnyvale, CA. Once we’re settled in Stockholm we’ll be starting up the production lines again so if you’ve got any leads whatsoever on accommodation in the Swedish capital please let me know.

Oh, and one last thing. Please remember: All views expressed here are my own and do not represent the views of my current employer, Yahoo!

Unfortunately, I have to announce that BlogRadio is going to be offline for as long as it takes Apple to fix my PowerBook. I’m having to use the Mac Mini it runs on as my main machine while I work out why my laptop has been incessantly whining and then turning its screen into tartan.

P.S. I’m not dead and will be posting about what’s been going on in my life for the last two months just as soon as I can.

I ♥ THE INTERNET

It’s been a long time since I last wrote here and I don’t have the energy right now to document all of the exciting things that have happened since (here are some). Tomorrow I fly to San Francisco for a week to show Chatsum and BlogRadio at Yahoo! in Sunnyvale. You can read more over on the Chatsum blog which is where most of my blogging energy has been going recently. I’m planning to get my flickr on while I’m away and I’m sure Matt, with his beautiful website, will be taking some photos too.

Wish us luck, we might need it!

I’ve busily been getting some visualisations of Chatsum activity ready for the RCA Show and have completely redesigned them so they no longer look like a 1980s videogame. Above is a picture of the huge videowall monitors I’ll be showing them on.

For those that are interested, the visualisations are all made in XHTML and JavaScript. I’ve been using the Canvas tag a lot recently and I’m really in awe of how powerful the open standards of the web are becoming. It seems like JavaScript is being totally reborn and I just can’t get enough of positional CSS. It really is true:

Chatsum has gone public beta! Anyone can now sign-up and give it a go. Just click this banner to join:

Yesterday we had a massive influx of Brazilians and boy can they chat! They generated over 15,000 posts in under 12 hours and for the first time there was more chat going on away from www.chatsum.com than on it.

Unfortunately though, with all of the activity came a single spammer who posted the letter A into the chat repeatedly, several hundred times, forcing us to ban them. We started by only banning them for half an hour but they came back later so we’ve had to ban them indefinitely. I hate the fact that we had to do it as we’re working on some really nice user blocking code that puts the power in the users’ hands but until that’s live I had to come over all moderatory and I don’t really like that. Chatsum is meant to be a totally public space with us only really wanting to moderate the chat that happens on our own websites (chatsum.com, imgeorge.org and pixelhospital.com) in the hope that others will moderate their own.

If anyone would like to come and see Chatsum in the RCA Summer Show (as mentioned below), it’ll be in The Show: Part Two 23rd June - 3rd July. It’s always a really good show with lots of beautiful things to look at from lots of very different departments. Last year the Silversmithing and Photography blew my mind.

Let me know when you’ll be coming and if you need a place to stay and if you’re really desperate to come to the private view, let me know and I’ll see what I can do.