I’m George’s Blog

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.