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!

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.

There are now only 17 days left until I have to have everything ready for the Graduation Show of my MA in Interaction Design. I’m going to be showing Chatsum itself alongside different ways of looking at the social data its use produces.

We’ve just entered the second phase of beta testing Chatsum which involved inviting in another 1,500 users to test our new Member Profile pages, you can check out my profile here. We’re letting users bring in feeds from lots of other web services so when you’re looking at someone’s profile you can also see their photos, blog posts, bookmarks, videos and upcoming events. There’s something beautiful about these pages that will hopefully get us a lot of press. I think it’s a different approach to a lot of other sites - we pull in content from the internet’s Web of Data rather than trying to replicate Flickr, YouTube, etc.

If all goes well and I don’t have to look through the MySQL slow queries log again then we’ll be taking Chatsum into public beta in about week or so. The prospect of doing this so close to the show, when my part in it relies on Chatsum working, is terrifying but as the MBA students that Lucy has put me in touch with keep saying, “it’s also very exciting”.