I think for me what makes this particular piece of art so enticing is the uniqueness of each pencil. They are a hotchpotch of old remnants, each has experienced its own life of drawing, writing and expressing the owners thoughts and feelings. They each have their own story to tell, their own individual experience, yet they come together to form one rudimentary expression of language in its most basic form – the alphabet. Had the piece of art been created using a standard uniform HB pencil then this concept would have been totally lost. The idea that these pencil stubs have been gleaned from the detritus of the artists studio adds a beautiful layer of their part in the process of art as a whole, not just this individual artist’s practice. So you can imagine my delight when I found out that most of the pencils he uses are found on the streets, abandoned by their owner but now given a second existence despite their sketchy background!!

It is a piece that crosses boundaries between art and design, sculpture and typography, the conceptual and the aesthetic. It combines a simplicity of concept with a sheer beauty of craftsmanship. I began a quest to find out more about this artist and his work, eventually I found his site http://www.daltonmghetti.com. Here you can see a cross section of the work he is producing and exhibiting, but even after looking at the many intricate and what must have been pain staking sculptures, for me ‘Alphabet’ still stands head and shoulders above the rest.

Good content sparks conversation

Both Em and I still get these emails every week, we read them separately; me at work and her at home. Then in the evening the new things it suggests often come up in conversation. Except Em would always have learnt a bit more than me. She’d say things like “oh did you see the bit about rotating the toys so they don’t get boring” and I’d offer up a confused face and a shake of the head, assuming I’d been distracted by something shiny.

This happened a few times and I made a mental note to concentrate and not read them too quickly (It can happen, even if they are good). I read the emails from top to bottom but she was regularly learning more from them than I was. And neither of us could understand how I was missing things.

At first I wondered if mum was getting a different email to dad. Which I figured would be a pretty clever way to target the email, and considering how the site had encouraged us to set up our profiles in the first place (‘Why not add your partner? etc’) that seemed plausible. But we looked at both the emails we’d received and they were identical. No such cleverness.

The penny dropped

It took a while, but then one day the penny dropped. Em was talking about the email but meant the website. To her there wasn’t any difference. All she cared about was learning about the subject.

19 months on and I realised that if an email is interesting enough the line between the content of the email and the article it links to is blurred. If you’re absorbed enough and don’t care about the mechanics of it all, you’ll happily switch from one to the other and not even consider the join. I’m guilty of this because thinking through creating the mechanics is our business, but it’s another great reminder to think like the user. And I have a feeling this applies to a lot of different ‘joins’ too. Twitter to article, website to Flickr, etc.

It connected on an emotional level

There’s something strangely reassuring about receiving this email every week. It has connected on an emotional level with a little bit of virtual support when you need it most. So congrats to the guys that came up with the idea. It’s clever, it feels real and despite knowing that they really just want to sell me baby products, I’m actually happy to engage because they give us something very valuable at a time when it’s most needed.

Hats off, sirs.

HootSuite seeks to be the ultimate tweeting tool for businesses, and it has some interesting features on offer to accomplish that goal. We thought we’d take a closer look at HootSuite, what it is, what it isn’t and whether it could be a good solution for you.

In essence, HootSuite is a combination of tweeting/posting tools with an assortment of project management features. They range from the impressive to the not so impressive, so here’s a rundown of what you can get:

The More the Merrier:

Many people can manage one account. This has many uses, especially if your company maintains one company account or one big customer service account as opposed to lots of personal accounts.

Get Organised:

Set tasks for other members of your tweet team (e.g “Can someone respond to this customer”) and schedule automatic posts for certain times to make sure your account can still pump things out when you’re busy doing other things.

Syncing:

The obvious feature for almost all these apps lately is synchronisation across all your social accounts, including Facebook, LinkedIn, WordPress and some things people don’t use so much anymore like Ping.fm. Personally I don’t rate this as a useful feature, mainly because for me, different social networks need different content. I wouldn’t post the same content on Twitter as a WordPress blog post or vice versa. Nonetheless, if you like cross-posting, you’re catered for here.

Local Knowledge:

Of potential benefit to some companies is language localization, currently offered in Japanese, Italian and French flavours. If you’re an international business with international needs, this could be useful.

Stat Attack:

Hootsuite offers the ability to track numerous things, including links clicked, keywords mentioned, facebook likes and follows. These stats can be assessed in real time or you can export some reports with fancy looking graphs for your next social strategy presentation to the board.

What’s the catch?

There’s always one. HootSuite hides it’s best features behind a paywall, with some of the most compelling additions like multiple team members to manage accounts and stat reporting eluding you unless you’re willing to cough up $5.99 a month and an extra $15 a month for every additional “team member”. An ad-supported, free version is available with the bare minimum.

If you listen carefully you can just about hear thousands of Android users spitting out their tea at the very mention of paying for an application. iPhone users may be more accustomed to opening their wallets for the sake of interesting apps, but it’s hard to ignore the fact that there are many good, free applications that offer social media functions and that makes HootSuite difficult to recommend to the majority.

Customer relations management:

If you’re an organisation looking to have a customer service team manage a support account or something of that nature, then you might find HootSuite to be a good investment as one thing it appears to do well is support groups of people tweeting.

If that’s not what you’re after then for now I wholeheartedly recommend TweetDeck, my go-to Twitter client.

Passive Twitter (and LinkedIn and Facebook…) users will start to emerge from the shadows, seeking to improve their social standing as the irresistible urge to compete kicks in. The popularity contest that was ‘the number of Facebook friends’ or ‘Twitter followers’ has evolved into what feels like a more sophisticated social pecking order.

I have to admit that I’m already succumbing. I’ve checked my score a couple of times this week, and I’m surprised at myself for doing it. Right now, I’m a ‘Conversationalist’ which Klout describes as…

“You love to connect and always have the inside scoop. Good conversation is not just a skill, it’s an art. You might not know it, but when you are witty, your followers hang on every word.”

As far as I can see a ‘Conversationalist’ is respectable. It’s not in the high numbers score-wise, but I think this is where Klout does things really well. Like a parent to a child, it’s encouraging with its feedback. ‘You are influential to a tightly formed network that is growing larger’. The message is upbeat, and focusing on the positive. For what it’s worth it feels like a relatively accurate description of the way I choose to use the platforms in my daily life.

Perhaps it’ll spark and feed that competitive instinct in all of us. In the Klout dashboard it’s already comparing us to others in our networks to give us a gentle nudge in that direction.

Is it a good thing?

Only time will tell. I think anything that fuels engagement on top of engagement, may end in burn-out. And if that involves quietly rocking in a corner (we’re all smartphone addicts didn’t you know) then maybe it isn’t. But if it helps to give people a greater understanding of social, through their own, more personal involvement then it may prove to be the catalyst for more people harnessing social media’s obvious benefits. And that can only be a good thing.

“The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.” — Tom Cargill

Generally, the remaining 90% is bug fixing. Everyone prefers working on exciting new code to fixing old code but part of managing a project well is making sure bugs are fixed faster than they are found. These days, when an issue report comes in, developers have lots of tools at their disposal to make finding and fixing code more fun.

At Base, our war on bugs is won thanks to our combination of weapons: version control and unit testing. A bug I had to resolve recently was related to some transactions crossing over midnight suddenly not working any more. Here’s how I won the battle:

1. Reproduce the bug

The first step is trying to reproduce the bug as simply as possible. The minimum required was to create a fake request with the time set to just before midnight and start an empty transaction. Using an empty transaction meant that any problems that came back must be the result of the transaction itself, not what was in it.

2. Write a test to make sure it fails

Unit testing means writing code that runs against a single part of a system and checks that the one part gets back the correct result. Once I’d written a test for midnight bug with PHPUnit, any developers at Base could run the test suite on their own systems and see that PHPUnit reported “FAILURES!” for my test.

3. Find the source of the problem

As I could recreate the bug whenever I wanted, writing and testing a fix was so much easier. This bug was a regression, meaning it was working fine until some new code came along to break it. We use the popular version control system “git“, which lets us become masters of (code) time travel and step back to any point we’d previously “committed” some code.

Git has the wonderful tool “bisect”, which helps you search through the code history, narrowing down on a specific commit. You tell git bisect that the current commit is currently “bad”, then you go to an old version and say its “good”. Git bisect then goes to a halfway point and the process starts again. This only takes a few steps, even if there have been hundreds of commits since the bug was introduced.

Whilst “git bisect” by itself is a bit of a black art, the true magic comes when you combine git bisect and PHPUnit together with a simple shell script. You tell git bisect to run PHPUnit and use the result of the unit test to automatically mark a commit as good or bad. Seeing the two working together is incredibly cool. It’s like having your own personal bug detective.

4. Fix it

I now had the precise commit where the bug was introduced. Git let me see the exact date and time of the commit and who had coded it. It turned out it was me. Fixing the bug involved changing just a couple of lines. The bug was fixed and committed after PHPUnit gave the nod by reporting “OK”.

Due to the fun of using PHPUnit and git bisect, I’m often tempted to code in extra bugs, just so I can watch the my bug detective do its thing. That’s my excuse anyway.

Dave and I have trialled it with our boys with varying degrees of success (mine dependant on the brightness of the screen – too bright and Mally wants to eat the phone.)

It kicks off around 6.45pm in the evening, in the run-up to a 7 o’clock bedtime – if bedtime is a little later then it’ll be there waiting in the feed when you’re ready.

As to how it came about; I’ve entered a whole new world of responsibility and I guess this is just a natural blurring of my old life and the new one.

We’ve yet to turn it into a design classic, but the bones are in place and functioning, so we thought we’d share to get feedback. You can follow @Tweetanory here.

No? Well, when I heard the big ‘social platform’ announcement from Google it was one of the first things that crossed my mind (that and the awesome prospect that is Circles). I think it’s the shortest name they’ve given anything so far.

It’s because ultimately Google+ is not a product in the same way that Maps and Gmail are. It’s the very core of what they need to become. As you’ll read pretty much anywhere on the web the biggest threat to Google’s long term survival is Facebook’s command of the way people are increasingly engaging with the web. More and more the search giant, having been the starting point for so many people for so long is quietly being forgotten by the social generation who are now starting and finishing their time online with Facebook.

The new-look Google (designed by Andy Hertzfeld — an original member of the Apple Macintosh team) that arrived along with it’s most recent social network is indication itself that this new ‘product’ is actually a fundamental shift in approach. The level of integration across existing products at this early stage, signals no doubt about the intent.

If the gamble pays off, in time we won’t remember the difference between Google+ and Google; the social integration will omnipresent and they’ll be no need to differentiate. In the same way Facebook lost ‘The’ from its name Google will lose the ‘+’, but with far greater significance.

For the most part, we listen to our friends and the people we surround ourselves with (whether online or in life). And because we’ve already established that we like the same things and made some level of intellectual connection with one another it suggests that we’re more likely to like what they like, than someone we don’t know.

Now the interesting part comes when you’re online, and it’s here that it starts to differentiate itself from real life. Online our behaviour is tracked accurately and the things we do build a pattern of interactions that add weight to what we say we like.

In real life we recommend things all the time, with varying degrees of authority. Online that authority can be measured using our tracked behaviour data and used to decide whether we’re actually in a position to make that recommendation in the first place. Let me give you an example:

Your friend tells you that he went to a great Italian restaurant and that you have to check it out next time you’re in town. You trust your friend and think it sounds like a great recommendation. What you don’t know is that your friend hasn’t been to a lot of Italian restaurants in town, in fact just this one all year. He hasn’t a lot to compare the restaurant too.

Another friend who’s been to three Italian restaurants in the area over the last few months tells you to go to the one just out of town. Because he’s checked in more often and more recently, his recommendation is based on more information and is likely to be the most beneficial to you.

And it was only a matter of time before the community decided it needed to be able to measure and quantify this kind of influence. Sites like Klout and Photorank  are now busy rating and ranking just that. According to Klout it “uses over 35 variables on Facebook and Twitter to measure True Reach, Amplification Probability, and Network Score”. Photorank works in a similar way through the photography you upload. The interactions you have online and the response you get are all contributing to your popularity score.

In many respects, in writing this article I’m taking my own advice from that presentation. In it I said: ‘Be of service without regard and be meaningful to people now.’ And if I’ve articulated myself well enough then maybe, just maybe I’ll end up with some measurable klout.

Firstly, I would say to anyone wanting to join, you should expect to learn a lot. In my time at Base I improved my skills in almost every aspect of my professional life, expanding my knowledge of PHP, JavaScript (using jQuery) and other coding skills on a daily basis.

These new skills will be necessary to tackle your new work. You’ll be a part of a small team on a number of projects for a variety of clients, making everything from emails to WordPress plugins and everything in between.

It’s a small but friendly team of decent people. You may get shot by a nerf gun and eventually you will end up drinking a lot of tea, even if you don’t like it to begin with. You may also have to do a lot of testing – For example, a large part of my time was spent rigorously testing the interactions between users on a large social platform the team built during my stay. Hey, you’re a student, you can’t expect to always have the best tasks! But there is fun stuff too.

You’re given clear instruction and project managed in person, and through tools like BaseCamp and our own BaseFlo. If that last sentence made no sense, then don’t worry. A week or two in and they will be very familiar. If all else fails you can always bother Project Manager Matt, who is always ready to help but may occasionally make you earn it.

Overall I’d say Base Creative Agency is a good place to do a placement for anyone looking to expand their skills and get some great experience of life in an agency. Did I mention it’s paid? I’m off to spend some of my hard-earned money in America this summer. And if I get a chance, I’d like to return to Base for more of the same during my final year of University.  That says it all really.  I recommend you apply.

I thought it might be useful to share with you a response to a client today regarding a query on the implications of the change in EU law regarding cookies on 26th May 2011.

Hi Liz,

Thanks for your query on this. It’s one we’re watching very closely as it’s likely to have a big impact on our day-to-day work. As it stands, the industry is massively unclear as to how to implement the new directive. We were all waiting with baited breath in the run up to 26th May 2011 for a technical interpretation of the law, ie how to comply with the new rules from a practical point of view, and unfortunately it didn’t come.

Personally I’m not sure the ICO has an answer yet, and so has given everyone 12 months ‘to get your house in order’ starting 26th May 2011.

In lay terms anyone who wants to comply isn’t being told what practical steps can be taken for compliance. While the ICO work this out, they’ve ‘given’ the industry additional time (I’m sure to indirectly help them come up with the solutions). Very few have chosen to act without the practical guidance as the solutions that have been suggested thus far within the industry can’t be implemented without some degree of negative impact in either the user experience or statistical tracking data.

Whilst the new directive is essentially a step in the right direction for our privacy it does appear on the face of it very blanket in terms of it’s view of cookies. Personal feeling on the subject is that there may be some back tracking on the use of cookies for collecting non-personal statistical data, ie Google Analytics. And in which case your site wouldn’t need to change, as this is all we use cookies for. Time will tell.

The ICO is required to investigate any claims (even within the 12 months additional timeframe), and in this event you are required to state what you are doing to become compliant. In response, by saying that you are watching developments closely and are in consultation with your website development agency to implement the new rules whilst reducing the impact on your site’s user experience, you will demonstrate that you are aware of the rules and have started to consider making changes towards compliance. As far as I understand, this is all that is needed at this stage.

In reality I think the likelihood of a complaint as a result of non-compliance is virtually nil within that time, but always best to be on the safe side.

If there is any movement from the ICO in the meantime, in terms of a practical way to implement the directive, we will be in touch with next steps.

Hope that helps. Any other queries, feel free to give me a shout.
All the best. Tom