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Telegraph and OpenID

OK, this is the big announcement that I was referring to a while ago.

We were asked to help figure out the best way forward for single sign-on and registration generally. OpenID was an excellent fit - but The Telegraph will be going further than simply allowing people to login to Telegraph services with an OpenID from John Q. Provider (although they will be able to do that as well). They will actually become an OpenID provider. Since that decision was made, Google have announced support for OpenID in blogger and, last week, Yahoo! announced that it would issue all of its users with OpenIDs from the end of January. So the Telegraph’s brave move is already looking like a very good bet.

This is a very exciting development in my opinion. The Telegraph is a trusted brand and they have blazed a trail in user-generated content in the UK newspaper world. The Guardian only very recently announced that they would be working with Pluck to provide UGC features - although there was very little detail about exactly what they will support. For some reason, The Grauniad are seen as the innovators in the newspaper space in the UK, although they are clearly behind the Telegraph in some important respects. Let’s not forget that they lost out to the Telegraph in last years’ AOP awards when the Telegraph was awarded the Online Publisher of the Year gong.

So, from the end of February (and I hope sooner than that), My Telegraph and Telegraph Blogs users will be enjoying the benefits of OpenID. Because of the trust in which Telegraph is held - as a major mainstream media brand - we believe that an OpenID from the Telegraph will have that extra feeling of familiarity and security to users of, shall I say, a certain age. It was the ability to reinterpret the technology for the Telegraph’s audience that made My Telegraph a success. Hopefully they’ll be able to repeat the trick with OpenID.

Keep your eyes peeled for more announcements next week.

Exciting news on the way.

My first post of 2008 and it’s half way through January?  Shameful I know.  But, in my defense we have had a very busy few weeks.

Our strategic recommendations for The Telegraph are beginning to go into production so keep an eye out for some announcaments in the coming weeks.

The first announcement should be public on Monday.  For all of you who are curious, keep and eye on Shane Richmond’s Blog tomorrow morning.  James will also be posting a follow up post on our blog shortly afterwards.

There is a LOT more to come….

Also, we’ve set up a Resident Digital page on Facebook.  Make sure you stop by and say hello.

Doggysnaps.com wins Yahoo Social Site of the Year

So it looks like Doggysnaps won Yahoo’s Best Social Website of the Year!

This is the sort of good news you want to hear on a gloomy January day.

First up, congratulations to all the people that worked on DoggySnaps back at Interesource - to name a few: Simon I’Anson, Sophia Vader, Matt Hotstone, Kevin Potgieter, Sara Howlett thank you all.

Looking back into the recent mists of time, back to those old Interesource days, I can’t help but think about my biggest client while I was there - Dogs Trust. Sure, I managed Virgin Digital with Stuart Toller as well as Mirror Blogs, to name a couple, but the constant was always those guys. DoggySnaps was Dogs Trust’s big leap into the unknown, and when we first started it was seriously exciting - there were no other animal centric sites out there - with the exception of Dogster, which was a for profit organisation.  Since then a huge number of animal sites have cropped up -  the similarly designed ‘pets get slim’ by the RSPCA, Worldwide Fido, blah blah as well as dogbook on Facebook and a number of sites in between. The thing that was really exciting was the concept of turning a social community on its head and allowing users to express their love and enthusiasm for their dog by writing on behalf of them.

Originally, the first release of the beta (before we updated the user’s kennel functionality) site had nowhere for people to put any information about themselves, which was really mental, but very funny. You don’t realise how crazy people are about their dogs, until you see them pretending to be them. The point about setting up Doggysnaps was three-fold - to connect people and create a support network between dog lovers, to increase exposure for Dogs Trust and increase donations to help Dogs Trust to fulfill their charitable aims, and to collate the best photographs to use as an image library for Dogs Trust and for other organisations to use. I believe they are no longer keeping the image rights for photos, which I think is a real shame, as it could have been a win win for Dogs Trust, and the proud dog owner.

(I have one very sought-after DoggySnaps sweatshirt with Abbey the boxer dog on - I’m sure her owner would be proud!)

The real shame is that before Interesource went into administration, we were literally one day away from launching ‘DoggySnaps Print Shop’ - we had a deal with a fulfilment house, and had some really nice drag and drop functionality for the kennel photos in a sliding gallery (a little like the mashup between flickr and moo). It will be interesting to see what Global Beach do with this ‘Golden Bone’ in the future - I hope they do them proud.

Software for startups

Starting up a new company can be a little bit daunting. There’s a temptation to think that everything has to be done properly, as if you were really starting a multi-national corporation. You know, buy everyone a copy of MS Office, install Exchange Server, buy a file server, some network equipment, get an office, chairs, desks, lamps, the whole thing.

There’s no need to do things this way though. There are so many bits of software that you can use to get your company up and running at a fraction of the cost of buying ‘enterprise software’. Here’s a quick list of the software and services we’ve been using in the first month or so of our existence.

• Basecamp - really simple project management and collaboration tool that can grow with you - includes to-do lists, messages, milestones and more
• Campfire - web-based chat with automatic transcripts - ideal if you’re behind a corporate firewall (as we are at the moment) and can’t use anything that doesn’t go over port 80
• Google Apps - email, calendar, docs and spreadsheets all for free - there’s no need to buy copies of MS office. Plus, now that GMail supports IMAP, you can use Mac Mail or Thunderbird from the desktop and then use the web interface for times that IMAP isn’t available.
• WriteRoom (version 1) - distraction-free writing environment. Once you’ve got the words right you can format them with Google Docs. Version 1 is free and, in my opinion, superior to the later versions because of the auto-save functionality.
• WordPress - the software that powers this blog
• MediaWiki - the software behind Wikipedia and others
• del.icio.us - social bookmarking - useful for bringing links to others’ attention
• Seashore - open-source, free image editor

You’ll need somewhere to host WordPress and MediaWiki - and we’ve had very good experiences with BlueHost.com so far.

Since we’re feeling a little bit more generous towards each other, we also spice this lot up with some software we actually had to pony up some cash for:

• iWork - Apple’s version of Office, just much much nicer
• OmniGraffle - easy charting application from the OmniGroup - I will never go near Visio ever again, I promise
• OmniFocus - not-yet released Getting Things Done task manager from the Omni Group. Worth it for the quick entry window alone.
• NewsFire - absolutely beautiful RSS reader for the Mac.

Agile beginnings

It’s only a little over a month since our former employer, Interesource, went into administration. A week earlier we’d never have thought about starting our own company; Interesource had assembled the best team we’d ever had and we had a stream of new business leads that made the future look pretty exciting.

In the shock that followed the collapse of Interesource, we were all just focused on trying to pay our mortgages, having not been paid the salary owed to us for October, so any kind of strategic plan would have been an indulgence. Of course we had a series of sessions at the pub in which we all expressed how much we’d like to work together again, but we all knew that pragmatism would have to win out over sentiment.

Neil, Abbie and I had worked very closely with each other and got on particularly well. I really wanted to work with both of them again, and I felt that if we didn’t seize the opportunity immediately it would be gone for ever. I jumped at the chance to bring them in to help me when the Telegraph asked me to write their User Generated Content strategy. Just on a word-production basis, I couldn’t have done this on my own but, from a standing start, we produced a document crammed with ideas that we had developed together.

Over the course of the time we spent writing that document, we gradually agreed that we ought to seize the chance to start our own company. Resident was born.

We decided what we would be doing before we decided on a name. Our shared experience of web agencies both as employees and as clients gave us an excellent platform to help other people select, engage and work with an agency. Interesource was a ‘full service’ agency, but Resident will not be. One of the things we will do is to help businesses understand the emerging trends on the web, adapt them to their environment and then implement them. But we won’t be doing the implementation ourselves.

One thing that we’d like to do a lot more of is to help development teams work better with their customers - internal or otherwise. When I first joined Interesource in 2001, relations between the creative and technical disciplines were not good, but over the years we hired well and worked very hard to forge bonds between these two vital departments. By the end, we were working really well together and had been for some time.

There are often even more intractable problems between developers and their customers. There is a natural and understandable linguistic divide, but there are also misunderstandings that can sprout when everyone is under pressure and such tensions can ultimately destroy a project.

So, we’re keen to help companies with in-house development teams, or agencies with teams that are struggling, to get the best out of their development practice. All of us have experience of the problems I’ve been describing from one angle or another. I have years of experience of mentoring developers and getting them to build quality into the development process, and I’m really keen to continue doing so. This is another aspect of our shared experience that I would never have expected to make use of in this way.

And it struck me. We’ve started our business in a very agile way. There was no grand plan, there were no targets, no dates and no expectations. We simply started working on a document and found that there were other people who were interested in talking to us, other people who were interested in joining us and still more who wanted to hear about what we were doing. Who knows where it will go from here?

futurology? not on your life mate…

Today there’s been a lot of banter about futurology. Earlier we went to lunch with a few of the commercial guys from the Telegraph where we were asked “So, outside of all the money and time constraints, how do you think this is all going to look in the future?” Neil responded by saying anyone who tried to predict the future was, “a fool”, and he’s right, I mean - look at James’s blog post for TCUK today (he’s blogging for Shane while he’s living it up on holiday).

Obviously I’m joking, James isn’t predicting the future any more than I would - the thing is, that the digital world changes so fast at the moment - we were reminded today that it was only the beginning of the year when we were all telling each other to ‘get on the Facebook‘ - look at where we are now (and how much it’s now worth.)

A great example of one of these fools is probably one of my favorite links (posted on my Facebook profile obviously,) from Dazed Digital. Now apart from my Shoreditch Twat leanings (I do like dazed digital on occasions) they’ve really gone overboard with this one here - Ashok Gangadean at the bottom of the page makes a total arse of himself when asked this very question. “A virtual inter-net of minds”??? Ridiculous.

I suppose the point I’m making, is that if you want to make a laughing-stock of yourself, have a pop at it, but even guessing what’s going to be the big thing in 18 months these days is something you should leave the to the experts.

Microsoft Word needs an education

We’ve been working hard over the last couple of weeks to produce a plan for User Generated Content that the Telegraph can implement. We’ve done this is an agile fashion by using Basecamp to create a Writeboard for each section of the document and then allowing stakeholders to review each one of them as they emerge from our brains.

This has worked really well because we’ve been able to use Basecamp’s built-in versioning for Writeboards to show the progression of each section, as well as share the outline of the document itself by uploading it as a file.

On Wednesday last week we finally started to bring everything together into a Word document, and it became very obvious that Word’s dictionary is a long way behind the language. It doesn’t know about iPods, blogs, wikis, del.icio.us, trackbacks, pingbacks, Digg, podcasts, and many many more.

Some of these terms are more recent, granted, but many of them have been around for ages. Of that list, the built in Apple spell-checker has only complained about three words.

Further proof, if any were needed, that Macs are way cooler than PCs.

Having a Lovely Time

Today we’re putting the finishing touches to our UGC spec for the Telegraph. It always makes me laugh that we took the piss out of our predecessors for saying in a meeting, “Oh yes, its going to be a big document with all the buzz words in.” But here we are on a Sunday (!!!!) with James still editing into the main document and we’re running up to 100 pages very quickly. Big document anyone?

I’m trying not to be smug when I say ‘not bad for 7 days work’. I really hope the Telegraph are going to like what we’ve said, not only because I’ve had a spiky headache for the past week trying to pull all the spaghetti out of my head and into some sort of cohesive document structure on Basecamp, but because we have worked our asses off doing this, and lived, breathed the Telegraph day and night. I met up with my best friend yesterday,  who sat on the other side of the table in the pub and gave me a bollocking about how smug I had been recently; “I mean, you’ve only been there for a couple of days Abbie, and your already using phrases like ‘changing the face of online publishing forever’, I mean get over yourself.” Shamefully I do totally believe that though - we’ve all had some seriously wicked ideas, and I also totally believe in the power of three - its much easier to come up with awesome ideas if you’ve got someone there to talk through them with, easier still if those people happen to be bad-ass industry specialists .

It’s been much more intense than anything we did at  IR, and its also been difficult because of the rolling news we’re receiving through facebook and mail everyday, regarding the fallout of our old company, but as my Grandpapa said to me, its all a learning curve, and what doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger.

Oh, and today’s the beginning of my love affair with Mac (I went to the Apple shop today…)So maybe something beautiful did come out of the last few weeks….

And so it begins…

Resident Digital hatched in November 2007 but it had been incubating for the last few months.  The core Resident team has known each other as friends and colleagues (and clients) for the last few years so the decision to set up Resident was a logical one.

At the moment we are doing some really exciting work for The Telegraph, an ex-client of ours in a former life.  The issue of user generated content and social media for newspapers is such a fascinating problem.  How much do you break down the barrier between traditional journalism and user generated content whilst still upholding the core values of editorial policy and editorial identity?

We previously helped develop the award winning My Telegraph but the work we are doing at the moment is really going to push things forward to the new level…  A newspaper site made in total collaboration with its readers.  Very exciting times indeed and we are really happy that such a potentially important project is out first engagement as an agency.

In the 2006 AOP conference, most of the major media owners were talking about adding UGC and social media elements to their sites. I left that conference extremely excited..traditional media was at least acknowledging how important the peer production revolution was.  But 12 months on, nothing has really changed.  During the same conference this year, the only mention of social media in connection with news sites was from the US.  Caroline Little, chief executive of Washingtonpost.com gave an impressive (if jetlagged) overview of how they were developing hyper-local communities and using comments.  But…er, that was it.

So it’s a pretty open playing field at the moment.  Either people are keeping their cards quite close to their chests or traditional media companies are just a bit too terrified of Facebook (aren’t we all).