A former colleague of ours, Tristan Ferne in the BBC's Audio & Music Interactive department was interviewed by the Guardian this week. We're particularly intrigued by Moose 6... looks like yet another cognitive surplus moment...

I've hugely enjoyed the Sublime Frequencies label's almost willfully eccentric compilations  - revolutionary proto-Rai from Algeria, Bollywood steel guitar - but have only just caught sight of their equally willful website. Less user-centred than dada-centred design.

The value of Top 100 lists is always questionable - and why always in multiples of 10?! That said, the Guardian's list of the 100 best websitesis worth a peek. Still no Weebly though? Why hasn't it made an impact in the UK? Weird...

TED's European director Bruno Giussani has all but decommissioned his always-thoughtful blog Lunch over IP. His reasons for for doing so are as clearly thought through and articulated as one would expect.

Another former colleague and a good friend, Nick Reynolds discusses the highs and lows of the BBC's iPlayer Day on his personal blog.

Game Politics points to at least three low-fi Flash games based on the Bush/shoe incident. Hardly as controversial as the suicide bomber game - nor frankly as funny - but they made me chuckle for a few seconds.

We try to avoid Powerpoint as much as humanly possible at Double Shot, going generally for a much more nail-biting live online demo approach to our presentations. For all that, it can be deployed well (indeed, only this week we witnessed Jem Stone deliver a riveting 50 minute PPT-driven presentation at one of the BBC workshops we've organised).  Anyway, I thought this 11 Rules of Powerpoint  post  was a pretty nifty guide to how to do it well. Also, take note: 11, not 10! Yes!

Paid Content report on the Beta launch of emi.com. I suspect we'll have more to say at a later date - once we've had a good play - but on first glance I have to say I'm impressed; it's certainly the best thing any major has done in the field so far, with customisable playlists, a pretty solid recommendations service a free live streaming. A really impressive start.

This is really, really old, but came up again in a conversation J and I were having this week: Gizmondo's report on the utterly fallacious figures bandied about about the impact of P2P on IP-based revenue.

What happens if you mix the fluidity and unchecked openness of creativity with the rigour and absoluteness of copyright law?  Utter confusion.

A few posts ago I was getting excited about the user generated content that games like Little Big Planet are putting centre stage. Well having now spent a little time with the game and played a few 'user' levels I can now confirm that there are some mind blowing and very lovely things coming out of this world of player/creators.

So my heart sank when I saw this report at 1up.com. It seems that the age old tension between the desire to create an environment where anything goes, or as the TV advert says - 'play with everything' and an environment where the needs of the publisher (in this case Sony) to protect the rights of intellectual property owners at all costs prevails.

Homage levels to other games such as Super Mario have been removed suddenly without warning or explanation, which does beg the question why they have released a game that is going to require them to resource the policing of it even more as time goes on and the user base increases.

This is a quote from the creator of a much loved level called the Azure Palace that was removed without explanation  -

"I invested a huge amount of time making The Azure Palace to not only be original, but to shift the gameplay of this wonderful game you guys made. Besides similarities to underwater stages in general, there is nothing directly taken from any game/movie/etc. If there so happened to be one, the terms of moderation are by far extremely irrational. The user is given no chance to change certain aspects of his creation to conform to said rules above. WE'RE NOT EVEN GIVEN A FREAKING REASON AS TO WHY IT HAPPENED!!!"

Media Molecule the game's creators have said they will try to deliver a much clearer moderation system soon. But it has become clear that moderation decisions are not being taken by the developers but by Sony itself.  This has obviously left a sour taste.

Unfortunately this seems to have affected some of the finest user levels, leaving users confused and the level maker burnt after spending sometimes up to 30 hours to pull off a particularly innovative creation.

This is an object lesson for all of us involved in social media, building user trust and in the developing of tools that engage the creativity of users - I only hope this one get's sorted out before it creates any lasting damage.

Justin

We won't add our voice to the Scorpions/Virgin Killer/Wikipedia noise here. But we will point out this typically insightful piece by The Observer's John Naughton in which Naughton points to the fact that the web, far from being the libertarian free-for-all so breathlessly anticipated a decade back has turned out to be rather easy to control by special interest groups and self-appointed moral guardians... and there's plenty  of them waiting in the wings.
Simon

We announced a while back that we were pleased to be working with BBC Training & Development on delivering a series of workshops about social media and its relevance to BBC production staff. So... yesterday we kicked the series off with a little 3 hour session entitled "Right Tools for the Right Job".

BBC Vision Multiplatform's Roo Reynolds introduced the broad principles of the whole area, including some excellent myth-busting; Rowan Kerek talked everyone through her experience of running the community side of things on the BBC's Collective website; and we put several teams of producers  through their paces developing some ideas which we can't tell you about, or we'd have to kill you. You can see them all hard at work below.

We'd like to thank the BBC's Andy Wilson and Penny Vernham for making everything run so smoothly... and we're looking forward to the next 11 workshops! Whew!
Simon

Well this one's a beauty.

Fold.it is a downloadable game that challenges the player to fold, wiggle and cajole 3D proteins into the kind of shapes that nature allows. The scoring is calculated on how quickly and how few moves you created your permissable shape. You play on your own, but your score joins the huge web 2.0 style leaderboard ; surrounded by a pile of social activity buzzing around you, you really do feel that you are part of some strange world wide collective protein wranglers.


The amazing part is that this is another 'cognitive surplus' project, this one making use of a very particular facet of human intelligence - problem solving through spacial awareness. The software creators want to see if having a large user base (approximately 60,000) of human problem solvers trying to find all the possible protein shapes turns out to be as efficient, if not more so, as running the same problems through a research facility's computer simulation system.

"Predicting exactly how a long protein chain curls up as compactly as possible, amongst all the myriad possibilities, is a very hard problem to solve with computers," says David Baker, the game's inventor. This is the distributed computer idea that was brought to the world's attention through projects like SETI, but instead of idle processors being used to sort data or do some maths, human brain power is being used to do what it does best - play around, recognize patterns and solve puzzles.

Read this lovely round-up by New Scientist of some of the most interesting projects making use of the worlds human computers.

We've been lucky to do work over the Summer and Autumn with the Royal Opera House, amongst which we've been taking a look at some of the applications of gaming tech to music education. Here's Justin showing some of their Learning and Interactive teams how to use Guitar Hero and Singstar. The Tina Turner karaoke rocked.

Two pieces of news about website launches in which we've had a hand. Today sees the official launch of the City of London's Visit the City site, a comprehensive guide for visitors to the oldest part of London - the Square Mile. We've been working closely with the City in delivering this site, not least engaging them in a thorough User-Centred Design approach to re-designing the homepage and several key areas.

And  Justin has designed and built a micro-site for the publication of Sir Ken Robinson's forthcoming book The Element. We'll be using this site as the basis for building a much bigger proposition over the coming months.

The Register's Andrew Orlowski takes an especially sarky, scabrous look at Malcolm Gladwell's work this morning, using it as a platform to take a pop at the whole Web 2.0 & marketing consultancy world.

"For want of a snappy description, and because it traverses the public and private sectors in a kind of League of the Clueless, I'll call this new class the vertical marketing bureaucracy, or VMB). These are people whose ambition is to speak at, or at least attend, New Media Conferences. Gladwell is their passport. And because TV and posh paper executives are now essentially part of the same vertical marketing bureaucracy (VMB) too, they're only too happy to report on Gladwell, the Phenomenon."

Ouch.