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.

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.

Just wanted to draw attention to a lovely lecture by Luis Von Ahn from a couple of years ago.

He takes us through a particularly entertaining look at what humans can do better than computers, and ironically, how to use computers to make use of this resource.

He himself has devised a game that allows players, unbenknownst to themselves, to usefully describe and tag images from the internet. Two random players somewhere in the world are presented with exactly the same image at the same time - the idea of the game is for the two users is to type in the same word to sum up the image in as few trys as possible, without any other way of communicating with each other. When the two players reach the same word they receive a score based on how long it took them to come to agree. Of course in attempting to arrive at the same word they build up a very useful set of descriptors around the image they are looking at.

The image tagging by-product of the game could, if used in conjunction with something like Google Image Labeler, swiftly provide rich textual descriptions for most of the images on the internet and therefore much improve visually impaired people's experience of using the web pretty much without anyone actually working to make it happen.