After months of hard work, head-scratching, frantic coding and copious tea-drinking by a number of the team here, I’m over the moon to tell you that we’ve just launched a brand new site (I could have had a baby by now. Well, I sort of have, with multiple parentage).

Virgin Media Pioneers is a social networking and video blogging platform, and is a partnership between Virgin Media and Enterprise UK – the charity that aims to increase entrepreneurial behaviour across Britain.

It’s the core of a programme that’s going to equip young, budding entrepreneurs – Pioneers – with the skills, confidence, experience and network of contacts to help them make it on their own.

Anyone who joins the site can easily connect with entrepreneurial people like them, as well as get support and advice from established business experts. Pioneers upload video blogs and responses to share their experiences, talk about their business ideas, ask for help or simply celebrate success.

The site’s been built on a set of open source platforms and plugins, most notably WordPress, VideoPress and BuddyPress, which gave us a foundation to combine social and video features without coding everything from the ground up.

From day one we’ve worked in really close collaboration with both Enterprise UK and Virgin Media, running an agile methodology that’s proved massively successful.

Without going into too much detail, the biggest feature of this is that we – all of us, clients included – have met up every two weeks for nearly the past nine months, and at every point there’s been an opportunity to change the shape of what we’ve been doing.

When we discovered a new requirement, decided we didn’t like the way something worked or had a brand new insight into our target audience, we simply changed the priority of what we were working on next. It was an eye-opener, working on a large-scale build in this way, but one that’s been pivotal to the success of the development.

NixonMcInnes provided the skills and experience in designing and building the site, including user experience design, working to create a brand identity and undertaking usability testing to make sure that this is something that fits with the immediate needs and expectations of our first Pioneers.

Usability testing with people who were actually going to be using the site was particularly interesting and vindicated our choice of agile as a methodology, as well as the other decisions we’d made along the way; all feedback we gathered was overwhelmingly positive and even after months of development, I only came away with a few minor changes to make.

This is only the start though – the first release of the site is going to build and evolve over time to include new features and functions, based on the needs of the people who use it, using feedback and research.

Why am I so excited? OK, there’s a degree of self-satisfaction and pride in what we’ve all produced, but it’s more than that – as other people have pointed out, in the recession young people were some of the hardest hit – and this is one opportunity for those people to move towards turning their own ideas into a career. As a result, it’s also supporting independent business in the UK, in which social enterprise is beginning to feature more (from my recent experience, anyway).

It’s been an amazing experience, working with some brilliant people (not just Steve, Josh, Matt, Jenni and Telmo) and I can’t wait to watch more people join the site, follow their journey and build on what we’ve all started.

For a few days before Christmas, deep within the NixonMcInnes Skunkworks, a band of elves were busy developing something special based upon some newly released Wordpress functionality. Behold, our new plugin, Sentimeter!

At the end of December Wordpress 2.9 was released with newly added support for comment metadata. We though it would be great to build a plugin that utilized this new feature and it also happened that a client of ours needed a plugin that that used comment meta data, everyone is a winner.

The resulting plugin is called Sentimeter. In the words of Steve the plugins main author (and lead developer here at Nizomk):

This plugin allows users to express sentiments (a la getsatisfaction.com, e.g. happy, neutral, outraged etc.) through the WordPress commenting system. Users can also associate their comment with a pre-defined ‘topic’. Overall sentiment, and comment topics, can be viewed as pie charts in the admin system, within a user-defined date range. Additionally, comments (along with their sentiment, and topic, if specified) can be exported as a CSV for further offline analysis.

You will need to update your templates a bit to utilize the plugin but it is written in the traditional Wordpress ‘loop’ style so it should slot in easily. Check out the plugin homepage for the detailed instructions. As the blurb says, the admin panel allows you to view how your users are feeling via a couple of pie charts, these are rendered in pure HTML using the fantastic gRaphaël javascript library.

We still have a bit of work to do to make the plugin easily customizable (which is still possible if you dont mind getting your hands a little dirty) so look out for updates in the near future. In the meantime, grab the code from here, follow these instructions to install the plugin and get Sentimetering!

I enjoyed the day and there were vibrant twitter backchannel conversations.

I’ve embedded below the slidecast (slides plus audio) as a nice lofi alternative to the videos, which are also good and enjoyable.

I’ve also included James Clay’s talk, which was the stand out talk of the day for me: hopeful, fun, inspiring.

(Also definitely worth checking out is Peter Robinson from Oxford University’s comprehensive account of setting up iTunesU, which was very interesting too.)

My thanks to Tim Bush and Frank Steiner from ULCC for inviting and looking after me on the day: they put on an event to be proud of.

This weekend I was reppin’ NixonMcInnes at the first MusicHackDay held at the guardian offices (which were super plush!), it was an excellent, fun and tiring event. Held over Saturday and Sunday, about 150 music and computer geeks were given 24 hours to hack some cool stuff together using API’s and data from music related sites around the web. Sponsors included Last.fm, Gigulate, SoundCloud, 7Digital, BBC Music, Echo Nest, Songkick, Peoples Music Store and The Guardian. There was some amazing stuff built over the weekend ranging from cool little hardware hacks aided by the folks at tinker.it, an app that lets you share your iTunes library over the net (with syncing play so you can listen along with the owner) and tons more. All in all great fun.

The weekend started off with an introduction from the organizers and then brief introductions to each of the sponsors and their API’s. The group then broke up and some of the sponsors gave some more in depth talks about their companies and API’s, after that it was hacks-ahoy!

I spent my weekend working on a Flex/Actionscript 3 wrapper for the SouncCloud API, something that I had started about 6 months ago but never had the time to finish. Not being an Actionscript guru had hindered my progress somewhat and it was great to be able to quiz the any attendee’s who were better versed in AS3 than myself (a big thanks to John Martin of Gigulate for that). My code can be found up on Github, its a little rough around the edges but perfectly usable. I’m planning on tidying it up for use in a future app.

After a looong (caffeine fueled) night of hacking (surprising how many people were up until the wee-hours working on the particular hacks) we had breakfast, wrapped up our work then at 2pm the presentations began. There was a huge amount of projects, far more than I was expecting and we all waited eagerly to show off our own work. I cant remember all of the hack but two of my favorites were:

http://citysounds.fm/ – An app from some of the SoundCloud guys, it grabs the latest tracks off SoundCloud from cities around the world. simple but quite cool, its interesting to see how different cities vary in the styles of music that are being produced there.

MusicBore – Pulls in songs and metadata from last.fm, gets info about them from the BBC (like shows they’ve been played on) and then mashes them into a ‘radio’ program spewing the data into an IRC channel where it can then be read using a screen reader as a kind of DJ.

The coolest thing I discovered there was the Echo Nest service, you can upload a tune to it for analysis and it will give you back tons of data on it like tempo, key, volume points and changes in the track like chorus or fade outs etc. You can also process tunes, pitching them up or down or mixing them together etc. An amazing API put to some excellent use in some of the hacks, check it out over at http://developer.echonest.com/pages/overview

Something Rob Watson, one of the other attendees there had built a little while ago using Echo Nest is this piece of awesomeness: http://www.donkdj.com/ – remix your favorite track in to a scouse/bouncy house donk master peice! Give it a whirl.

You can check out all the projects over at http://musichackday.org/info/Hacks and prepare to be impressed!

A massive thanks goes out to Dave Haynes, the other organisers and sponsors for putting the weekend on, I cant wait for the next one!

Cheers to Alexander Ljung for the photo

Here at Nizomk Towers, we have been following, with keen interest, the conversations flying around teh internets about the perils of URL-shortening services, such as TinyURL et al. Apparently, with both the number of available URL-shortening services growing, along with the reliance on them, what we have is a ticking time bomb, just waiting to explode in our faces! Yikes!

As one Dave Winer so wisely puts it:

We need to prepare for the day when N of the URL shorteners go out of business. When that happens a large part of the web will die. It will not be a good day.

There have been various dialogues about what can be done to tackle the issue, one proposal is to place the responsibilty of URL-shortening firmly in the hands of the owner of the long URL, who would dutifully publish a shortened version using a common and, one hopes, widely-adopted convention. This would then be revealed in much the same way that RSS feeds are currently announced and discovered.

One very clever ’short URL auto-discovery’ solution, rev=canonical, has been proposed and implemented by Kellan Elliott-McCrea, it’s not much more than a proof-of-concept at this stage, and would need widespread adoption to truly solve the issue, but we like the idea so much we thought we’d show our support by quickly throwing together a WordPress implementation and releasing it into the wild!

The source code for our plugin, wp_rev_canonical.php, is hosted on our GitHub repository, and our own beloved website (yes, the one before your very eyes) is already serving blog post pages with included shortened URL goodness, so now any service that supports it can publish our super-cute shortened URLs wherever needed.

For example, the shortened URL for this blog post is http://www.nixonmcinnes.co.uk/?p=1017, this is broadcast by the following markup in the head section of this webpage:

<link rev="canonical" href="http://www.nixonmcinnes.co.uk/?p=1017" />
<link rel="alternate shorter" href="http://www.nixonmcinnes.co.uk/?p=1017" />

Ideally, of course, the shortened URLs would be served from an alternative, shorter, snappier, domain name, you might notice that ours sadly aren’t. We will be implementing this under our syllable-preserving pseudonym, nixmc.com, at the moment we are simply proving the concept, but hope to build on this in the not-too-distant future.

So, if your site is running WordPress, then you might like to download and install our plugin yourself, just grab it from GitHub, upload to your /wp-content/plugins/ folder, make sure your theme supports wp_head, enable it, and before you know it, Internet-friendly short URLs are your new best friend! Yay!

Do you have a project that you would like to discuss with us? Or perhaps you know someone who is thinking about how to implement their digital strategy for 2009 and could do with some useful, actionable input and direction?

If so, we are running a limited edition special offer to help you shine online.  Check it out.

If we can’t be of assistance or if you are not satisfied with the results then we will send you a delicious cake from the lovely Brighton cake boutique Choccywoccydoodah.  Mmm, how can you refuse such a tasty proposal?

“And if you want to know a little bit more about our practice areas and service offerings then check out our “What we do page”.  This will give you guys, the wonderful NixonMcInnes audience, a little more information about the kind of work we are helping folks with.

Just so you know in case it is still not clear; we are a full service agency; this means that not only can our skilled social media consultants help you apply social media to your marketing strategy and help you use this medium to plan specific campaigns, but the consultants are backed up by a fully formed delivery team made up of talented developers and designers able to make your ideas for websites, widgets, applications, blogs, social media press rooms and anything else web wise a reality. You can even get to know the team in advance.

So go on, book your conversation with us now, we are ready, poised to listen to your challenges and lend a hand; guaranteed!

Just e-mail or pick up the phone:

ruth@nixonmcinnes.co.uk

01273 648315.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Thanks to EpicFireworks for the image.

Yesterday started like any other day at NixonMcInnes; Will was running the ever popular Measurement Camp when he was suddenly pulled aside by our friends at Hotwire and asked if he would like to provide comment on the breaking news that Facebook had decided to change their terms of service and implement an ‘irrevocable’ licence to do exactly what they want with your content.  Facebook have now returned to their previous terms of use after tens of thousands of users said it breached their right to privacy.  Controversial eh?  So controversial that the BBC picked up on the story and invited Will to comment.  We naturally, jumped at the opportunity, it’s not every day you get to be on the BBC after all.  15 minutes of fame at last.

So Will had to leave Measurement Camp early (apologies to all of those in attendance and thanks to those who were left to wrap up the morning session) and was whisked over to Television Centre in White City where he was interviewed for the BBC lunchtime news.

Back in Brighton, the NixonMcInnes office and various members of the Twitter community eagerly waited to watch him on the TV.

Check out the Twitter chatter that’s been going on; NB this content is liklely to be out of date in a couple of weeks time.

Such an exciting and memorable day, we simply had to shout about it.

We are very proud of our Will, well done and many thanks goes out to Robin Wilson at McCann Erickson for the lead and to Hotwire for securing the opportunitty and organising Will on the day.

View Will’s stellar performance.

Jenni recently spoke at an event held by Fresh Business Thinking on the subject of internet marketing and more specifically how small businesses can start to engage with social media and some practical tips of how to get going with your digital strategy.

See the video and view the accompanying slides for a breakdown of:

- five easy tips to get you started with social media
- some examples of how we have been using these approaches with our own clients
- a list of must reads for those bookworms who want to know more

Like what you see?  Sign up to receive more of Jenni’s and our collective wisdom from our range of free, no nonsense ebooks for marketers.

Would you like to book Jenni to speak at your event?  Please get in touch with me, Ruth Baker, Marketing Co-ordinator to discuss the possibilities.

The Web is ever evolving. Technology, trends and methods never stand still, and as such, we at NixonMcInnes like to tinker with our website all the time. Just before Christmas, we took a moment to add some Microformats to our site.

What are Microformats?

As you may know, webpages have a structure that is defined using a markup language — typically HTML. This tells the web browser about the structure of our page and what each bit of content in the web page is for: whether it’s a heading, link or list, for example.

Microformats are patterns that use existing markup standards to describe certain parts of our content in even finer detail. These patterns help make our information machine-readable, which in turn makes it more useful.

Take the address of our office as an example.

On screen you might see the following:

NixonMcInnes
21–22 Old Steine
Brighton BN1 1EL

As a human being, it’s fairly easy to use our judgement and interpret this as an address, based on our experience of how addresses are typically formatted. However, to our browser, this is just a paragraph of text and nothing more.

We can’t provide any more specific information than that, just by using HTML tags, but we are able to specify that this is an address using a Microformat called hCard.

hCard is a Microformat developed for contact details. By using a specific markup pattern, you are able to convey that the text is an address, and what each part of the address represents (like a street address or Post Code).

It is up to you how much information you wish to include for the contact. The only piece of information that is required is a name, so you are not forced to add any information that you do not already have or are not willing to publish on your site.

How is this useful?

As mentioned earlier, using Microformats makes your information machine-readable, and if it is machine-readable, software can gather and use it.

I use an add-on for the Firefox browser called Operator, which lets me know if there is any Microformatted data in the web page I am browsing. If it finds contact details marked up with hCard, for example, it gives me several options for what to do with the data. I could instantly find the address of a restaurant on a mapping site, for example, or I could export a contact to my address book, which would then sync to my phone. Very handy!

There are many other Microformats besides hCard. There is hCalendar for marking up dates and events, XFN to represent relationships between people, geo for geographical co-ordinates, hReview for marking up reviews and hRecipe for recipes, among many others.

Not only can Microformats provide some useful short-cuts for individuals, but search engines are beginning to index them, as well. Having our information marked up in such detail means that it can be easily recognised by the search engines, and added to catalogues of contact details, events, reviews and so on, making it easier for web users to find what they are looking for, and for us to get our useful, accurate, up-to-date information out to the wide World.

We have added hCard to our Contact Us page, and to our individual profile pages. If you fancy seeing Microformats in action, give Operator an install and see what you can do with them.

We like building things. Most of all we like building useful things that engage, empower and get people talking about world-wide issues.

We like ethical banking too and that is why we are delighted to have recently designed, built and delivered a shiny new blog for Co-operative Financial Services.

The Co-operative Bank has created a special $50 million fund in order to support the future development of small businesses in some of the world’s poorest countries. As part of its clever and informed CSR scheme, The Co-operative Bank provides microfinance to Bosnian people. Let Co-op Financial Services introduce you to Belma Gracankic, a Bosnian refugee who was forced to leave Bosnia in the midst of civil war, Belma now has a new life in England working for the bank. The blog features video footage and photos of Belma travelling back to Sarajevo to explore how the country has changed since the war and the important role that microfinance is playing in helping people re-build their lives.

Whilst all the other financial systems in the world seem like they are going down the drain, The Co-operative Bank is throwing some social media goodness into the pot to show how they’re making a long-lasting difference.

Using video on the site helps break down the barrier between brand and customer, giving the observer a more engaging, interactive experience. The Co-op blog, complete with video interviews of individuals that have specifically benefited from the good work of the bank, aims to allow real people to tell real stories. The stories are powerful and genuine; the type of thing customers of the Co-op Bank would be interested in finding out about.

Helping The Co-operative Financial Services to share its positive stories online is something we are tremendously proud to be involved in. It also gives The Co-operative Bank a softer more informal way of telling people about their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives and as a result helps them further in unlocking the value of their brand.

This is only the start of the journey for The Co-operative Bank but it is a step in the right direction. They are boldly using online to continue their journey and judging by the reaction their blog has already received, it seems they are venturing down the right track.

By using an online blog, The Co-operative Bank are starting to peel back the veneer to reveal the real people who are doing the real work which matters so much to the bank and their customers.