Just a quick note that tickets for dConstruct 2008 went on sale at 11am BST this morning. It’s now 2:30pm and we’ve got around 135 tickets left. We’ve got some great people like Steven Johnson, Daniel Burka and Joshua Porter speaking this year, so it should be a lot of fun. So if you want to come along I recommend popping along now to secure your ticket.

To win a free ticket to dConstruct simply grab the code for one of our customisable buttons, add your own image and upload it to your website. Next, take a screen grab of your button and post it to our flicker group. The best button posted added by the evening of the 30th June, as voted by ourselves, will win a complimentary pass to the event. It’s as simple as that.

As well as a great line-up of speakers we’ve got some amazing workshops at this year’s dConstruct. We only launched them a couple of days ago, but several of them are already half full, so we expect them to sell out a lot faster than they did last year. I think people have realised that the workshops are one of the best was to guarantee a place at dConstruct, which typically sells out in under 24 hours. However I think it’s mostly down to the fantastic people we’ve got running these workshops. It’s just a shame that I can’t see them all!

First up we have Lane Becker, Thor Muller and Leslie Chicoine from Get Satisfaction running a session on building and managing online communities. They will cover everything from the effect design can have on community growth and behaviour, through to community managers and dealing with unhappy campers.

Following on from this we have Daniel Burka and Mark Trammell from Digg on how to scale your designs when your community becomes a success. Daniel and Mark will look at things like performance tips, designing for unknown numbers of users and how to grow your site over time. If you’re involved in developing or managing social networks of any size or scale, these two workshops will be a perfect accompaniment.

For the more user experienced focused we have an excellent workshop from Joshua Porter on how to design sites that encourage social participation by using the insights we’ve learned from social psychology. Drawing from year of experience as a consultant at UIE and his amazing new book, Designing for the Social Web, this is the workshop you’ll find me hiding in the back of.

Last, but most definitely not least, our very own Richard Rutter and James Box will build on the excellent session they gave at SXSW and run a workshop on the practical aspects of architecting social websites. More specifically, how we can create wireframes and interactive prototypes in a world that has moved away from static pages and towards fully featured online applications.

So if you want to come to one of these workshops I’d defiantly recommend getting over there now, before it’s too late!

If you haven’t already heard, we quietly launched the dConstruct 2008 website at the start of the week. So if you’ve not seen the latest incarnation yet, I suggest you pop along to take a look.

2008.dconstruct.org

The conference itself will be take place on Friday the 5th of September, back at the
Dome in sunny Brighton. And like last year, we’ll be hosting a series of practical workshops in the run-up to the event.

Rather than putting on the same show with the same people year after year, we try to mix things up by focussing on a specific theme. One that we feel sums up the current industry (buzzword alert) zeitgeist. So in previous years we’ve covered the meaning of web 2.0 (it’s the sound of one hand clapping), the importance of open data and the art of experience design. This year we’ve decided to turn our attention to the social web.

We’ve got an amazing line-up of speakers this year, all of whom will be asking the question ‘what makes the web social?’ We’ve got author, web entrepreneur and veteran TED speaker, Steven Johnson, kicking things off with a wide-ranging discourse on how communities form and ideas spread. We’ve got Guardian podcaster Aleks Krotoski looking at the psychology of game play while the Internet’s Joshua Porter will show us how these theories can be applied to the web. Using his experience working on Digg and Pownce, Daniel Burka will explain how we can use design for social interaction while limiting negative behaviour, while Tantek Çelik will examine the growing importance of social network portability. We’ve then got the guys from Dopplr showing how they brought all these ideas together to form a complete ecosystem of feeds, widgets and APIs. Wrapping the day up we have our very own Jeremy Keith with a high-brow look at what it means to be social in an always-on, networked world. Expect lots of big words and event bigger concepts.

Of course it’s not all talk, talk, talk. The hallway conversations are just as important as the sessions, so you’ll have plenty of time to meet your fellow delegates and chat with the speakers. As well as nice long breaks we’ve got two great parties full of networking (aka drinking) opportunities. Incidentally we’re still finalising sponsorship, so if your company wants to buy everybody beer, please let me know.

The event has got a lot bigger and (hopefully) better organised since the first one we ran in a converted church hall back in 2005. However we still strive to maintain that community spirited, grassroots feel we’ve come to be known for. dConstruct is all about the people, so we hope you’ll help get the word out by posting buttons on your site and blogging about the event.

As you’re probably aware dConstruct is hugely popular and tickets sell out in a matter of hours. Tickets go on sale from 11am on Tuesday the 24th June and are a snip at £125 inc. VAT. So if you want to come along I recommend you set a reminder in your diary, cancel your meetings and get your browsers at the ready. Either that or subscribe to our events feed ☺

And if you just can’t wait to buy a ticket, there is a sneaky way to jump the queue. We’ll be opening registration for our workshops next week, and each attendee gets complimentary entrance to the conference as well. Neat huh?

So I hope you’re all as excited about the event as we are and I look forward to seeing you in Brighton in September.

Since my last post people have been clamouring for more details on Silverback, so I thought I’d explain where the idea came from, then show you a few screenshots.

Clearleft are a very user-focused agency and we try to do at least one round of usability testing on every project. We keep things as simple as possible by using our own premises, recruiting our own subjects and feeding the results straight back into the design process. Instead of expensive suites we’ll set up a computer in an empty meeting room and train a video camera on the screen to capture what the subject is saying and doing.

We tried using dedicated testing software like Morae, but it took ages to set up, didn’t play well with Parallels and was, ironically, very difficult to use. The app was packed full of features making it perfect for a dedicated usability lab but was far too bloated for the type of guerrilla tests we ran. What’s more, with a price tag at around $1,500, it was just far too expensive for the majority of small agencies to use. There had to be a cheaper way, so we looked around but we couldn’t find anything.

Around the same time a friend of ours participated in a usability study run by Leisa Reichelt. Simon explained how Leisa had opened up the iSight preview pane, and then set her screen capture software running. The result was a single file showing both screen activity and the users reaction. We really liked the idea but felt that the ever-present video would be distracting to use. Realising there was a need for something more sophisticated we set about building our own.

Development on Silverback started in late December and we had a very early alpha version working by early January. However developing in a desktop environment was new to all of us and we were amazed how fickle it was. In fact, it was surprisingly similar to developing for the web, with it’s own text display issues and 3-pixel spacer bugs. Some things that looked difficult were surprisingly easy, while other things that looked easy were frustratingly tricky. Luckily we had a great Cocoa developer, Martin Redington Redington, helping us along the way.

We also called on the services of Jon Hicks to help with the logo and interface design. As the application was for Guerilla usability testing we’d been using the working title of Silverback as an in-joke since day one. When it came to thinking up a proper name we brainstormed for ages but couldn’t think of a better one. We knew we wanted an illustrated gorilla as our icon and after toying with a few ideas, including dressing Silverback Steve up as Che Guevara, we settled on the lab coat and clipboard look.

For such a deceptively simple application, it’s actually gone through a lot of iterations, and we’re currently reaching our 60th build. We’ve spent a huge amount of time tweaking the interface, optimising the output and streamlining the code. The development of Silverback has very much been a team effort and we’re getting to a point where we are almost ready to launch.

At this point I’m starting to feel a little like an expectant parent. I’m really excited about the launch but also slightly nervous. Like all the best applications, Silverback scratches an itch and it will be a welcome member of the Clearleft family. I just hope you guys love it as much as we do.

My antipodean adventure is coming to a close so I thought i’d reflect on my time away. The trip started with a two day lay-over in Hong Kong to break the journey. I’ve been to this amazingly vibrant city before and it’s one of my favorite places in Asia. It’s a bit of a cliche but Hong Kong really is a city where east and west collide. A city where hundred year old temples sit next to trendy bars and street hawkers compete with international food chains. Like many Asian cities, gadgets rule supreme in this town and none more so than the ever ubiquitous mobile phone. The streets are a blur of activity both day and night, and as dusk falls the city is lit by a forest of neon. Like stepping into a scene from Blade Runner, you expect Decker to come round the corner any minute.

Getting from the Airport to Mongkok is a breeze, and a living example of public transport done right. Riding the MRT is also a joy, especially if you grab an Octopus card. These little cards can also be used as currency throughout the city, so remember to top up. The flight wasn’t too onerous so I turned up at the Langham Place Hotel in pretty good shape. However for an extra bit of R&R I went for a quick swim followed by a relax in the hotel spa. The view from the 56th floor Oriental hot tub was awesome.

I’ve done the normal tourist things before, such as going to Victoria Peak, taking a sanpan round Hurricane Bay and browsing the stalls at Stanly Market. I’ve also done some more out of the way things like walking the dragons back to night wave bay. However the one thing I’ve always meant to do but never managed was a trip to the races. With betting almost banned in Hong Kong, this is one of the few opportunities city dwellers have for a quick flutter. Luckily they take this opportunity with gusto. I took some amazing pictures of the event, but as my hard drive dies when I reached Auckland, I guess they are consigned to my memory now.

I didn’t know what to expect from Auckland and I have to admit that it provoked a bit of a mixed reaction. The main drag around Queens Street was pretty characterless, although Vulcan lane and some of the other side streets proved a pleasant escape. Definitely check out the ‘hash brown stack’ at the Vulcan Cafe if you want a hearty, artery hardening breakfast. However it was the areas of Parnell, K Road and especially Ponsonby that caught my interest. Still, the city was pretty spread out and obviously not designed to be circumnavigated by foot. Sadly I didn’t manage to get out of the city and see the hot springs of Rotaroua or the beautiful Bay of Islands, but this provides the perfect excuse to come back.

Next up was the city of Wellington and possibly the biggest surprise of the trip. I’ve not been to Wellington before but as the seat of government I thought it could be a little grey and lifeless. This couldn’t have been further from the truth. Wellington turned out to be a seriously cool city with a vibrant cafe culture, some amazing bars and restaurants, and a burgeoning tech community. I particularly commend Deluxe and Midnight Espresso for their enlightened opening times. Why we don’t have late night cafes in the UK is beyond me.

The Museum Hotel proved the perfect base from which to explore the city, although as Tantek rightly pointed out, it was the type of hotel you’d want to bring a partner to. The room felt far too opulent for one person alone. Another time I guess. Talking about time the schedule was pretty packed, so I ended up being confined to the city limits once again. Otherwise I would have liked to have checked out some of the local vineyards and gone LOTR location spotting. However I did manage to sample some of the Wellington night life thanks to a few members of the local tech crowd. The hospitality was overwhelming, so cheers guys. If you’re ever in Brighton please do look me up and I’ll return the favour.

Next on the itinerary was Christchurch. On first inspection the city feels like an English market town with it’s chain stores and shopping centers. But scratch the surface and you’ll find an active counter culture of trendy bars and restaurants. You’ve just got to know where to look.

As quickly as my New Zealand adventure had started it had come to an end and I found myself heading to Australia and the city of Melbourne. I’ve never been to Melbourne before but have only heard good things. Thankfully it didn’t disappoint. The city is very cool and felt like an anglicized version of San Francisco. From the arcades and alleyways off Flinders Lane to the streets round Fitzroy and St Kilda, cafe culture was very much in evidence. Local hipsters sat in beautifully grungey surroundings, sipping ‘flat whites’ and discussing their plans for the evening. Everybody was incredibly trendy, although not in the self conscious way you find in bigger cities. The cities thoroughfares were also awash with an amazing amount of street art, giving the city a tantalizing edginess.

After my duties were over I took the opportunity to hire a car and drive The Great Ocean Road, one of the worlds best known touring routes. The nature was stunning and definitely on par with the Pacific Coast Highway or the New England backwoods. I visited some great spots including the surfing mecca of Bells Beach and the iconic Twelve Apostles. I then headed inland to sample the mountain air of the Grampains before setting course back to Melbourne. Despite being a well documented route I was glad I hired GPS. Otherwise I’m sure I would have got lost at least a couple of times.

I’m on the final leg now, jetting off to Hong Kong for a couple of days before heading back to Blighty. I’ve been away for almost a month and while I’ve had an amazing time, I’m looking forward to getting back home.

A few months ago Clearleft accidentally leaked the fact we were working on our own application, known as Silverback. I say accidentally because we had just bought the domain name silverbackapp.com and thought we’d better post up a holding page. However the combination of a great logo from Jon Hicks and an amazingly inventive parallax technique from Paul meant the page got far more coverage than anticipated. Before the week was out we had over 5,000 people registered for updates and had started to receive comments like “I don’t know what Silverback is, but I know that I want it!” So no pressure there then!

For the last few months we’ve been working in what some people (not me) would describe as stealth mode. That doesn’t mean we’ve been coming to work dressed as ninjas, although that could be fun. Instead we’ve been keeping schtum about the project. You see; we thought the idea was so blindingly obvious we didn’t want anybody else doing the same thing. Greedy I know!

We’ve been beavering away at the app for the last few months, hunting for glitches and tweaking the interface. We’ve put the app in front of some friends for alpha testing and have just opened it up to a semi-private beta. We’re currently working on setting up the support site and hooking in the payment system. Once that’s all done it should be chocks away!

So by now I’m sure you’re all wondering what the hell this Silverback thing is? Well it’s time to put you out of your misery. Very simply, Silverback is an OSX application to help people run their own low-cost Guerrilla usability tests. It captures screen activity, records audio and video from your built in iSight, and then composites it into a handy Quicktime movie for later use. There are a few added features that make it perfect for usability testing, but it’s basically as simple as that!

If you’re redesigning an existing site, and especially if the site is a traditional content driven site, then one of the best ways to start is by performing a content audit. The process involves going through every page on the site and noting what the page is about and where it sits within the existing navigational structure. Looking at the content from a macro level allows you to generate a clear picture of how the site is currently structured and whether this structure makes sense.

If the site has been around for any length of time, new content will almost certainly have been added since the original schema was devised. Unless the structure is particularly robust or well planned, there is a good chance that some of this new content will have ended up in areas where it doesn’t quite fit. This is understandable as it’s very difficult for organisations to anticipate their content needs several months in advance, let alone several years.

Unfortunately websites tend to become dumping grounds for content that doesn’t fit elsewhere in the organisation. I’ve seen countless sites become little more than glorified filing systems, full of annual reports and messages from the board. Content that nobody cares about or will ever read, but that needs a home. This is very much an organisational-centred rather than a user-centred approach to content, but sadly one that is still prevalent in many of today’s websites.

There is a strong chance that the site publishers haven’t taken a proper look at their content since it was initially developed. So a site audit is a handy way to find and cull out of date or irrelevant material. Stuff that has been hidden in the dark recesses of the site for years and left to gather dust. As such it’s a good idea to note the date the material was created and who has responsibility for that page. That way you can pass the information back to the relevant people and get it updated or removed.

With a full understanding of the existing structure, you can tell wither the schema is still working. If not, the process should have provided you with enough insight to start forming opinions on a credible new structure. This is ultimately the goal of the content audit.

However there is one added benefit of the content audit which I’m yet to mention, but which I think is vitally important. A structured review of the site forces you to read every singe page, understand the content and talk confidently about the results. By doing this you gather a huge amount of intelligence on what the organisation does, how they work and how they communicate with the outside world. It’s a great way of developing your domain knowledge and getting up to speed on a project or organisation.

A thorough content audit will often unearth important information that has hitherto been brushed over or forgotten. Stuff you may never have learnt from your clients or only found out when it was too late. You may even end up knowing more about the organisation than many of its employees, who will often have a particular specialism, area interest or personal bias. This thousand-foot view can come in very handy as it allows you to cut through a lot of the politics and make informed strategic decisions.

The information architecture reasons for a content audit should never be overlooked. However it’s the deep understanding you develop for the content, the organisation and ultimately the domain where I think the real value lies.

Hey sports racers. I’m in Auckland at the moment, on the second leg of my world tour and feeling decidedly disconnected. I’m not sure if it’s just bad luck but I’ve been having WiFi nightmares down under.

Like most chain hotels the Internet connection in my room isn’t free. Unfortunately the Internet connection in my room also isn’t working. So I grabbed my laptop and headed out to find a cafe with free WiFi. A scribbled note in the guide book I borrowed from Simon and Nat indicated that the cafe across the street had a free connection. Sadly the Wifi was no longer free and also no longer working.

I tried two or three cafes but the so called “Fast Internet Broadband” was neither fast or particularly board. At Cafe Melba I was forced to register my details before I was allowed the honour of paying them my money and pretty much all of them charged. The networks I did pay for were incredibly slow and much to my surprise charged for data transfer as well as time. So collecting email was fine but uploading my pics to Flickr was a no-no.

I did find one place called Mecca which proudly exclaimed that their WiFi was free. Sadly the network was password protected and none of the staff new what the password was or could be bothered to find out. So despite trying as hard as I can to support local small businesses I’ve found myself back at Starbucks who seem to have the only reliable net connection in town, despite being over twice as expensive as everybody else.

I do have one last tip off. Apparently the traders of Parnell Road have all clubbed together to offer street wide free WiFi. It’s a bit of a walk out of town, especially when it’s raining as it has been the last couple of days. But I may try to make one last sortie out there tomorrow in search of the mythical free connection.

Now I deeply object to paying for WiFi. First off I know that by it’s nature WiFi doesn’t cost much. The charges come from setting up a billing system, offering technical support and then skimming a profit off the top. The bigger problem is that it leads to a really bad customer experience. Instead of being permanently connected and being able to check your emails or Twitter whenever you want, you’re forced to meter your usage. Logging off whenever your activity goes quiet to conserve those precious minutes.

It reminds me of the dark ages of dial up and feels like internet rationing. I’m sure when I tell my children about the old days when you had to conserve your Internet usage they will roll their eyes and say “Oh daddy, don’t be so silly, the Internet doesn’t cost money!”

I don’t know if I’m spoilt and this is the norm, but Brighton is literally dripping in free wifi thanks to the lovely chaps at Loose Connection. Similarly most of the US cities I visit have plenty of free wifi cafes and some of them even have free municipal connections. Even Singapore airport offers a free net connection to all it’s travellers.

I do think in this day and age WiFi should be offered as a free service to cafe patrons, much the same way as they offer free newspapers or use of the washroom. WiFi is extremely easy to set up and by it’s very nature wants to be free. You have to go out of your way to lock it down and start charging for it.

I imagine that the cafes don’t make any money out of this. Instead a salesman from a big telecom company has come round and offered them free kit in exchange for the opportunity to fleece their customers. On the surface this sounds like a good deal, but you’d get much more custom and generate much better feelings if you simply set up your own WiFi router and opened it up to the public. I know that I frequent cafes and bars that offer free WiFi much more regularly than other establishments, even when I’m not looking to ‘log on’. And I would have been there every day for breakfast and lunch if just one cafe in Auckland offered a free connection, instead of being continuously disappointed.

I’m heading to Wellington and Christchurch next, before hopping over to Melbourne, so if you can recommend a nice cafe with free WiFi in any of those places, please let me know.

If you don’t know Indi Young, she’s one smart cookie. As one of the co-founders of Adaptive Path she spent 5 years working alongside the likes of Jeff Veen, Dan Saffer and Peter Merholtz on a variety of diverse and challenging projects. Indi left Adaptive Path in 2006 to work on her new book, Mental Models, which was recently published by Rosenfeld Media. We got a copy in the office a few months back and haven’t put it down since.

The book is about user centred design, but it takes a much more scientific approach than most. By looking at the field of cognitive psychology, Indi has developed a series of mental models which help explain typical user behaviour. By understanding these models and designing around then, it’s possible to create more effective, satisfying and meaningful experiences. Experiences that match the users goals with the goals of the site or service.

Indi dropped us a line the other week to say she was heading over to the UK in June. We couldn’t let the opportunity go to waste so we twisted her arm to come down to Brighton and run a workshop. If you’re interested in information architecture, usability and user centred design you really don’t want to miss this workshop. We’ve only got a limited number of tickets and I think they are going to go fast. So I highly recommend you grab a place while you can.

Somewhat unintentionally I seem to have arranged what almost amounts to a world tour over the next couple of months.

Things kick off in London with the Future of Web Apps on the 17-18th April. My half day Guerrilla Usability Testing Workshop has proved particularly popular and I was just informed this morning that the session has sold out.

I’m then flying out to New Zealand to do a series of full day usability workshops with those lovely guys from Webstock. I’ll be starting in Auckland on the 5th May, then flying down to Wellington for the 8th May, before finishing up in Christchurch on the 12th. I’ve never been to the North Island before, but absolutely love NZ, so am really looking forward to it. Incidentally Tantek will be reprising the sell out workshop he first debuted at dConstruct last year the day after my sessions, so well worth checking out.

I’m then hot-footing it over to Melbourne to speak at the newly formed Web Directions South: UX on the 15-16th. The line-up for the conference looks amazing so it’s a must for all antipodean user experience practitioners out there. I’ll be doing a session titled Designing the User Experience Curve and a full day workshop on — you guessed it — Guerrilla Usability Testing.

I was supposed to be hopping over the pacific for @media SF on the 22nd May but sadly the event has now been postponed. Instead I’ll be heading back home to feed my plants and do a spot of laundry before An Event Apart Boston.

AEA Boston is set for the 23rd-24th June and has an all star cast including Jared Spool, Jeff Veen and Doug Bowman to name but three. Jeffrey and Eric always put on a fine show so I’d highly recommend going. And to sweeten the pot a little, quote the following code when booking and you’ll get $50 off the ticket price. Now don’t say I never get you anything.

AEABUDD

All that travelling should leave me feeling pretty jet lagged, not to mention putting a big dent in my Edenbee profile. So time to plant some trees and look into other ways to reduce the environmental impact of my flights. Now if somebody would just organise a conference that didn’t involve air travel, that would be great.

I’ve decided to start a quick series of posts on design artefacts. Basically all the documents, diagrams, designs and other outputs you create during the design process. These artefacts include the following items, although I’m sure you can think of more. As the series progresses I’ll link all the items up for ease of navigation.

• Content Inventory
• Competitor Analysis
• Personas and Wireframes
• Site Maps and User Flow Diagrams
• Low Fidelity Paper Prototypes
• Interactive Prototypes
• Usability Testing Reports
• Mood Boards
• Rapid Design Iterations
• Page Designs
• HTML/CSS Templates

These artefacts are often called ‘deliverables’ as they tend to get sent to clients for formal sign-off. Sadly I think we’ve got so fixated with the project management value of these ‘deliverables’ we’ve started to overlook their real value.

During this series I’m going to argue that the benefit of these documents is formative rather than summative. That, rather than being a milestone for checking the validity and progress of your designs, they are actually critical to the formation of the design itself.

If this is the case, which I believe it is, I’m also going to suggest that we stop treating them as traditional ‘deliverables’ and handing them over to clients for approval. Instead I’m going to suggest that we work with our clients in a more collaborative and iterative manner, using a process of passive approval instead.

A few weeks ago we organised a public speaking workshop for the whole of Clearleft. A lovely chap called Alex Marshall hosted the workshop, and asked us all to give a 5 minute presentation to the rest of the team. Each session was video recorded and then played back to help us see what we’re doing well and what we’re doing badly.

I’ve been a dive instructor for several years, and have worked as a safety diver on shark feeds in the Great Barrier Reef. I’ve dived with all sorts of sharks in my time, from little white tip reef sharks in Thailand to schools of over 50 hammerheads in the South China seas. There is nothing like jumping in the water with a top level predator to get the heart racing.

However my first ever experience of a shark underwater was dead, laying on the bottom of the ocean with it’s fin cut off. Shark meat isn’t worth much, so it’s quite common to slice the fins off a living shark and then throw it back in the water to slowly drown. As such, I chose to do my talk on the terrible shark finning trade around the world.

Shark fin soup is increasing in popularity due to the economic success of China and other Asian countries. At $100 per bowl in some Hong Kong restaurants, shark fin soup is a sign of power and wealth. However it has little in the way of taste or nutritional value, with all the flavour coming from the chicken stock it’s cooked in. It’s really just there so you can say you’ve eaten shark.

The raising demand for shark fins is having a dramatic effect on the shark population. Many sharks don’t reproduce until the age of 15, so they are extremely sensitive to over fishing. As a top level predator, their disappearance may also have dramatic effects on other parts of the eco-system. There was evidence a few years back that the spiney lobster stocks around Tasmania had collapsed as a direct result of shark overfishing. With no sharks to keep octopus number in check, there was a massive bloom octopus numbers and they were eating all the lobsters.

The problem is that sharks have gained an undeserved reputation as killers, largely as a result of films like Jaws. In reality there are only around 5 unprovoked shark attacks per year, while around 50 million sharks are killed by the finning trade. Much of this trade domes from Europe, which supplied about a third of the fins used ion the Hong Kong shark trade. Spain is the worst culprit, but the UK also has pretty poor regulations.

People love dolphins because they are cute, but few people care about the fate of the shark.

This is anecdotal, but I personally witnessed the affect of overfishing sharks in as little as 3 months. When I was working on the island of Koh Phi-Phi back in 1999, the fishermen were catching fairly large specimens. However as the weeks progressed I noticed the catches getting smaller and smaller until one day, no more sharks were being caught. I went back to Thailand this time last year, and underwater sightings of sharks in the area had dropped to almost zero.

I noticed there was an article in the Times today on the fate of the worlds shark population. It seems that the Hammerhead shark, along with 8 other species, has been put on the ‘red list’ of endangered species. Apparently stocks of the scalloped hammerheads have fallen by 98 percent off the US Atlantic coast since 1970. It’s an interesting read, so I urge you to take a look.

We’re starting to see a resurgence of documentary making at the moment, and Sharkwater gets it’s UK release on the 22nd of February. The movie charts the film makers journey of discovery as he sets out to make an underwater shark adventure but ends up getting embroiled in the international finning trade. I’ll be going to see the movie and I hope you will to. In the meantime, please support the anti finning movement by avoiding any restaurants that sell shark fin soup.

There was a bit of a meme going round the Britpack mailing list last week, with people coming up with names for fictional social networks. Below are a few of my favourites, although please be aware that none of them are my idea and several are just plain WRONG! PC people or those with a sensitive disposition, look away now.

• Floundr – social network for struggling fishermen.
• Tickr – photo site for heart surgeons.
• Fuckr – the network for people with Tourette’s Syndrome
• Wankr – the network for porn addicts
• Shittr – social networking for sewage processing workers
• Whoremongr – social networking for pimps
• MyFace – for models
• Losr – for people who don’t know how to socialise in the real world. Oh wait, that’s already been done …
• Grammr – ironically titled social network for grammar pedants
• Kiddyfiddlr – obviously it’s a site aimed at children who happen to play the violin

Feel free to share your own ideas for a great new social networking site.

Ever since starting Clearleft people have been asking why we don’t build our own app? After all it’s the kind of thing people like 37 Signals or Firewheel have been doing for a while now.

In truth it’s always something we’ve wanted to do, we just never had the time. We’ve been so fixated on creating great products for our customers, we couldn’t fit it in. The other problem was coming up with a great idea. Sure we’ve thrown concepts around before, some of which were pretty good. However none of them ever quite stuck.

That is until a few months ago when we came up with an idea so obvious, we couldn’t believe it hadn’t been done before. As well as being stupidly simple, it was something we ourselves would use. In fact we liked it so much we wanted it to magically appear so we could start using it straight away.

So what is this mystery app? Well I’m afraid it’s a little too early to say at the moment. However if you know the kind of work we do, you can probably figure it out from the holding page. It’s kind of niche, but we hope it will be of benefit to a lot of you designers and developers out there.

The app itself is at a very early alpha stage. It’s almost feature complete but needs a lot of performance tuning. We’re hoping to have a demo ready by SXSW and will start a limited private beta when we get back. However I doubt the app will reach a releasable state for at least a couple of months.

In the meantime, If you’d like to be involved in the beta, why don’t you pop along to the holding page and sign up for notification.

Oh, and I forgot to mention. The app is called Silverback and it features a gorilla holding a clipboard. How cool is that?