The good people at news:rewired got in touch to ask if I'd like to take part in a panel on incorporating game mechanics into interactive journalism. I readily accepted – this is an area that I think we'll see some real interest in during the next few years.

I started with a look at the struggle news media faces in attracting attention across digital channels. Whilst readers generally prefer authored content, advertising agencies use clever tricks to give their messages an equivalent appeal. The invasion of social media in the form of promoted Twitter trends and tv characters that answer back makes decreases the signal to noise ratio. In the face of so many things demanding our attention, is it any wonder so many people opt for the escapist relief of gaming?

The popularity of games puts our readership in perspective. From what I can tell, FarmVille has at least 10 times as many daily visitors as most of the popular UK media sites. Angry Birds has had over 100 times more downloads than our Guardian iPhone app. In the face of this, we'd do well to look at ways we can incorporate classic game devices like goal fulfillment, collaboration and competition into our interactive features.

My fellow speakers had a variety of other views on this emerging trend. I was particularly struck by Philip Trippenbach's talk about the difference between stories and systems.

The news:rewired team liveblogged the whole panel here. A PDF of my slides can be downloaded here.

I was pleased to be invited to present at City Hall yesterday. The Greater London Authority's Intelligence Unit assembled a great lineup of speakers to talk about "Visualizing London" and I was lucky enough to be included in their ranks.

The seminar took place in the main chamber and, looking across Foster's extraordinary interior to the capacity audience from the same seats that Ken or Boris might hold court, it was hard not to feel a little daunted.

After recapping some dataviz essentials, I gave a whistlestop tour of how the Guardian deals with government data, describing how a bunch of unassuming spreadsheets from the Treasury were transformed into an award winning newspaper graphic and then an interactive tool that allowed readers to make their own budget.

Following my talk, Emer Coleman rounded up some of the GLA's own data projects. The popularity of the Boris Bike data APIs is clearly testament to how much value the public gets from this kind of investment. That said, I was concerned to hear her recommend that departments should all hold hack days in the expectation that loads of developers would turn up and build great things for free. On one hand, I suspect hack day fatigue may soon set in amongst the UK development community. On the other, it's important not to confuse a 24hr sketch with a finished piece of software.

Finally, two chaps from UCL took the floor and described some of the amazing work being done at CASA. Some great projects were profiled and it reminded me how beneficial it can be to step outside of the news and take a longer form approach to working with data.

A PDF of my talk can be found here.

Six months after Apple v Adobe first became headline news, I found myself in the basement of a pub explaining how the Guardian builds interactive news features. Although we've made heavy use of Flash in the past, we're currently evaluating the promise of standards-based authoring and I wanted to share some of our findings.

The intrepid London branch of Hacks/Hackers invited me to speak about creating interactive pieces in a newsroom. The audience was a mixture of coding types and journalists, so I wanted to discuss our process without getting too hung up on technical details. Since everyone seems to be singing the praises of HTML5, I wanted to take a practical view on whether it could be used to make some of the pieces we've produced recently at the Guardian.

Our existent workflow copes well with rapid authoring and that's helped a great deal by the tools we use. Creating interactives requires constant dialogue between designers and developers, and the ability to port Adobe Illustrator files into Flash makes this fairly seamless. While Adobe are starting to broaden their tools to encompass the new technology, it's still early days – and in the fast pace of the newsroom, speed and reliability are big factors.

On the plus side, vector drawing, animation, realtime image manipulation and 3D graphics are all there; good start. Features like web sockets and web workers bode well for the future. However, in its current state, the lack of cross-browser consistency and unpredictable performance means we'll have a hard time bringing people comparable experiences. Moving through a series of our more successful pieces, it seems that each one has one or two ingredients that are hard to replicate without Flash. For example, although HTML5 contains greatly improved audiovisual features, it would be difficult to reproduce April's sound map of Caledonian Road without more reliable audio synchronisation capabilities. That said, we look forwards to continued experiments in this area and would imagine that better tools are round the corner.

A PDF of my talk can be found here. My colleague Martin Belam did a nice job summarising the evening as well.

I was in good company last night, addressing friends old and new at the latest meeting of the London Flash Platform User Group.

Over the course of an hour, I stepped through some of the ways we use Flash in the newsroom to help present stories in an interactive manner. The ability to integrate dynamic graphics and rich media provides digital journalists with a powerful palette and I wanted to share how some of our more successful features came together.

After telling the story of how one of Steve Jobs' favourite iPad apps started life as a Flash prototype, I finished up with some thoughts on the difficulties facing developers trying to get similar results with HTML5. This triggered a rewarding debate with several people describing their experiences, good and bad.

As always, the peerless Tink has everything taped so you can watch again or download the slides here.

Ported the Guardian's audio, video and slideshow widgets to AS3. Integrated Omniture analytics logging. Worked with Brightcove to build a custom player able to display video and ad content at multiple resolutions across the Guardian site. Helped the Java team incorporate versioned SWF artifacts into their main build process using Ant, Maven and SVN.

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Helped San Francisco agency Viscira create a Flash-based product presentation for pharmaceutical company Amgen. Researched and advised best practices for serving HD video over the internet. Liaised with studio staff to combine multiple visual elements into a web-friendly package. The finished result combined video footage, 3D animation and motion graphics into a coherent interactive design.

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Helped San Francisco agency Viscira build a Jeopardy-style quiz game for pharmaceutical company Tarceva. This required plenty of hands-on work developing and integrating an AS3 client with a LAMP web app. Also spent time structuring a Scrum-based workflow to help producers coordinate designers, copywriters and interactive developers to meet oft changing client requirements.

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Built an AS3 library that wraps up the Guardian Open Platform API and makes it available to Flash and Flex projects. Set up Ant scripts to manage build a SWC, generate ASDoc documentation and run a series of FlexUnit tests. Shared the result on Google code for all to use.

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Here's an attempt to make an unusual music visualiser, inspired by seventies cartoon colours.

I guess my main motivation was trying to avoid all those black background, BitmapFilter feedback, spectrographic cliches. After several months in SF, what better than a few rainbows?

The code is over here, in case you fancy a nose around.

Having arrived in SF for a few months, I split my first weekend between O'Reillys esteemed Irish Bar and the FlashCamp over at Adobe Town Hall. In possession of a fresh promo copy of Flash CS4, myself and Pi Bot decided to get acquainted with the Pixel Bender Toolkit.

Rubbish editor aside, the general flow of writing Pixel Bender kernels comes easily.  At heart, you're writing a blob of C code that gets fired once for every pixel in your destination image.  Having fathomed that my code would be evaluating every pixel in turn, it occurred to me a nice introductory exercise might be to build a cellular automaton. This in mind, I decided to tip my hat to Wright and Eno have a crack at the good old Game of Life.

Aside from learning how to plumb in kernels to AS3 projects using an directive, this challenge was over very quickly. An internet search revealed that someone else had got there first. Hump.

Inspiration came a little later whilst catching up with Paul and the gang over corned beef quesadillas at O'Reilly's.  What if the simulation ran backwards so that the cells converged in a fixed pattern? Sunday never provided enough time to find out, but subsequent twiddling with pre-generation to a bitmap cache produced a masked image rotator type thing, complete with elliptical Hofstadter references. Not everyone's pint of Guinness, but kept me amused all the same.

Helped build a Facebook BMX game commissioned by Sky Sports, Sport England and British Cycling. Developed a multi-player engine in record time by combining a custom SmartFox installation with a lightweight API for AS3 developers.

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Led the development of an award-winning virtual world where kids can adopt monsters with unique personalities. Worked with illustrators, animators and designers to create a Flash client with features like puzzle solving, social networking, mini-games, user-generated content and a dynamic behavior engine with its own scripting language.

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Co-founded a project exploring themes of cultural identity by mapping the sounds of New York, Manchester and five Portuguese cities. This work combined a Flash client with a MySQL database and a custom MP3 streaming engine. It was featured in TimeOut, the Guardian newspaper and BBC Radio and won several prizes and festival commissions.

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Coordinated the conversion of over 150 electronic journal titles to a J2EE platform for one of the world's largest open-access publishers. The chosen architecture combined an Oracle-backed SOA with web apps built using Struts, JSP and Velocity.

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