The new Harrison Parrott website went live at the end of last month.

Harrison Parrott (”HP” to their friends) are one of the world’s leading classical music artist and project management agencies. As we have discovered they are also a highly principled, ultra-professional, appreciative and engagingly eclectic group of people.

The new site is the product of a rigorous development process that included Scenario Planning, persona creation and brand definition.

Scenario Planning is a proprietary tool that uses a combination of stakeholder workshops and spreadsheet number crunching to directly relate user goals to business objectives. This allows us to objectively prioritise functionality and content via a process that is jointly owned by all of the key decision makers.

The planning for this project included primary research amongst various audiences including orchestra promoters, record labels, journalists and musicians. These audiences presented us with a sometimes contradictory set of insights around attitudes to all things social, technology usage, and the role of agency websites in their professional lives.

The process of reconciling these insights has resulted in a site that is finely tuned (no pun intended) to be fit for commercial purpose whilst offering a clean, efficient and intuitive user experience.

It has also resulted in simple but innovative features such as a notebook facility that allows users to create a personalised list of artists as they browse the site. These lists can be saved, printed or shared by email via a unique link. The notebook is already proving to be a popular feature both within and outwith the agency.

So there you have it. We clearly enjoyed the project and working with the HP team. This is what they had to say about us.

“Impressed by their work for Sadler’s Wells, Edinburgh International Festival and Dilettante Music, we found Blonde to be an energetic and responsive agency. Their proposal for the redevelopment of our website was fresh and creative, but clearly focused on what we were trying to achieve. Asking the right questions to ensure they understood our business and our culture, they delivered – on schedule – a clean and striking site which is easy to use and features innovations that work for us and our users. We’re looking forward to continuing to develop our digital marketing strategy with this highly professional outfit.”

Antonio Orlando, Marketing and PR Manager

We had another website launch yesterday – Creative Scotland’s perspectives’ forum.

Creative Scotland (if you didn’t already know) will be a new organisation with creative practitioners at its heart: an organisation designed to listen to the needs of professional practitioners and use that intelligence in its role as advocate, champion, investor and broker.

It’s your chance to share your views on the opportunities as well as the obstacles for the creative community, for the individual, for the public and for Creative Scotland itself.

Over the next three months, they’ll be listening to your perspective on Creative Scotland’s four priorities: creative practitioners, accessibility, participation and international activity.

Creative Scotland has commissioned essays from the international creative community as a starting point to stimulate discussion. The first of these, the creative practitioner, was launched yesterday morning by visual artist Hans Abbing.

You can read his thoughts and submit your response on the site.

perspectives.creativescotland.org.uk

EdTwinge is a Twitter-based, crowdsourced, realtime Edinburgh Fringe rating application.

It monitors tweets that mention any of the acts at the 2009 Fringe Festival and/or the most commonly used Fringe hashtags. It then matches the content of these tweets against an extensive database of positive and negative words and phrases.

The site publishes two scores for each act at the Fringe. The first is “Noise”. This is simply the number of tweets that have mentioned the act in an Edinburgh/Fringe context. The second, and more important, measure is what we call “Karma”.

A full, geek-friendly explanation of how Karma is calculated can be found on the Edtwinge site. But basically it is a measure of the net positive sentiment about each act, which is based on a robust statistical analysis. This statistical analysis ensures that the Karma score is as reliable as possible. For instance an act mentioned in, say, five tweets, all of which are positive will have a significantly lower karma score than an act mentioned positively in 60 tweets out of 70. Phrases are prioritised over words, so “shit-hot” would be correctly identified as a positive statement for instance.

The top ten tables for the Fringe as a whole, and for each genre of show, are primarily derived from Karma. Noise only comes into play if two shows have the same Karma rating. In this instance the act with the higher noise score would rank above the other.

The site also allows the user to search and view karma and noise scores for any act, and to view in chronological order the verbatim tweets that underpin these.

EdTwinge is also the result of a garage-band style collaboration with some very talented, sparky and creative people.

Mike Coulter – social media exponent at Digital Agency (the original idea was his).

Andrew Burnett – another social media exponent and expert traffic driver.

Jim Wolff – digital misfit (his words not mine) who joined Leith part way through the project.

There is no paying client behind EdTwinge. It’s been a fun and fruitful diversion from the day job for those of us lucky enough to be involved. And what we’ve learned about tag-team style collaboration, baton-passing Twitter account shifts, and fleet-of-foot digital seeding and amplification has been as valuable as the technical, under the bonnet of Twitter stuff.

Early days yet (3 and a half days into the Fringe at the time of writing), but there has already been a significant amount of positive commentary and the site appears to be performing well. A big thank you to our friends at Stripe for securing some really excellent profile for the project.

I’ll post a more in-depth analysis of results and learning in a couple of weeks but average time on site is currently running at over 4 minutes on the back of an average of 5.22 pages viewed per visit according to Google Analytics.

Follow us (EdTwinge) on Twitter for regular updates. And/or embed your own EdTwinge Top 10 widget, like this one that we prepared earlier…

We’ve been working with Edinburgh International Festival over the last few months on a new site ‘Following the Diaspora: Chinese Lives in Scotland’. The site gives an intimate insight into the lives of Chinese people who have chosen to make Scotland their home, exploring memory and homecoming, as well as celebrating the lives of the Chinese Scottish Diaspora.

The website is made of work by the Scottish/Chinese artist, Pamela So. The project has taken Pamela from her home in North Ayrshire, Scotland, to her ancestral home in Shunde, Guangzhou, China, and back to the most northerly shores of Scotland in Caithness and Sutherland. The result is an interactive portrait of several individuals of Chinese descent who share their thoughts and experiences through text and multimedia, giving a sense of what it is like to live within two cultures.

Browse the Following Diaspora: Chinese Lives in Scotland website at eif.co.uk/diasporaproject

Dundee has long been known as the ‘City of Discovery’ – an identity that has been very beneficial to the city in terms of raising its profile locally, within Scotland and further afield. However this old branding for the city is now more than 20 years old and in need of a new look. Blonde has been working with our sister agencies, Leith and Stripe, on a new website www.dundee.com to support the relaunch of Dundee and its new branding, ‘One City, Many Discoveries’. The new vision, while still reflecting the city’s heritage, has been created to better represent modern, multi faceted Dundee: a diverse, creative and innovative city which is home to world leading research, a thriving digital sector and which offers a fantastic quality of life.

At the heart of our refreshed vision for Dundee are people who are linked to the city and their stories about it. A host of inspirational individuals including figures such as the actor Brian Cox and presenter Lorraine Kelly as well as scientist Sir Philip Cohen and local musician Ged Grimes have shared their personal discoveries about Dundee with us.

Through the website we’re inviting people to ‘discover more‘ about the city but we also want to unearth locals’ stories so we can share with these with everyone else. So through ‘Dundee & Me‘, we want to hear from the people who live or work or study in Dundee and find out what it is about the city that sparks their imagination. A selection of these stories will be published online and also in a new guide book to the city, and one story will be chosen as the subject of a new short film about Dundee.

This week we were delighted to be involved in the launch of the 2009 Edinburgh International Festival with the design and build of their new look website. The website showcases the ‘Enlightenment’ programme of events from 14 Aug – 06 Sep. It also showcases the new EIF brand and the newly commissioned (and slightly controversial) Edinburgh Toile by our friends in Glasgow, Timorous Beasties. (Not the Edinburgh Toilet as one of our developers mistakenly called it throughout production!)

Having worked closely with EIF for the 2008 Festival, we were keen to improve the usability of the site and make searching for events totally intuitive with both a general search and search using a diary mechanism.

The initial response to the new website has been fantastic and we’ve already got our eyes on events for when tickets go on sale on 04 Apr.

www.eif.co.uk

A week ago we set out our stall to provide live tracking of EdTwestival socialising as it happened.

The idea was to do this using a newly created Twitter account @wemet. By sending a direct message to WeMet with the Twitter @names of the people you met, you would help to create a real time database of all the social interactions as they happened.

That was the theory…

In practice in turned out pretty well. The EdTwestival event itself was an unqualified success – well organised, well supported and much appreciated by all who attended. By comparison the live tracking element was more of a mixed bag.

What worked

• Roy, Andy and Fraser did a grand job in a short space of time to grapple with the Twitter API, develop the application and sort out the front end interface.
• Excellent support for the idea ahead of the event from the EdTwestival team and the “community”.
• At the event itself there was a generous spirit and plenty of good intentions to participate in the idea.
• In the end, from a universe of 189, a total of 58 people sent direct messages detailing conversations with 118 others. These “meetings” involved 124 unique names or 66% of the universe. The resulting social graph of the event is shown in the image above and the movie below. You can also view a replay, condensed into 5 minutes, here.

What could have been better

• Despite the best efforts of the EdTwestival guys the venue wifi couldn’t cope with demand for bandwith resulting from the furious content creation of 200 avid twitter-bloggers. We ended up running the application through a 3G dongle that could only manage a 2G connection.
• A design that looked great on screen could have been better optimised for large scale projection.
• Despite the predictably high penetration of iPhones within this geeky group, many people simply weren’t packing the right kind of mobile devices to make participation easy.
• Even with an iPhone, sending a direct message at the start of every new conversation is actually an anti-social act. In the end, an idea that was enabled by technology was also limited by technology. More accurately, and reassuringly, the idea was limited by people’s desire to be socialising rather than technologising.

Nonetheless a big thank you to all who did “technologise”.

To retweet this post, copy and paste the text below into Twitter, Tweetdeck, Tweetie, Twhirl, or twhatever.

Results of Wemet live tracking at #EdTwestival – http://bit.ly/yblG3

We’re thrilled to have been appointed by Dilettante to handle their Phase 2 site design and development.

Dilettante is a classical music social network and we’ll be developing a range of Web 2.0 consumer-facing tools, boosting the site’s usability and finessing its look and feel.

The finished site will integrate social media mechanics, e-commerce and expert content.

Dilettante visitors will be able to chart the progress of Phase 2 development via series of video diary posts on the site.

Dilettante adds to our niche expertise in using digital channels to promote the arts – we already work with Sadlers Wells and the Edinburgh International Festival.

Grolsch is sponsoring Original Comedy on Channel 4.

In support of this, Leith have produced a series of sponsorship idents, shot in Amsterdam and featuring a couple of guys on a grass-roofed barge. Quirky things happen around them as they make their way along the canals – these involve a zebra, a mole, Amazonian indians, a visit from on high by a Japanese businessman, an unusual pizza delivery and some “wild” grass.

We’ve developed a new Grolsch site which is being referred to internally as the “immortal” – part immersive brand experience, part portal. The new site is designed to make the most of the increasing amount of dynamic content that Grolsch/we are generating – much of this obviously arising from the C4 sponsorship.

An example of this dynamic content is the Codebreaker competition. Within the action of each sponsorship film we’ve included a Grolsch-related number. These numbers pertain to facts about the brand, its history, its locations, its products, its packaging and to beer drinking in general. The numbers are “hidden in full view” in that they’re pretty easy to spot if you know to look for them, but you probably won’t notice them if you don’t.

Competition entrants have to identify each of the six numbers between now and the end of March and enter them on the Grolsch site. To successfully break the code they have to enter the sum of all six numbers. Winners get their own centrally located houseboat in Amsterdam for three nights, plus a two day trip to the Grolsch Brewery in Enschede.

Getting this competition off the ground has been a properly integrated effort involving forward planning and great collaboration between Blonde, Coors, Channel 4, Leith and their production company. Hard work but good fun.

Mark Wong joined us recently as a developer in our London office (aka Blondon).

Talking of aka, it’s Mark, aka “Wonky”, aka “Wonkenstein”, aka “the Wonkenator”.

In a previous post Fraser talked about developers being machines that turn coffee into code.

Wonky is clearly a machine that turns beef flavour Hula Hoops into code.

(Plus the occasional banana).