It’s Friday, it’s hot and many of us have had hideous journeys, courtesy of London Underground. But life still goes on. As Ferris Bueller said “life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss something”. Hmmm… anyway, this weeks theme is all about engagement and interactivity. Over the past few years, we have been treading a fine balance between content/relevance and engagement/interactivity. As applications are becoming more powerful, and our knowledge about how interactive channels function deepens, we are starting to see the rise of things that do both. Enjoy the examples.

A

Visual Newsreader (www.spectramsnbc.com)
As technology is shifting from purely text-based to more interactive experiences, we are seeing the redefinition of existing applications into visually represented forms. I’ve included here an example of a newsfeed, that draws together the news in a really engaging way. I think that the definition of their offering sums it up pretty well: “Spectra merges the news spectrum and the colour spectrum into an expansive news viewing experience. With comprehensive live news coverage, striking design, complete customization, dynamic browsing, human body interaction and many other unique features, Spectra brings A Fuller Spectrum of News to life in our most immersive extension yet.”

Visual Meta Search Engines (http://www.exalead.co.uk/search ; http://www.kartoo.com/en_index.htm)
Microsoft has been looking at transforming search for a while now and we are starting to see the introduction of visual search engines. At the OnRec conference, Laura Stoker from AIRS demo’d Exalead and I was pretty impressed. It’s just one of those really useful tools that provides content in a way that accommodates different types of learning styles – you can quickly glance at the thumbnail previews to see whether the result is relevant or not. Kartoo is simply a different approach to this, that I have included for reference. I’m sure that Google will catch up pretty soon…

Creating more engaging presentations (http://www.sliderocket.com/index.html)
Anthony found this one – it may be still in Beta (i.e. it is in testing rather than commercially available) but it looks really useful. Slide Rocket is a web-based application that allows people to come together online to create really engaging presentations. In a world of ‘death by PowerPoint’, adding a bit of stage management to your client presentations is going to become readily more important. What’s more, it has some useful analytics that allow you to see how long who is viewing your presentation, where they viewed it, who they’ve shared it with, which slides they looked at and for how long. Great stuff.

Big Brother (http://www.channel4.com/bigbrother/) vs.. the Apprentice (http://www.bbc.co.uk/apprentice/)
OK. So Luisa calls these programmes “Life Theft” but I believe that we have an obligation to keep in touch with populist opinion. Opinions about the programmes aside, both of these programmes tend to be pretty forward-thinking in their use of technology. Missed an episode of the apprentice? Why not watch it on your computer via the iPlayer. Want to see the latest snippet of what’s happening in BB — get downloads to your mobile phone. Read the blogs. Complete the polls. Join the debate. It’s all harmless fun. Until some psychologist points out that it has become an addiction, that is…