Off The Wall Post

Off The Wall Post delves into some cool web apps - Google's Chrome browser web experiments that teleport you to bakeries and miniature parks across the globe, lets you bang drums in London's Science Museum and, coolest of all, sends your portrait to robots endlessly drawing and erasing faces in the sand.

We also look at lovely mapping archive project History Pin and we deconstruct fandom via Lady Gaga's Little Monsters - her own social network.

All this plus wanky words aplenty.

As ever, share your thoughts on any of the above and send us your wanky words to @offthewallpost, our facebook page or our website offthewallpost.com

After nine years and five months, Phil Gyford finally uploaded the last entry of Samuel Pepys Diary to his epic blogging project Peypsdiary.com. A side project for this brilliant web developer, we talk to Phil about his labour of love: the process, the audience it built, its move to Twitter and how it feels when something this long-term comes to an end.

Other items include the discovery of InstaCRT - crazy iOS photo filter app; Lenddo - social banking; a bump in the road for Sweden's citizen-led @sweden Twitter account.

As ever, share your thoughts on this episode and send your wanky words to @offthewallpost, the Off The Wall Post Facebook page or the Off The Wall Post website.

Photographer Chris Floyd decided to turn his relationships on Twitter into a photography exhibition (and then a book) called 140 Characters. Dan went to meet Chris at a book signing event in The Big Green Bookshop and talked to Chris about the book, the project and his exploration of Twitter and its users.

The podcast is interspersed with soundbites from Chris' 140 Characters slideshow and we thank not only Chris, but his subjects for their contribution to this episode of Off The Wall Post.

Chris on Twitter - @chrisfloyduk; Big Green Bookshop on Twitter - @biggreenbooks

For more info visit our website: offthewallpost.com and let us know what you think: tweet us @offthewallpost; Post on our Facebook page; leave a comment below.

Dan and Kat are joined by journalist, academic, podcaster and presenter, Aleks Krotoski to discuss the topics of her forthcoming book: Untangling The Web. Attitudes and behaviours around Sex and Privacy are the big changes that the web has wrought upon humanity, but there's a real sense that serendipity is the real goal - and Aleks has built a machine to show it!

Kat also highlights PointerPointer.com, a brilliant use of images from the web; Dan advises you to watch Between 2 Ferns (from Funny or Die) and investigate the amazing PolitWoops.co.uk, which publishes the deleted tweets of polititians.

All this and the latest attrocious wanky words from New Media and the crisis in the Eurozone...

Let us know what you think: tweet us @offthewallpost; Post on our Facebook page; leave a comment on our blog.

NB: Barry's gutted he missed this episode and so are we. Barry sends his love and will be back next week!

Kat, Dan and Barry chew over the meaty digital and social issues of the day: what ARE cookies? Are they evil, naughty or necessary? Is Microsoft's new social network So.cl actually a social network or some weird search meets pinterest meets delicious thing? Is Polaroid's iphone app too little, too late?

All this plus some of the wankiest words you'll hear this side of South by... 

Join in with the fun on Twitter - @offthewallpost; on Facebook facebook.com/offthewallpost or the blog offthewallpost.com

Head of Entertainment for ITV.com, Tom Dolan joins Off The Wall Post to share his insights and talk telly and online - the partnership of big entertainment shows, audiences and online. What are the opportunities for TV to add value to the 2screening / online audience? And how to keep a light touch integrating the opportunities so as not to ruin the experience for the mass audience who just turned on to watch TV.

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Novelist and author of The English Monster, Lloyd Shepherd, joins Off The Wall Post to discuss his close-up experience with pirates, publishing and the changes and challenges facing the novel in the digital age.

Barry gets excited, along with the rest of the Kickstarter community, about a watch; while Kat finds Kickstarter has rekindled the creativity of an old favourite Ze Frank.

Share your thoughts, comments and wanky words with us on Twitter @offthewallpost, Facebook.com/offthewallpost or our website Offthewallpost.com

We love a bit of interactive entertainment on Off The Wall Post, so we're delighted to talk to the awesome Dr Jo Twist - CEO of UKIE (United Kingdom Interactive Entertainment Association) about games, playfulness, demographics and the promise the UK Games Industry holds for young people hoping to make careers out of creativity and code.

Barry gets his critical groove on for Google Glass(es); Kat gets nostalgic and Dan finds an easy way to play with his data and APIs across the internet with If This Then That. Plus some of the wankiest words this side of SXSW.

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It's all the rage for brands and TV shows to have Twitter feeds, but how many of them actually have Twitter personalities you'd want to follow? The ones that Dave Levin writes do! With a host of majorly successful Twitter accounts to his name, including The Dolphin Pub, Channel Four's BattleFront and now BBC's The Voice UK, Dave talks to Off The Wall Post to share his Twitter technique, tone of voice and his top tips for building an engaged and loyal community on Twitter. AND whether your Facebook and Twitter voice should be the same.

Also this week: Kat talks about Cat Map and digs into hot new privacy-busting location-based app Highlight; Barry wonders why he should care about which internet browser he uses; while Dan wonders what's become of the industry that brought so much innovation to digital media, but has since gone quiet.

Find more information on our blog. Tell us what you think about the topics and tell us your latest #wankywords on Twitter @offthewallpost or on our Facebook Page.

Image tagging service, Pinterest, has received a lot of tech press since it gained a staggering 12 Million users in 2011 and looks set to continue being huge in social media in 2012. Kat, Dan and Barry sign in and pin, then dig deeper into the practical and commercial uses of Pinterest, and whether anyone should really give a damn.

Meanwhile, Barry revives the Twitter Joke Trial as Stephen Fry blasts the judiciary for being out of touch with Twitter. Barry presents his hilarious top ten tweets to get yourself arrested.

Dan gets highbrow with Cowbird, a storytelling collective that seeks to pull together human stories and narratives in a sort of experiential wikipedia for the human soul.

Full links available on Off The Wall Post Blog

Wanky Words

Pinterestification - @heatherataylor

Twipping Point / phablet - @marcsettle

Surface - @fakebitpoly

Going Meta - @_martinfranklin

Don’t forget to share your thoughts and wanky words with us on Twitter – @offthewallpost;Facebook.com/offthewallpost or the blog offthewallpost.com

Timothy Winchester's People I know is a wonderful, quirky web comic that's been bringing joy to readers for years. Timothy joins Dan, Barry and Kat to talk about his hobby-turned-bedroom industry that moves between the internet and hard copy sales across the world.

Kat returns to the podcast this week, and so inevitably does talk of Google - this time Google's browser history-inferred information it uses to feed you its targeted ads. We look into Google's Ads Preferences Manager and reveal Kat's true age!

Barry discovers a QR code application that DOESN'T suck - although that depends on whether you advocate innovative Turkish football fans abusing opposing teams at a match...

Dan gets Shazam happy about the increased use of the audio recognition and tagging app in TV advertising.

Wanky Words:

Permalancing - @huey (via @janefriedman)

Ultimedia - @thomhoffman

etailer - @jordit

To make a viral - Timothy Winchester

Don’t forget to share your thoughts and wanky words with us on Twitter – @offthewallpost; Facebook.com/offthewallpost or the blog offthewallpost.com

Kat's away, leaving Off The Wall Post to dig into the stats provided by Who Are Social Gamers to discover that only two things in this life are certain: death and Barry's insatiable desire to create a quiz out of an infographic.

Dan discusses the interesting case of This Is How You Die - a tumblr collecting deaths as imagined by those destined to die them. Confused? Don't be. It's all in a good cause - a crowdsourcing of material for author Chuck Wendig's latest novel project Blackbirds.

Enough about death - what about life? Your social life, that is - as analysed and reported by Social Life Audit, via Facebook check-ins and picture tagging. Clever facial recognition software Face.com and your Facebook places check-ins combine to make up a fun (if depressing, in our cases!) collection of sentiment analysis and conjecture.

Kat will return next episode to return brains, class and credibilty to the show!

Wanky Words:

Appcessorise - @R4isstatic

Engagification / Intentcasting - @andypiper

Zeitgeist-defining / Eyeballing / Freemium - @MarkBeharrell

Earlyvangelist - Tom Kenyon (on the Off The Wall Post Facebook Page)

Don't forget to share your thoughts and wanky words with us on Twitter - @offthewallpost; Facebook.com/offthewallpost or the blog offthewallpost.com

Television and digital media have been obsessing over two screen (#2screen) synergies for ages now - thinking about audience attention and behaviour in a world where they have laptops, mobiles and tablets open on their laps offering alternative, social media treats to detract (or complement) the traditional content of the first screen Television. But Screenpop's Head of Games and blogger, Mark Sorrell, has a different take on this - that the Television is the second screen in this relationship and that the primary focus of audiences is on those other screens - they just happen to have the Telly on at the same time. We discuss the hope and hype of social TV and the opportunity of platforms like Zeebox and its API.

Other things discussed this episode are Louis CK's live recording download experiment (and success); the number of iPads and tablets activated over Christmas 2011; and the rights and wrongs of Google's decision to remove MG Siegler's 'offensive' profile picture from Google+.

PLUS - our first ever Dan Biddle Off The Wall Post doodle give-away!

Wanky Words (both provided by Mark Sorrell):

Telefication

Clarion the hero message

Don't forget to share your thoughts and wanky words with us on Twitter - @offthewallpost; Facebook.com/offthewallpost or the blog offthewallpost.com

Fuelled largely by Pringles, Celebrations, jellybeans and beer, Kat, Barry and Dan slap a Dickensian motif onto the podcast. Looking to the past, present and future of digital and social media. Photovine, Flickr, Instagram, Google+, YouTube, Facebook mobile phones, Gowalla, 3D TV, Siri, Twitter... What's promising to rock the year ahead and what's doomed to pick over leftovers with MySpace and Friendfeed? Listen in to find out.

Wanky Words:

Kidfluencing - @ZoeEBreen

Curautomation -@Huey and @srhas quoting @benjilanyado

Brain Rain - Tom Kile Hartshorn (from OTWP Facebook page)

Engagerprising - Andy Piper (from OTWP Facebook page)

Don't forget to share your thoughts and wanky words with us on Twitter - @offthewallpost; Facebook.com/offthewallpost or the blog offthewallpost.com

Dual Screen iPad and web app Zeebox is fresh off the production line and causing a stir. Dan's got himself an iPad and has been playing along to the branded TV special E4's Desperate Scousewives. Is this the future of social television...?

Barry makes the case against Frictionless Sharing with products like Spotify and The Guardian on Facebook; Kat brings USP music-sharing network This Is My Jam to the table AND the ultimate cuddly online productivity writing tool Written? Kitten!

Wanky Words

Twadvent Calendar - @GemmaBrady18

Thinkpiece / Bathtub curve - @ZoeEBreen

Ideation - a return kicking by demand of @AndyPiper, @quirkybean and @valeriemeachum

Deck (a powerpoint presentation) - Dan

Washup - @R4isStatic

Cloudify - @Jordit

Legacy Proof - Kabir Jutla

Raptured is a six-part online drama that started airing on YouTube, Blip.TV, Vimeo and beyond on 21 October 2011. Writer and Director Heather Taylor joins Off The Wall Post to explain the series that upgrades the humans that got left behind when The Rapture happened. Heather describes the funding models; distribution deals through Koldcast; issues around product placement and misplacement; Vimeo frustrations and the second series already in the works.

Watch the whole series on the Raptured The Series website.

Other things brought to the podcast include Barry's Internet-enabled Television; Kat's ruminations on Google's release of Google+ brand pages and the death of the URL as we know it; Dan gives everyone nightmares with the Facebook privacy scarefest Take This Lollipop.

Wanky Words

Affluenza - Heather Taylor

Augmentainment - Paul Rissen

Futurescoping - Zoe Breen

Don't forget to share your wanky words with us on Twitter - @offthewallpost; Facebook.com/offthewallpost or the blog offthewallpost.com

How do you get a seat on a crowded commuter train? How do you get your blog posts to go viral? Turns out the two questions have the same answer...! Digital Strategist and blogger Brendan Nelson joins Off The Wall Post to discuss the modern warfare that is getting a seat on the train and the strange experience of a blog post about commuting propelling him into the news headlines, radio spots and ethical battles with The Daily Mail. Not to mention the curiously silent ruckus to be found in the Google Analytics of Fame.

Also on this week's podcast Kat offers a web tip to avoid those embarrassingly out of date link tweets - Is It Old?

Barry blows our ears and minds with a quiz - yes a quiz! - using a series of mnemonic ditties from tech history. And Dan brings Twitter gem HumbleBrag to the table to enrich your Twitterstream and point the finger at disingenuous celebrity humility.

All this and some of the wankiest words you'll (hopefully) hear all year:

Screenagers - @Thomhoffman

Succailure - @Rooreynolds

Coolmercial - @peopleIknow

halfalogue - @deeharvey

Braindump - @josephcoulson

Don't forget to share your wanky words with us on Twitter - @offthewallpost; Facebook.com/offthewallpost or the blog offthewallpost.com

What's better than an awesome music mash-up? How about an awesome music mash-up breakdown that you can watch unfold in front of you while it rocks your world! Kat, Dan and Barry break out the smoking hot tunes of Girl Talk and Daft Punk to marvel at the visualisations of mash-ups online.

How many photographs are on Facebook? A shitload according to the 1000memories blog that claims 4% of all photographs EVER TAKEN are hosted on Facebook! Dan brings these incredible stats and how digital photography and video means his children are living a paparazzi'd life of self-referenced action.

More stats arrive as Barry returns to Google+ which, after initial success, has reportedly shed 60% of its users. We consider Google's social platform's failure to capture our or many other people's attention. Even Kat's losing the love for Google+ - a negative feeling shared by Google employee Stephen Yegge (from a private comment made on Google+ subsequently shared publicly!).

Wanky Words

Dogfooding - @ZoeEBreen

Astroturfing - Barry's own gift from working in a wanky industry

Salami slicing - @duncanbloor

Appify - @zoeEbreen

Skillify - @jordit

Don’t forget to share your wanky words with us on Twitter (@offthewallpost), on Facebook.com/offthewallpost or on the blog.

Off The Wall Post is joined by the brilliant Roo Reynolds - Head of Emerging Platforms at Wieden + Kennedy London (and formerly podcaster of Shift Run Stop). Roo discusses the new opportunites for advertisers and brands in the digital space and brings his own digital bugbear to light: QR codes - the good, the bad and the ridiculous.

QR Code Rubik's Cube

Clean Bandits 'Telephone Banking'

Kat presents an incredible facial meshing webcam homebrewed technology video well worth watching here. Barry introduces How Many Really, a social media / history mash up contextualiser that tells you how many of your friends would have survived the World War II. Dan highlights the recent Facebook developments and what Frictionless Sharing means to the users. And Roo delights u with the Don Draper MAd Men Timeline video.

Wanky Words this week:

Internaut - Roo Reynolds

Fragvergence

Thinkiatry

Verbification - Hugh Garry

Maximum Traction - Barry (for SHAME!)

Don’t forget to share your wanky words with us on Twitter (@offthewallpost), on Facebook.com/offthewallpost or in the comments below.

What happened when Off The Wall Post took out a Facebook ad? Kat, Barry and Dan muse upon Facebook's page advertising: the targeting. the cost and the effectiveness. And in the process of wondering about the engagement possibly insult everybody who's liked us recently!

We love you all really! If you Like the podcast on Facebook come and say hello. Tell us about the best thing on the internet or your latest, favouritest mobile app, or best of all a wanky word we wish we could erase from new media jargon forever.

Other web wonders from the team are Barry's respect for Google+ hangouts being enhanced for the benefit of sign-language users. Kat introduces Housebites - takeaway food re-invented, which leaves us hungry, but sceptical about the sustainability of the business. Kat also highlights BERG's neat Transport for London bus countdown data scrape that puts live bus times on your phone or tablet.

Wanky Words

Tweetching - @hemmysphere

Twibbon - Dan Biddle (for SHAME!)

3x ("3 ecks") - @vtri / @andrewjskatz

Webinar - Roo Reynolds (from our Facebook Page)

Leave a comment on our Off The Wall Post blog, on our Facebook Page, or tweet us @offthewallpost