The game has two main branches – the normal levels (of which I created quite a few – see if you can guess which ones), and ‘create and share’, where users can create and share their own levels. This latter mode, a kind of ’sandbox mode’, was really important, for me at least, as it removes all the preset limits and just allows you to play with all the blocks in a free-form, constructivist manner.

Hope you enjoy the game. There’s still a few minor bugs at the moment, but they’ll get ironed out over the coming days. If you love it as much as I do, please help spread the word (and the link) through your social networks.

Update: Launchball made it to the front page of Digg, which promptly overloaded our server, so we’ve had to take it down for a while – we’ll try and get it back up as soon as possible.

Further update: It’s back!

‘These sites allow you to store, tag and share links across the internet. You can share these links both with friends and people with similar interests. You can also access your links from any computer you happen to be using.’

Am I the only person who thinks that these look a bit tacky? Whilst it seems fine to have these links on a blog, on the BBC News site it just doesn’t feel right somehow…

I wonder what Currybet (who just completed a fairly long-winded review of which newspaper websites include these features) thinks…

This is significant for two reasons. One, because they are one of the first major cultural institutions to endorse the Creative Commons licenses and philosophy. And two, because Wellcome Trust have lots of money and use some of it to fund web projects from other institutions, which will now be more likely to also use Creative Commons licenses.

I’d be interested to see how the images on the Wellcome Images site will be used. They won’t qualify for Wikipedia usage, unfortunately, but there may be other sites who will find a usage for them.

Q. Why is the Exemption Scheme time-limited?

A. The Images of England scheme is a concessionary one. Anyone can take and publish photographs of any building, providing the image is taken from publicly accessible land. We have introduced this exemption scheme because we recognise that some homeowners feel uneasy about a photograph of their house being published on the internet. We envisage by 2013 the internet will have become an accepted form of everyday communication and publication, as printed books are today. We hope people will become accustomed to the internet so that in the future they become more relaxed about their buildings being included on the Images of England website. Within this timescale the photographs will no longer show current information, but be historic images themselves.

These publicly-funded website ‘digitisation’ projects are pretty common in the ‘heritage’ sector. Unfortunately, because they’re usually only funded for a limited amount of time, there rarely seems to be an opportunity to re-visit and revise old websites like these. I seriously wonder whether it will be possible to re-incorporate these opted-out photographs in 2013, without rebuilding the whole website from scratch. Back-end interfaces, server platforms, databases and even the HTML are all things that can become un-documented, unsupported and unusaable given a reasonable length of time.

One flaw of the Images of England website, for example, is that all of the photographs are sized at 420px x 280px. Whilst this was probably due to reasons of scanning ability and server capacity, not to mention any concerns about commercial usage, the photos now look pretty tiny on a modern computer screen, with the finer details almost impossible to make out.

This seems like a positive step forward, and will hopefully better manage the expectations of the users. The only metric that might be missing is the amount of time it takes on average for each comment to get published. And whilst the post says “we hope these changes will encourage more people to take part”, I can well imagine that some people will be put off from commenting by the sometimes enormous moderation queue.

Some of my friends and family will have heard me spout on about this idea for years (indeed, I’ve sat on the domain a good year), so it’s good to finally get something started. Basically, the idea is to investigate ‘facts’ and ‘truths’ which have become well circulated and accepted, but which are in fact popular misconceptions. Whilst it might seem like a pedantic exercise, the original idea was anti-pedantry, in the sense that it would be a compendium of ammunition against boring people in pubs who go on about how it’s illegal to deface the queen’s head on banknotes, or wild moon landing conspiracy theories involving flags flapping in the vacuum.

For now, it’s just a fairly standard Wordpress blog (RSS feed), but it will soon have a wiki, serving as a more collaborative knowledge bank.

I’ve kicked it off with an introductory post, and then a copy of a recent office e-mail forward, which I will be slowly deconstructing. So, if you think you’ll be interested in this kind of thing, subscribe and stay tuned.

Meanwhile, I’m continuing to write TV previews for on TV tonight, which I launched a couple of months ago. It’s been quite fun to sift through the press releases and pick out the most potentially interesting bits of telly. I had hoped to be organised enough to write a week’s worth in advance, but instead I’ve slipped into the habit of writing it day by day, a few hours in advance, which adds a bit of (perhaps helpful) deadline pressure.

Since launch I’ve also added a site masthead, using the logo of a parrot carrying a remote control (below). It’s inspired the by the Independent Masthead, but hopefully adds a playful twist. I like the fact that the website is about television, but borrows design elements from newspapers.

The illustration work was by Chris Davidson, who I found using the job bidding website iFreelance.com.

I’ve written a page briefly describing the new website structure, and will no doubt write more about the process by which we re-designed it over the coming weeks, but for now, have a click around and let me know what you think.

It was this frustration that led me to create on TV tonight, a website which I’ve described as delivering “daily recommendations for the discerning viewer”. The idea is that write up a few sentences on which programmes I think are watching, which get published each morning and delivered to you via RSS. If there’s nothing but rubbish on, then you’ll get a short message telling you there’s ‘nothing worth watching’, and you can make plans to go out to the pub instead.

Of course, it’s all slightly tongue-in-cheek, as you can clearly make your own mind up (and probably will), but I simply hope that my suggestions are occasionally useful, even if only as a reminder.

Part of my motivation for producing the site is to force myself in writing regular, concise copy for a web audience in a given format. Having a blog gives you a great flexibility to write whenever you feel lit it, on whatever subject interests you, in as much depth as you can must, but this can make you a bit lazy. Writing requires creativity and inspiration, but it’s also a craft best honed through the discipline of regular practice.

Another reason I’ve done this is as an experiment into a concept I’ve been thinking about which I’ve called ‘micropublishing’. The idea is to focus on publishing concentrated amounts of highly relevant content which fills a specific need of a time-poor audience. By being rich but small, the content can be aggregated and transferred across platforms to be consumed in any way that’s useful. On TV tonight might be only a small demonstration of this, but I’d be interested to see whether the phenomenon gains wider traction. Del.icio.us-driven link-logs are perhaps the most common example already out there. I’d like to see this approach tried with news publishing, where the number and length of articles would expand and shrink to match the amount of actual news-worthy stories taking place, rather than being largely fixed at a set amount. With online distribution, there’s little point in publishing much on a slow news day any more.

I designed and built on TV tonight mostly over the recent Christmas break. It’s all pretty simple and back-to-basics, although I did spend far too long agonising over the fonts and line spacing.

Please do take a look, and let me know any feedback. You’ll probably get the best feel for the site by subscribing to the RSS feed for a week and seeing whether it’s something that works its way into your daily read.

The content is creative commons licensed and microformatted-up in case you want to try and do something interesting with it.

So, mostly quite predictable, but competently researched, and with a few things/people I didn’t know of. Eyedropper is spot on to call out on the lack of a web presence for the programme, which is a bit ridiculous, especially as there were a few links in the programme that I would like to read more about.

During the course of the programme, we see Yentob create a blog and a myspace space (helped by his token geek friend of course), but there’s no call-to-action suggesting that he might actually want to use these to engage with the viewers for real. After ten minutes of Googling, I can find neither of his pages, just a few traces of his attempts to understand Second Life and YouTube. Maybe he’s deleted them, like he has done with his YouTube video.

Despite all that though, the programme does manage to cram in a lot of ideas into a fairly short programme, and in a fairly compelling and well-told way. This is a programme your gran could watch, and probably get (if she’s not blogging already). The Long Tail, the transference of authority from institutions to processes, the erosion of what it means to be a broadcaster – it’s all in there.

With so much apparent understanding of the way the web works, I was half-expecting Yentob to announce at the end of the programme that the whole thing would be available for viewing on YouTube. Sadly, that wasn’t to be (no doubt because of some crap rights-related or ‘commercial sensitivities’ issue). If you missed the programme, though, I’m sure someone will do the honours and it’ll be available on a Bittorrent/YouTube page near you…

Update: Stu has put together this great list of links connected with the programme. I considered doing that, but couldn’t be bothered, so thanks! I’ve been checking out Strand Venice and the Newsroom blog.