Infocow connects young people with useful stuff to help take control of life - sites, stories, information and inspiration.

Worked on the front end code and UI design with Nicolas Alpi and Ed Davey developing the back end on this project for Futurelab. Was a great experience with lots of brilliant feedback and user testing done by Futurelab feeding into the Agile development methodology we use here at Jiva.

The private beta is now live and we are looking for students and tutors to start testing.

The visor screen from “Boy In The Bubble” (Fan shot video)

The visor screen from “Mirrorball” (Fan shot video)

The rear vertical screens on “Apres Moi” (Fan shot video).

The rear vertical screens on “My Body Is A Cage” (Fan shot video).

And some stills from the original renders..

My new home at Jiva is a startup company building web services to help people find other people who can help. The first product is a website called Beanbag Learning and it’s purpose is to help parents find tutors in their local area for their children. Moving the ‘word of mouth’ culture onto the Internet in short if you will.

I’m excited to find out that my first project is an Adobe AIR application built round communication. This is something very interesting to both design and build as the technologies and UI paradigms involved are pretty well defined these days so the basics of the interaction are pretty much in stone and assumed so that leaves all the fun stuff. The details.

Nothing really new up front as yet in terms of features but - like Real World Records - the site has been designed to be extended easily over the coming months with plenty of scope for custom areas.

Standards based, with proper separation and where possible semantic markup this is the final Real World site to move to PHP from Lasso and the final missing site after the theft.

www.womad.org

This is a temporary site and as such there are some rough edges but I think for only a few days work on the UI and design it holds up pretty well with a simple and clean design, free from Web 2.0 clichés, a full search, clean URLs and sound samples for every track in the Realworld catalogue so in many ways is a vast improvement on the original site.

www.realworldrecords.com

Finally managed to get the replacement Realworld Records website online last friday. It was the website that along with WOMAD’s website that was based on a very old version of Lasso that we decided to finally put out to pasture so this new version is based on a LAMP backend.

I had the majority of the site built and working locally before the server theft but with no design or UI in place. The design came together very quickly and was designed from the ground up to be easily improved upon.

This is a temporary site and as such there are some rough edges but I think for only a few days work on the UI and design it holds up pretty well with a simple and clean design, free from Web 2.0 clichés, a full search, clean URLs and sound samples for every track in the Realworld catalogue so in many ways is a vast improvement on the original site.

None of this would have been possible however without the hard work of the Records staff who have spent some of the last year on data entry of the catalogue information into the new discography system, so many thanks to Jon!

Stolen.

So a note to all you admins out there in charge of sites. Have a think about what your strategy is in case on not just hardware failure, but total loss. Not something you think about too often.

We are mainly back after 4 days of frantic work, but have made some harsh decisions about the very old sites based on some archaic tech that we have just cut free and plan to remake. The only main one missing as of now is Real World Records which we are planning to get online in a new form this week.

Alongside the restore we moved hosts, and switched to a hosted system rather than a co-located server so had to get elbow deep to reconfigure most of the sites to get them working on the new server so this wasn’t just a simple backup restore.

The only missing thing are the video assets. We will be re-encoding and re-uploading those over time to take advantage of the new flash based video player we switched to earlier this year.

As ever having Peter’s name attached gives it legs in the blog world and here is some of the reporting.

Techcrunch | Wall Street Journal | Slashdot | The Register

Always interesting to read the comments (apart from the endless Sledgehammer jokes) and see what people on the outside think our setup is like. Most appear to assume a large enterprise type setup with a team of devs, designers and editors. The reality is much more modest.

 bigblueball.realworldrecords.com

Front and back end rebuilt from the ground up to enable products to be grouped in dynamic ways so digital downloads can be incorporated in the next phase with lots of work done to make the front end as simple as possible to create a higher conversion rate despite the relatively high amount of information required on-screen.

www.womadshop.com

It’s not often you get to meet a legend, but working at Real World you get more than your fair share.

Not long ago I was scared half to death by Robert Plant when he excused a sneeze in my office when I thought I was alone and obsorbed with code and today I got to meet (again) one of the kingpin producers in my world, Adrian Sherwood.

Adrian is at Real World Studios mixing a project for Little Axe - one of my favourite Real World artists - and I was there trying to capture some moments on video for the forthcoming EPK but during some downtime we chatted for a moment about music production and he offered up some top tips and my boss, York Tillyer, captured the moment when Sherwood laid down the knowledge.

Which was nice.

You can listen again till next Tuesday if you fancy it.. The track list looks eclectic to say the least!

The Imagined Village EP that includes my latest remix is now available to buy online at womadshop.com and you can listen to my remix after the jump.

This EP brings you a preview track from the forthcoming full length album (due for release on September 10) and three exclusive mixes only available on this special edition.

If you think you know about English folk music, think again. The Imagined Village project, the brainchild of producer and musician Simon Emmerson, has recast age-old traditions in the shape of the twenty-first century. A daring mix of ancient and modern, The Imagined Village fuses fiddles and squeezebox with dub beats and sitars. To do so it has gathered an extraordinary array of talent, including - on this exclusive EP - Martin Carthy, Eliza Carthy, Sheila Chandra, Billy Bragg, Chris Wood and Simon Emmerson.

EP Track Listing:

1. ‘England Half English Meets John Barleycorn’ was recorded and mixed by producer Simon Emmerson with Billy Bragg featuring Martin Carthy and Eliza Carthy. The spirit of the track, with its meeting of two songs, seemed in perfect keeping with the overall sentiment of The Imagined Village project

2. ‘Acres of Ground (Beats Mix)’ is an original song by Eliza Carthy, based around old traditional counting songs. Created through collaboration between Simon Emmerson and mix engineer Mass in their London Studio and Ben Ivitsky and Eliza in their Scottish studio. Another version of this song which will appear on the final album in a very different guise.

3. ‘Welcome Sailor’, a beautiful atmospheric collaboration between Sheila Chandra and Chris Wood, is a recording based on Lal Waterson’s traditional interpretation of the original folk tune. This track will appear on the forthcoming Imagined Village album.

4. ‘Cold, Hailey, Rainy Night - It’s Turned Out Nice Mix by Stabilizer’ grew out of a challenge set by The Imagined Village project on the Real World Remix website . The idea was to take this track - Transglobal Underground’s interpretation of Martin Carthy’s original track - and re-mix it. This song has been passed down from generation to generation through the oral tradition of folk music. It has now been re-invented in a radical fashion by the mysterious, uniquely- talented Stabilizer!

Tracks 1, 2 and 4 appear exclusively on this EP

It was a fun and unique project to get my teeth into and a new direction in my sound so you could see my remix as a preview to where my music is heading in general.

Taking a short break this week from the daily php grind of building our new shop at work I spent a great few days mixing down the audio for a new documentary called “Lay Down Your Hearts” by a young film maker called John Simpson.

The film tells the story of the Zawose family, Wagogo musicians from Tanzania, focusing Dr Hukwe Zawose and his nephew Charles Zawose and how they came to prominence and the huge void they left after their untimely deaths.

You can see a trailer for the film at petergabriel.com.

They toured the world and released records on many labels including several on Real World Records including the amazing Assembly with Michael Brook.

The Zawose Foundation is an ongoing project by the friends and family of the Zawose’s to promote and support musicians in the Bagamoyo region of Tanzania and the Family Zawose have just released a new album to support the foundation. You can buy it online at Womadshop.com and you can catch them on tour this summer.

The film is to be shown at the Barbican in August, and at this year’s WOMAD Charlton Park Festival and is a moving hour spent learning about these amazing musicians and well worth your time.

Also, for those in the big smoke, there is a special fund raising night at Cargo on the 1st of August with DJ sets from Daddy G from Massive Attack, Zero Seven and Ross Allen. There will be two live performances that night as well from The Family Zawose and Kong Nay

WOMAD are teaming up with Done And Dusted’s director Hamish Hamilton to create a DVD charting the 25 year history of the festival and are opening up applications for a budget to make five short films about this year’s Charlton Park festival to appear on the DVD.

On July 29 2007 in the English countryside begins the 25th year of the WOMAD Festival. Directors are invited to suggest an idea for a 10 minute film they can make relating to the festival.

Chosen films will be commissioned and delivered to end up on a DVD celebrating 25 years of WOMAD.

Crew will be given passes for WOMAD as necessary access where possible.

We are looking for unique viewpoints and will welcome brilliant ideas that embrace the infinite possibilities of connected stories. WOMAD Festival is about world music, arts and dance.

Directors interested in this project please send treatments and scripts to:

dolly@doneanddusted.com

Every race, age and sex welcome. Ideas by 0900 on the 18 July please.

Films will need to be shot and delivered on DV quality or above.

There is a £4,000 fund to help in the making of each film and a budget for how this is to be spent should also be submitted.

To apply simple send your brief and outline of budget to Dolly at Done And Dusted

We’ve been running (and will continue to) a tour diary by Richard Chappell (PG’s main engineer) with some great photos taken by York Tillyer (my boss) showing the glamour (not) of the early stages of setting up a major tour.

MIDI Marimbas, two drum kits and a vast array of lust-worthy equipment is on display.

The early stages are running to a close and they will be moving to production rehearsals soon and the first date is only a couple of weeks away.

They are working to a set list in part derived from a poll we held based on charts created by our registered members which threw up some very interesting leftfield choices, encouraged by Peter himself as he wanted to try to avoid playing the same songs played over the last two tours.

As usual the decision to start the diary and the required implementation date were essentially the same day (well not really but close!) but a quick tweak of the in-house news system and some extra rewrites to handle it was all it took. This quick turnaround is the advantage of having in-house staff and custom systems that are designed from the ground up to be flexible.

Based on the same ideas and technology we used with Real World Remixed the idea is to encourage the festival goers to recount their favourite tales about the experience. From performance reviews to more general festival tales, both good and bad, we hope the site will bring out the inner journalist in the WOMAD punters.

Hooking in to the Flikr idea users of the site can also upload photographs to illustrate their stories and to enable this we are using a combination of custom php uploading scripts and the lightbox javascript library.

The most difficult part of the site to get working is tucked away in the submit and filter sections. The sideways scrolling filter panel was my best guess at how to deal with handling performance data from festivals dating back 5 years (with older information planned) in a simple and easy to understand interface.

As usual the site, from the back end to the interface is custom built in-house and has, for us, had an unusually long gestation as the original idea was floated nearly nine months ago. Development of the in-house ticketing system for Charlton Park and the long overdue redesign of Peter Gabriel’s website put the launch of the site back so it’s great to see it finally live.

Finally PG.com leaves the Quicktime era and joins the rest of the world with embedded flash video. Just the one Moonclub video up at the moment but all future video content will be in this format and with luck and time on our side we will slowly update the older videos.

Based in part on the video player tutorial by Derrick Ypenburg over at CommunityMX but extended and customised to suit our needs here in the (ahem) Real World (sorry).

There are still a few little usage niggles which I’ll see if I can iron out over the coming weeks but basically the functionality is there and it does basically work which is always a bonus.

This will be my second visit to this amazing city - my first was as a DJ (in and out in 24 hours) - and I’m looking forward to seeing the city by day this time. I plan to try and sneak in at least one DJ set in a bar somewhere if I can convince the city’s hard pressed promoters to book me which given the pool of homegrown talent in town isn’t going to be easy.

If this part fails I’ll still fit in my other dream visit to Robotspeak to check out the circuit bent toys in store and with luck and a following wind I may even be in town for one of their sessions.

Fun stuff aside it’ll be an interesting week at the ADC, and one that hopefully will leave me inspired and keen to get back to my Quad and my Coda to try out all the new techniques.

All I have to do now is make sure I get my passport in time and practice queuing up for hours on end to try and catch the keynote…

Members can create their own favourite lists, use the forums and send private messages to other members.

It’s all custom built from the back end to the front with very little library usage.

www.realworldremixed.com

www.realworldstudios.com

Always more to refine and fix, but as usual the task of actual content creation often gets in the way.

www.petergabriel.com