Pancentric Blogs

I was sitting on the train the other day, heading into the Pancentric office at Bankside, listening to Radio 4’s Today program for my fix of news when up popped a feature on the Semantic wWeb. Featuring none other than Tim Berners-Lee himself (well it is the BBC).

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_7496000/7496976.stm

A good piece that shows the Semantic web is soon to go mainstream. So, it’s back to the R&D labs for Pancentric.

If you want to know how to design and build a site - it’s all here. Follow these simple rules and you won’t go far wrong. Love it!

Here at Pancentric we have been doing some work on how the Semantic Web can help our clients and add value to their online propositions. These typically range from the potential to be more “findable” through to understanding how corporate knowledge can be better known and used. Taking in along the way the usefulness of self describing data and the democracy of tagging. I would bore on about this, but…. it is nice to see some of the mainstream media starting to pick up on some aspects of this vis http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article3532832.ece . Not sure about the headline though, I guess that’s why I don’t work for big media.

Launched last night, www.millbayplymouth.com is the culmination of 12 weeks work by the team.

The Millbay area of Plymouth is undergoing a radical, and what looks to be a stunning, redevlopment over the next couple of years. Already underway, the redeveloped coastal quarter will incorporate a mix of new homes with commercial, retail and leisure space and cement Plymouth’s position as one of Europe’s finest waterfront cities by reclaiming a partly redundant harbourside area close to the city centre.

To supply the imagery on the site we used a local photographer who takes pictures of Plymouth and the surrounding area in his spare time. Contacted through flickr, Jason was more than happy to contribute some of his best images for use in marketing this great new development in his home town.

To get a feel for the scope of the development it’s probably best to take a loot at the ‘Explore‘ section or even watch the flythrough - produced in partnership with another agency.

The first phase of the site is primarily focussed on marketing the development at the world’s premier property conference, MIPIM in Cannes, France.

To accompany the site there is a kiosk version which has been modelled specifically for use on the marketing stand at MIPIM. This will be developed further for future use in the on-site marketing suite at Millbay.

There are huge plans for the coming months not least expanding the site as more details of the development are realised as well as some very exciting community features - more of which we can reveal at a later date.

In the mean time, check out the site.

Shane Richmond, communities editor at the Telegraph.co.uk, today announced on his blog that the Telegraph would be adopting OpenID by the end of February.

This is very exciting because not only are they accepting OpenIDs, they will be providing them for users also. As his post says, they are the first newspaper in the world and the first British media company to be doing this.

In brief, Open ID is a decentralised sign-on system allowing users to log on to multiple sites with a single ID hosted by any of the participating sites without having to remember multiple usernames and passwords.

Having multiple log ins for loads of different sites has been a constant tyranny when using multiple services across different machines at home and work. Open ID is a great step towards solving this problem. Having organisations such as the Telegraph adopting these standards will only help nurture adoption and accelerate its path into the mainstream.