noticings: the blog

Flickr machine tags + more fine features

If you take a look at the site right now, you’ll probably spot a big change. Whilst you’ve been out noticing stuff, we’ve been adding new features and tidying up the site. Normally we’d release these changes as we go, but we’ve got one big feature that we hope it was worth waiting for.

We’ve been working with the fine folks at Flickr (thanks Aaron!) to add Noticings to their third party machine tag services. What on earth does that mean? Basically, a badge on the sidebar of your Flickr photos linking to Noticings, like so:

When you add the tag noticings:id=x to your photos, Flickr automatically fetch details of the noticing and its scorings from us and display it alongside the photo. To make this super easy for you to do, Noticings can write these tags for you, so you don’t even need to it yourself.

To turn it on for your account, sign into Noticings, click on ‘your account’, and change your machine tag settings. We’ll start updating your photos within 24 hours, so you might need to wait a while.

We’ve also tried to introduce Noticings to new visitors a little better with a big home page, explaining what it is and how to get involved:

And that’s not all. Here’s a little list of the some other stuff that’s been added or tweaked:

• Places and people pages now paginate perfectly. How’s that for alliteration?
• The score shown on a player’s page is now over the last 7 days, rather than their all time cumulative score.
• Each player’s page now shows their most active neighbourhoods.
• And at the last minute, there’s now a places search page, searching over 1.4 million neighbourhoods and towns. Try Soho, for example.

As always, if you notice anything awry, get in touch on our Get Satisfaction page.

Weekly bonus, and your first noticing in a neighbourhood

Three very dedicated noticers got the weekly bonus, for noticing something every day for a week (Monday to Sunday). Well done to Knebworth Chap, russelldavies and Ben Terrett. You each got an extra 70 points. In fact, Knebworth Chap managed to combine this with the first noticing in a neighbourhood for a whopping 110 points on a single noticing.

We’re also awarding points for your first noticing in a neighbourhood. So even if someone else has beaten to you a place, you can still pick up some points if it’s your first noticing there. 10 points in fact, which seems reasonable.

And here’s a lovely noticing of a kite, trapped on overhead telephone cables, by Keith Bolland in New Zealand:

Dropped the nearby noticings bonus to 10 points

We decided that the 20 point bonus for nearby something within 100m of someone else’s noticing was a bit much, and gave a bit too much power to those in city centres who happen to be nearby other noticings quite often. So we’ve dropped it to 10 points.

The Fourth Dimension

Good news everybody! There are more rules coming, and this time they’re focused around time, not space. But we’re going to release them quietly just to see if anyone discovers them, for a bit of fun.

However you’ll need to take a few moments to check that the time and date are set accurately on the camera you’re noticing with. Otherwise you might find strange things happen. Which would make it lot less fun. Go and do that right now. We’ll wait.

…

Well done.

Date archives

Just a little tweak. There are now archives for each day, such as this one for last Wednesday. And the front page will only show the last day calculated. Do let us know if you spot anything amiss.

Top noticers in a place & our Twitter account

Oh, in all the excitement I forgot about a couple more tweaks we’ve made live. Now, on place pages you’ll be able to see who the top noticers in that place are. Such as this page for King’s Cross in London.

And we’ve got a Twitter account, @noticings. We’ll try to keep it more interesting than just links to our blog posts.

A new logo, and a home for help

Mr Ben Terrett has very generously provided us with a logo. And isn’t it good? You see what he’s done with the eye? That’s graphic design that is.

It works very nicely as a favicon or Twitter avatar too. We’re very chuffed. And it’s live on the site for you to admire.

That said, the front page is looking very shabby in comparison, and it’s getting a bit cramped with all the noticings pouring in every day. I think we’ve got some sketching to do.

We’ve also set up a Get Satisfaction page for problems and ideas you might have for the game. Asking and answering over there will save our inboxes and help fellow noticers at the same time. So when you’re stuck, head there.

In the mean time, the bus stop is that way:

First noticing in a neighbourhood

There’s a new rule in the game, as you might have spotted from yesterday’s noticings: the first noticing in a neighbourhood now gets an extra 30 points. So go forth and discover unnoticed places, and notice things in them!

A hole in time

Time zone bugs are very difficult to spot, especially when you live in GMT/BST. It turns out we’ve been counting noticings between 11pm-11pm, rather than midnight to midnight.

Because of the way the scoring works this means that we’ve missed a few noticings that happened between 11pm and midnight, such as these layers of advertising in the London Underground by Chris Gornell:

Don’t worry though, we’ve gone back and manually scored the ones that were missed, as well as fixing the bug. So it should be hunky-dory now.

Thanks for bearing with us as we work out the kinks.

Looking back, looking forward

About 10 days ago we took the password off the site, and opened it up to the world.

I wrote a little bit about how it works on my blog, Tom elaborated about our plans on his, and a friend of ours, Russell, said some nice things too.

It’s been great to see people pick up the idea and run with it, and there have been some superb noticings, such as this one from meltingman:

And this one from I like:

The 174 noticings, from 39 players, across 6 countries so far have given us an idea of how people are playing the game, and where we might want to head with it next.

We’ve got a few new rules in the pipeline, and when those go live we’ll explain them on here. Further down the line we’d like to move to a more open, collaborative game, with players able to suggest rules and adjustments, and maybe allowing everyone who plays to vote on them. A nomic if you like: a game in which changing the rules is part of the game.

We’ve realised that we’re going to have to work on explaining Noticings better, so new players know what they should be looking for. And when we have to pull a noticing because it’s not quite what we’re looking for, we need to explain that.

But for now, thanks for playing, and keep your eyes open.