Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ

We've got some additional help from Amanda, who's in the office, and Clare, who's on the other end of a phone, helping us to create the content. They're researching, writing and sourcing data and pictures, mainly looking into starlings and trout. Working with what is essentially a live TV show is, well, interesting. During the course of one morning the expected content of the show goes from birds to fish and then to birds and fish. But we do know the approximate structure of the programme - how many features are likely and what the regular features are.

From there it's onto Theo, who's maintaining a serene manner in the face of a lot of pressure. He's turning the facts and images into the pages, which vary from simple factbox templates to complex custom infographics. Duncan and Chris B are then taking on the designs that Theo's completed and building them into the actual pages that will be pushed to the viewers on the night.

Chris G and I are worrying about what needs to happen when, how we're going to test it all, identifying what's missing and generally co-ordinating things. I'm also volunteering to fill in any gaps that appear in the research. Vicky's co-ordinating all the content and figuring out what we want to learn for the questions in the survey that will be presented at the end of the experiment.

Apart from that, everything seems to be progressing smoothly. Kat, Jo and Vicky are doing some slideshow work, drafting new slide designs ready for a sign-off meeting next week. Kat runs a fantastic workshop to generate Firehose ideas with a good selection of bright people from radio, TV and news together with some R&D people. She's also written up the current user stories so that the engineers can start writing relevant queries. And indeed, Chris N has got MapReduce queries successfully running on our firehose data, using Amazon Elastic MapReduce and S3 to find the most popular hashtags. Meanwhile Paul and Sean work on monitoring the chain. Then there's the business-as-usual work - several slightly confusing EU telcos for George and Chris G, some handover work for Paul and Sam and some catching up on fixing some of our team processes.