"enron" in Weblog

After 5 good years I’m hanging up my freelancing spurs and settling into a more sedentary existence. Well, not exactly. I’m becoming Head of User Experience at Trampoline Systems. As a small start-up ‘sedentary’ is likely to be completely the wrong word… It’s going to be hard work - we’re up against the big boys - but it’s a really interesting field and the product we’ve been working on, SONAR, is absolutely fascinating. I don’t know whether anyone saw the Enron Explorer, which was our technology proof of concept, but it’s a step-change from that in terms of complexity.

Freelancing has been very good to me. I’ve been privileged to work for and with some really talented and inspiring people, made some good friends and learned a hell of a lot. I’ve been on longer term contracts for most of the last 2 years because I wanted to give myself the time to really get involved in some bigger projects. Over that period I’ve become less interested in web standards per se (it’s just how I do things so I take them for granted now) and more obsessed with problems and how to solve them. The logical next step is to get really involved with a single problem domain and see where that takes me. The Trampoline domain includes collective intelligence, social behaviour and semantics, all of which I love so I’m really looking forward to it.

I still have some loose ends to tie up though - if anyone wants a front end web dev job, check out my post on the Content with Style blog), but I’ll be permanent within the next couple of months. It’s going to be a busy period for me… I really want to get the work I’ve been doing with Wordtracker nicely squared away and I’m speaking at eTech in a few weeks too. I’ve also kicked off a personal project with fellow CwSer Matthias and there’s a small festival site to do as well. Crikey, seeing all that written down is quite intimidating! Roll on 2007.

This honestly wasn’t planned but you know Jeff Skilling was just sentenced to 24 years this morning for his part in the Enron collapse? Well it just so happens that while developing the SONAR application at Trampoline we decided to use the Enron email archive, which was made public as part of the FARC investigations, as our test data set. The results were so much fun that we’ve turned it into a standalone technology demo… It’s been in limited release to friends and family for the last few days but with the news today it seems to be spreading beyond our control. There are a few bugs in there (mine are almost all back button related!) but mostly I think it works. So, without any further ado I give you the Enron Explorer.

Just to keep things topical, it’s also worth mentioning that Jeff Skilling is responsible for my absolute favourite email out of the whole lot. How’s this for the head of what was the 7th largest company in the world: “Fuck you, you piece of shit. I can’t wait to see you go down with the ship like all the other vermin. Smug, paranoid, unhappy mother fucker. Eat shit.”