Serendipity Day at NPR

Last week the entire Digital Media department spent a day working on individual projects of our own design.  Some highlights:

• My project was to dig into several mashups with the Twitter Search API.  I built a twitter seismograph by mashing up with the highcharts library, as well as a google maps mashup, a simple sentiment analysis tool, and a word cloud maker (using a commonly available object model).  Our head of development and our analytics guru focused on similar projects.
• Responsive design was a common theme in several presentations, with a responsive version of our homepage and a blog story page that both collapse down to a mobile design.
• Content-augmented multimedia was also a big theme, including a tool that allows editors to add text overlays to an HTML5 video and a ‘virtual concert’ concept (this one wasn’t actually coded) that combined a map, a tweet deck, and a live stream of a concert.

The caliber of the work done was significantly higher than we get in a typical day, with big implications for our digital strategy.  Two thoughts: 1. why don’t we do this more often? 2) why doesn’t every company do this?