A short profile of me
In lieu of a CV, which is available on request, here is a quick pencil sketch of what I do and what I'm interested in. If you want to see what I really look like, then there is a big picture of me linked from the bottom of the page.
Ten things about me
- I've been an academic, worked on multimedia CDs, worked in advertising, built websites and applications for the BBC and now I'm back in publishing at Nature.
- I've published papers on adaptive hypertext.
- I went to WWW94, the first World Wide Web conference in Cern and many more conferences since, see speaking section.
- I've won awards for stage lighting design.
- I'm curiously passionate about clean URLs
- I've been freelance journalist for Macworld (UK) writing reviews and features, see the writing section.
- I'm strongly allergic to snails, sadly as they are quite tasty.
- I love the mountains, walking in the alps is one of my favourite holidays.
- I really enjoy cooking, my roast chicken and roast lamb recipes are in the top ten on google.co.uk.
- I'm married to Lucy, we have two cats, a lovely little boy called Oscar and I live in London
What I do
I work for Nature Publishing Group, leading the development of social software products, such as Nature Network and Nature Protocols.
I used work for the BBC, from 2001 til late 2005, I was a Development Producer and between Tom Coates, Matt Biddulph, myself and others we designed Programme Information Pages, a new system to generate a page for every programme the BBC broadcasts.
I then did a bunch of work on Location based services for the UK and civic data. Previously I ran the Membership Database project which created a foundation for identity within the BBC's internet services. Prior to that I worked in iF&L and helped editorial and design people understand technical people and made a lot of content sites.
What I'm interested in
The main things I enjoy are photography and travel, cooking and eating good food and drink. I like to hike and I've been climbing real mountains in the alps recently. I'm enthusiastic about the future of the web and spend a reasonable amount of my free time planning and thinking about new web projects.
A picture of me
Should you need a high quality picture of me, then please use this image Gavin Bell, 1600×1063, taken by James Duncan Davidson. The smaller picture in the margin was taken by my wife, Lucy.
