Not the band or that famous book, you’ll need to go elsewhere for that. This is about the backstory to Muddy, which we thought would be nice to share, because although Muddy is essentially ‘middleware’, we want to think of it as a ‘consumable’, as an application with a life, that real people use and engage with (albeit not that many!).
Way back in March 2007, Rob and I submitted an idea to the BBC Labs, then run by Matt Locke, to improve the (horizontal) navigation across the BBC by grounding news articles in ’subjects’ people could peruse. It wasn’t an earth shattering idea, but it came from our frustration in a BBC News experience that was still about ‘pages’ and very ‘flat’ (it’s improved since then). So, together with Paul Farnell (a designer friend and CEO of Litmus) we spent five days in North Yorkshire taking the idea to pieces and re-building it.
What came of this process was a) a commission from BBC News and b) a greater appreciation of Wikipedia (and dbpedia which extracts structured information from Wikipedia ‘infoboxes’ and creates usable subject-predicate-object relationships from that data) for joining up content by acting as a ‘controlled vocabulary’, a glossary for an ever expanding range of concepts and things.
So, we produced a prototype ‘application’ for BBC News called Muddy Boots (we called it Muddy Boots because we felt we were trampling across the rather pristine lawn that is the BBC). Muddy Boots took BBC News articles and identified ‘notable things’ (i.e. things in Wikipedia) in the articles and then via an algorithm and a social bookmarking service we attempted to provide relevant links on the web for that news story. It kinda worked. Jonathan Austin did a write up of it on the BBC News Journalism Labs blog which gives a fair bit of detail. Whilst we were waiting for the testing phase run by BBC News to happen, we continued to develop Muddy Boots as we were interested in where it could go. As we developed it we dropped the ‘Boots’ bit of the name.