To celebrate the end of another packed, exciting week at MxM, we had tea and cake. Tim is an advocate of proper tea, made from leaves, in a pot; so I took this picture for him of a sketch I saw in Howies on Carnaby St.

Great news for civil liberties in our green and pleasant land: MPs have dropped their plans to extend detention without trial to 42 days.

This is in no small part due to the relentless efforts of Amnesty International UK and its supporters to highlight the issue with a national petition, and to encourage voters in 20 constituencies whose MPs were undecided on the issue that this is not something the British people want.

Protect The Human garnered a staggering 9,503 signatures for the “Say ‘No’ to 42 days!” petition. Online campaigning in action. If you haven’t seen the video produced by Dark Fibre with music from the Orb and voiceover by Christopher Eccleston (erstwhile Dr Who), go and take a look.

Whilst there’s widespread cause for panic in these dark days of global economic downturn (which has given rise to Lingo Bingo in our office around terms like ‘challenging economic times’, ‘credit crisis/crunch/crash’ and ‘we’re all going to hell in a handcart’), there is however a small ray of hope on the horizon for us digital folk.

(Photo credit: Ricardo Carreon)

According to the IPA’s latest Bellwether survey, whilst Marketing budgets for Q3 have been cut at a record rate, the investment in digital remains steady. This supports our long-held view that digital is a good place to be in these challenging economic times. Bingo.

Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s all plain sailing just because we’re in digital - check out Tim Bray’s ‘Fear Factor’ presentation from last week’s FOWA. Happily, MBM are already employing a number of the measures he advocates for surviving in this hostile climate. Things don’t look good for enterprise software, though…

Isaac’s been known to repeat the maxim ‘We demand perfection!’ when collaborating with our CSS Ninja, Sarah, on projects. Now, whilst visual perfection is something we strive for at MxM, we also strive for maximum engagement with our users. So I was interested to see this mini-interview with Clay Shirky who espouses a bit of rough to make sites that require interaction more friendly.

Basically, he’s saying that if something looks too perfect (like a kitchen fit for a magazine shoot), people won’t touch it. This is why the sites we’ve designed recently (and in the past) put people and activity to the fore.

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This lunchtime saw one of the first big pushes for Protect The Human in the wider web - our friends at Amnesty are raising awareness via BoingBoing of the plight of Troy Davis, condemned to death for a murder he maintains he did not commit.

It’s very exciting to see how the PTH platform gives Amnesty the tools it needs to quickly respond to issues as and when they arise - clemency was denied to Troy Davis a matter of days ago and with the potential to gather support from across the web using PTH to push out to Facebook, digg, delicious and others, Amnesty supporters could make the difference to obtain a total stay of execution.

Follow the conversation on Protect The Human, and take a five minute action to save a man’s life.

Stuart and Alex are over in Berlin at the moment at the Rails Europe conference. They’re too busy learning about Design on Rails and other Rails-related issues to write, but here are a few snapshots of their past few days.