I read in yesterday’s Telegraph that mydeco.com have signed a joint venture deal with German magazine publisher, Burda, for the sum of £2m. Having worked on the community development for mydeco in its earliest stages, it’s great to see the site going from strength to strength.

A few of us at MxM have waited several weeks for O2 to sort out their supply issue with iPhones for business users (we nearly gave up and bought them as ordinary punters from Carphone Warehouse, but the Free of Charge thing seemed worth hanging on for…).

Here’s a picture of Stuart to show just how delighted he is to be in possession of a 3G iPhone in time for next week’s Rails Europe conference. Face saved.

With the economy in general down-turn and the consequent drop in advertising spend, we joked with a client last night that they should look at investing in bingo, dieting or dating, even though it’s pretty far from their usual business. So I’m not altogether surprised to hear that Penguin Books have got into dating.

Like many others, I’ve been watching Penguin’s development online with interest and have been impressed by their willingness to slough off the ‘dusty’ publisher reputation to experiment with some very novel (ahem) ideas like the One Million Penguins wiki-novel (which seems to have suffered an attack from an anti-virus software provider so I can’t link to it), the spy novel Google maps mash-up We Tell Stories or their crowd controlled site for young readers: Spinebreakers.

I haven’t had much experience of dating sites, having been in a long-term relationship for, well, a long time. But in the interests of science or something, I briefly checked out PenguinDating - Penguin Books’ collaboration with Match.com.

You can find a like-minded soul who reads the same books and authors as you, but it’s a very small part of the profile and is hidden way down the page. If I were a bookish type trying out online dating for the first time under the auspices of my favourite publisher, I’d want there to be a bit more emphasis on the literary stuff. Once you get past the home page, it’s a match.com i-frame headed up by PenguinDating. Partnering with match.com makes clear commercial sense, but the collaboration would have more weight with users if the user experience and expectation had been given more prominence and TLC. A little bit of custom service design to adapt match.com for the Penguin audience would make a big difference.

If finding a match is as confusing as the navigation (why does the PenguinDating logo link back to the Penguin UK home page?), you’ll have finished A la recherche du temps perdu by the time you find someone.

Our latest release, Protect The Human, a social campaigning platform developed for Amnesty International’s UK division, marks an important milestone in Made by Many’s life. It’s nearing our first birthday and on the back of the private beta release of Metrotwin, we quietly released Protect The Human to the world on Tuesday.

Today is the first day that the wider world’s attention will be drawn to Protect The Human as it sees the release of tickets for Amnesty’s Secret Policeman’s Ball and the announcement from the High Court that evidence from Guantanamo prisoner Binyam Mohamed is admissible in his case to escape the death penalty. His case has been highlighted by Amnesty’s Individuals at Risk campaign for the past few years. (You can help raise awareness of his plight by taking action on Protect The Human.)

The juxtaposition of these two events is classic Amnesty: the tricky balance of important human rights issues with the lighter side of life; and Made by Many, in collaboration with our Ruby on Rails development partner New Bamboo, are very proud to have played a part in helping Amnesty get the message out to the wider population.

We worked very closely with Amnesty to define their online campaigning needs and ambitions before entering into a period of service definition to flesh out exactly what the site would do and how. The close relationship with Amnesty and New Bamboo continued throughout the project’s design and development. We’re looking forward to the future as Amnesty’s commitment to the web as an additional campaigning channel grows.

The site was built over an intensive 3-month period using Agile project, design and development methodologies (more of which we’ll reveal in a future blog post) and in true Agile style, the site will continue to be improved with iterative releases. Keep an eye on the site (and this blog) for release of more features over the coming weeks.

So what can you do on Protect The Human? Well, you can share, comment on and bookmark content from around the web to spread the word about human rights issues that matter to you.

And you can show your support by contributing the smallest action. What we’re aiming to do is to encourage more people to get involved with human rights without banging the drum and coming over all heavy-handed.

Your contribution can be as quick as a comment on a video, gallery or bookmark you’ve seen on Protect The Human. Or you could send it to a friend. For anyone who wants to spend a little more time, users can add their own bookmarks, create their gallery of images or upload a video relating to human rights.

We anticipate that the site will significantly contribute to Amnesty UK’s target to engage with 1 million people by 2011.

Stay tuned for a case study on the project with more detail on how we worked together with both Amnesty and New Bamboo.

MOMA have established a seriously inspiring online exhibition to accompany ‘Design and the Elastic Mind‘. It explores the impact that technology, science and (increasingly) digital media has had on all aspects of design, from visualisation to bio-mimicry.

The interface is richly packed with content and whilst I found it a bit hard to navigate at first, once I let myself wander around the site as if in a real-world museum, the process of discovery took me on a very enjoyable journey. Every exhibit I visit is joined to the next with a line, looping across the index to show me what I’ve looked at. There are 300 projects on display online, which is 50 more than the physical exhibition.

It’s hard to pick a favourite, but after my journey on the tube this morning, I think I have to go for the Flyhead Helmet from the Environmental Transformer project.

Which exhibit would you choose?

One (or two) of the things that characterise the Web 2.0’sphere is (a) an almost unnatural predisposition to omitting vowels and (b) delight in new stuff.It was only a matter of time before The Onion entered the fray with frrvrr.com, touting a social network service that introduces you to people you don’t know, based on shared purchase history and your browsing habits, medical records and CCJ’s.

As ever, The Onion is so close to the bone it hurts. I particularly like the description of how it works:

When you sign up, Frrvrr’s AvaTroll Accelerator™ will download itself onto your desktop and begin cataloguing your web history, or “webtory,” from the past eight months. Once it gathers all of your information, it creates a personalized avatar of you based on the snapshot of you gleaned from web usage and sites visited.

Hate to think what my avatar might look like. Could be worse than the one here…