Tony Hirst (blogger)

Tony Hirst is an academic in the Department of Computing and Communications at the Open University,[1] but better known for the OUseful Blog[2] on practical applications of open data.

Notable achievements

In February 2009, Hirst and colleague Joss Winn, established WriteToReply, to re-publish the UK Government's Digital Britain Interim Report in a way that allowed readers to comment on each paragraph. This was among a number of experiments to promote greater online public participation in government consultations.[3]

In March 2009, Hirst created a technique for extracting and presenting subtitles generated from Twitter status updates in SubRip (*.srt) format[4]

Hirst won the 2011 "Open Up" contest for his ideas about the use of UCAS data.[5] The Open Up contest was run by TSO (formerly "The Stationery Office", a publishing company that supplies the UK Government) and came with a £50,000 development fund to enable the idea.[6] Hirst was chosen by a judging panel headed up by TSO director of digital products Robin Brattel, and included artificial intelligence expert Sir Nigel Richard Shadbolt and Open University director of communications Lucian J Hudson.[7][8]

Hirst was described as "brilliant" by The Guardian data blog for his work analysing the use of Twitter by journalists.[9][10]

Media work

Hirst has been an academic adviser and expert contributor to the BBC World Service programme Click, formerly Digital Planet. [11] [12]

He was co-founder of the Open University Robotics Outreach Group, which led to the Blue Peter/RoboFesta Competition in 2001. This competition - which required children to "Design a Really Useful Robot" - had 32,000 entries.[13]

References
  1. "Biography at Arcadia Project". Arcadia Project. Retrieved 2011-04-11.
  2. Tony Hirst. "OUseful Blog". Retrieved 2011-04-11.
  3. WriteToReply (Tony Hirst and Joss Winn) (2009-02-05). "What's it all about?". WriteToReply Blog. Retrieved 2011-04-15.
  4. Tony Hirst (2009-03-08). "Twitter Powered Subtitles for Conference Audio/Videos on Youtube". OUseful Blog. Retrieved 2011-04-11.
  5. Tony Hirst (2011-04-06). "Blog Post From Tony Hirst, OpenUp Winner 2011". TSO OpenUp Blog. Retrieved 2011-04-11.
  6. "OpenUp – TSO Launches Open Data Challenge with £50,000 Development Fund" (Press release). TSO. 2011-03-23. Retrieved 2011-04-11.
  7. "UK Digital Technology takes another step – Open Data | Lucian J. Hudson, Director of Communications, The Open University – personal blog". Open.ac.uk. 2011-03-26. Retrieved 2013-09-04.
  8. "OpenUp Panel Chair Robin Brattel, shares the panel's 'judging thoughts' « TSO Open.Up Blog". Blog.openup.tso.co.uk. 2011-04-01. Retrieved 2013-09-04.
  9. Simon Rogers (2011-04-11). "UK journalists on Twitter: how they all follow each other". Guardian Data Blog. Retrieved 2011-04-11. The brilliant Tony Hirst on his blog Ouseful has [...]
  10. Tony Hirst (2011-04-10). "UK Journalists on Twitter". OUseful Blog. Retrieved 2011-04-11.
  11. "BBC World Service Programmes - Click 01/02/2011". 2011-02-01. Retrieved 2011-05-05. In the first of a series of programmes on openness, Tony Hirst of the Open University joins Gareth Mitchell to discuss these ideas, looking at open source, open data and open standards.
  12. "Digital Planet investigates the history of the PC". 2009-05-15. Retrieved 2011-05-05. Dr Tony Hirst from the Department of Communication and Systems at The Open University and academic advisor for the series [...]
  13. "The Blue Peter – RoboFesta Robot Design Competition". 2001-03-23. Retrieved 2011-05-05.
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