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, two lovely boys called Oscar and Max, we 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 also worked on Geoweb or 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, please give Duncan credit if you use this image. The smaller picture in the margin was taken by my wife, Lucy.
Short Bio
Gavin designs social web applications for the Nature Publishing Group. He is an interaction designer, community advocate and product manager. Since the early 90s, he has been writing and designing for the web. Large scale web applications covering identity, on-demand media, geolocation and social software have been the main focus of his work at NPG and previously at the BBC. He has worked in academia, advertising, publishing and developed multimedia software. He lives in London with his wife and two sons. Find out more on his personal site gavinbell.com and his blog take one onion.
