A short profile of me
I work and live in London. Helping companies build products which successfully engage their community is my work. I wrote a book, entitled Building Social Web Applications. I'm married to Lucy, we have two lovely boys and one cat. I like to cycle.
What I do
I offer consultancy on product strategy and origination for the web, helping companies understand the social component of the applications they are building. I have a range of clients including the Guardian; ITV.com; Kasabi for Talis; Jirehouse; PACSMail for Sybermedica and Shutt VR.
I used to work for Nature Publishing Group, leading the development of social software products, such as Nature Network. Prior to that I worked for the BBC, from 2001 til late 2005, I was a Development Producer and with Tom Coates, Matt Biddulph and others we designed Programme Information Pages, a new system to generate a page for every programme the BBC broadcasts, which underlies iPlayer. 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, including Walking with Beasts and the Holiday programme.
Short Bio
Gavin works as a consultant offering product strategy and origination for the web to his clients. He has worked in academia, in publishing, in advertising and as a technologist. His experience at both Nature.com and previously at the BBC gave him a thorough understanding of the issues around motivating engagement and the potential for social interaction. His book, Building Social Web Applications gave him an opportunity to research how social interactions can be supported successfully online. A background in psychology leads him to a human centred approach to solving product and interaction design issues with social applications. He is a keen cyclist and lives in London with his wife and two sons. Find out more on his blog take one onion and on gavinbell.com.
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.
Ten things about me
- I've been an academic, worked on multimedia CDs, worked in advertising, built websites and applications for the BBC and 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 an award for stage lighting design.
- I'm curiously passionate about clean URLs
- 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 one cats, two lovely boys called Oscar and Max, we live in London
- The lunar rover drove on the Moon on the day I was born
