When Eddie Izzard set off across the United Kingdom to run what eventually became 43 marathons in 51 days, it was announced on Twitter in the most understated way. Something like “I am now going to run across the whole UK to every capital city. About 1000 miles. I leave now”.

We stopped everything we were doing, made some tea, and started building an app to follow him round and help supporters get a more visual view of his incredible run. He was posting bit.ly links on Twitter – some were compressed links to images on Twitpic, others to Google Maps… as well as his Tweets themselves. We wrote some clever stuff to go in, pull all this stuff apart and rebuild as a little Flash application, making sense of the map references – plotting his position, and displaying any relevant images or tweets for that position.

The BBC linked to it a couple of times, leading to 70,000 unique visitors in a matter of 2 hours. Nuts.

We stood in the pissing rain to watch him finish in Trafalgar Square, a long way from the computers. It was a truly inspiring human feat.