Thank you to everyone that came along to hackday and made it a very special event for everyone involved. It was quite a rollercoater ride.
In between the lightning bolts and outages of wireless, 73+ hacks and prototypes were created by the 400+ crowd of hackers, developers and designers. The prototypes ranged from involving yellow post-it notes and which poked fun at the lightning bolts on the Saturday morning. To a simulated on Y! Maps and Coke Mentos rocket ship with some great pictures.
We're planning to go through the range of hacks and see which ones could be developed further. Looking at the long list of hacks there certainly was some fantastic hacks including the winner of the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú prize - .
While at Hackday a couple of extra sources were released into the wild along with the wild west/playground servers. But expect to hear more about those in following posts.
Oh about 5000 load of the pictures can be found on flickr using the tags , or
Chris Valance from Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Pods and Blogs interviewed a lot of hackers and has made the audio interviews available .
Hackday caused quite a stir not just in London but also in the blogosphere and media spaces.
Even wrote,
Web developers are gathering in London for the first Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú/Yahoo hackday.
The free-form event aims to show web developers how to get more out of the data feeds and interfaces the two organisations make available. Those attending will be encouraged to play around with the technology to see what kind of innovative applications they can produce over the weekend.
On-hand will be developers from the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú and Yahoo to provide advice about how best to use the technology.
On the blogosphere most of what happened,
And friends, much code was hacked.
The Ten word review says,
God produces amazing hack that almost electrocutes 400 internet geeks. - isofarra
and
Like a slumber party for nerds, but without any makeovers - katemonkey
Back to the press, the Guardian wrote a small post
But the concept was simple: get a bunch of geeks in a room, give them goodies and assistance from some of the people behind the Yahoo Developer Network and Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Backstage, and let them build what they like.
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Anomalous uses the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú's news feeds to create a metaverse or stories arranged in a 3D space according to the time they were released and their relevance to the user.
By applying aspects of time and space the stories take on a representational structure creating a spiral of news and information.
Allows searching of the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Travel News RSS feeds for certain roads (using a special way of searching to ensure you only get, for example, problems on the M5, as opposed to problems on the M6 near the junction with the M5) or certain places. Is rather crude at the moment, but works - and I use it at work before starting the journey home. As for improvements - well see the todo page on the site - but the UI could do with a lot of improvements, and a way to select which feed to search would be good.
Basically I wrote this to deal with a personal niggle (that of having to use the IE search function to search for traffic problems that might affect me) and thought others might find it useful too.
If anyone's interested, then it's written using eRuby and runs on my apache webserver, which sits in my bedroom (that's why it's slow!).
A very to track your favourite sports team (or any sports news)
You can get your own rss feed to paste into your news reader by entering a query and then subscribing to that feed. My default is Cardiff City (its all bad news at the moment), but you can enter any term to search the bbc sports section.
Starting with the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú's lovely, tightly-written and edited news headlines and descriptions, Multi-Search uses Yahoo!'s term extraction API, Google's blog search, and Yahoo!'s Web search--run through Pipes when necessary--to retrieve current stories plus the associated buzz from the blogosphere.
An Opera widget that overlays the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Traffic tpegML files onto Google Maps, and sits on the desktop. An entry into the current Opera Software widgets competition (https://widgets.opera.com).
It features a continuous news ticker, a browseable list and a details view, all of which link into the interactive map.
I hope to improve the display of the details, perhaps a useful icon and colour scheme for quick reference.
Mojiti.com is a free online video annotation service that allows users to add comments and information directly onto online video via our overlay technology. Without changing the underlying video content, users can now add text, shapes, flash art and multimedia onto the video screen.
With more and more video content becoming available online, our goal is to continue to make online video a more interactive and engaging experience. Using Mojiti's RSS feed annotation, I have very easily taken an online Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú news clip and a Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú weather report and added the relevant live RSS feed to the screen. Now as users watch the video, the latest news can also stream across via the RSS feed.
News clip: https://mojiti.com/kan/3937/10619 (On this video, I also happen to add a Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú logo and made it clickable so that viewers can get redirected to the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú website.) Weather clip: https://mojiti.com/kan/3930/10597 (These videos can also be directly embedded onto backstage.bbc.co.uk if you think viewers would be interested to see these examples.)
Watch "Britain's most watched news channel" Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú News 24 in the Vista sidebar.
There are no controls, just right click to stop and restart, doubleclick to go full screen.
In the past I had that no longer works, and building on my
and because google maps now supports geoRss, and the backstage feeds dont do geoRss (something to work on?) I decided to do it myself.
You can now display the traffic data direct on the google maps site. This might be more handy for people who want the geoRss data, but i thought putting it on google was the best way to display it.
Direct google link is https://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=https://bbc.blueghost.co.uk/travel_data/locations.rss
My Yahoo Widget is written to provide local traffic information direct to your desktop. The idea started, as there doesn't appear to be an easy way to find any road incidents within 5/10/15/etc miles of your current location.
The widget currently accepts a postcode and a range set in the preferences and retrieves the all incidents within the range from the specified postcode.
The server is updating its database from the Backstage Traffic Data feeds and then providing the information via a simple xml feed that is then used for both the Widget and the Google map on the site.
I just need to find some time to add the additional information in the Traffic feeds to the Widget and improve the quality and presentation of the information provided.
