So we did it. We ran another BarCampLondon. It was awesome and it would have been impossible without all the organisers, volunteers, IBM people, catering, and most of all the attendees.
It’s sad it’s over already but at least we still have the photos.
I gave a little talk at News Innovation here in London 2 weeks back, at which I quickly ran through a long list of data visualisations to show how it can help people understand things easier. I promised to put the list on my blog and forgot till now.
Here they are. Most of them come from Dan W’s Tumblr which has a lot more, but some of them were my own finds.
So we were at the first London Music Hack Day this weekend, held at the beautiful Guardian offices where we held BarcampLondon6 a few months back. I’ve been to a few hack days before, mostly organised by Yahoo and the BBC, and sice the last one I promised myself to always at least prepare some hack and present it. The first few times that I went to Hack Days I didn’t, and it never felt right. My track record so far on these last two hacks is pretty good, with the last one getting an article on the Guardian blog, and this weekend’s one actually winning a price. But before that let’s look at some of the other hacks.
Some of the cool hacks
There was an amazing amount of hacks put together over the weekend, leading to a presentation session of well over 2 hours. A full list can be found on the Music Hack Day wiki but I handpicked a few that I really liked.
Percussion machine by @alistair
Alistair and Mr Duck set off to make something pretty crazy and play with Arduino boards and servos. They created a percussion machine that made most of us laugh.
Music Bore
I’d like to describe Music Bore as the death to Radio DJ. Powered by IRC and Mac OS X’s text to speech API they created a DJ like experience.
Lonely Harps
The dating website Lonely Harps helps you find potential partners based on matching Last.FM profiles.
Last.FM events on iPhone
Handy little iPhone app that gives you a map with all the upcoming Last.FM events in your area. Very handy if you’re stuck ina foreign city looking for a party.
My hack
My hack was really simple. I had the idea to map song lyrics onto locations around the world per decade, but discovered most lyrics actually don’t have that many place names in them. Instead I decided to go along the same route and explore other ways of visualisation musical culture shifts.
I decided to go for analysing the lyrics of the top 10 songs per decade an give them multiple visualisations. I only ended up doing a Wordle visualisation in the end, but I think it’s pretty cool. Go ahead and have a look at http://zeitgeist.cristianobetta.com/ and have a look at the different decades.
The hard part of this little app wasn’t actually the visualisation, but actually getting a top 10 list of UK songs per era. There is simply no API for it so I had to opt to make my own API (JSON) for the EveryHit site. For now it’s just JSON and only the cumulative decades (not the single years), but if anyone’s interesting I might write the rest too and maybe add a SPARQL layer too.
I knew that someone must have made a video of my presentation on ShouldIBackupMy.com, and this is the first one I found. It only shows a little bit, but I think it’s the best part probably.
For those who don’t get the joke regarding GeoCities: read and shiver.
Melinda and I spent last weekend at the Yahoo Open Hack Day 2009 here in London. I have been to both the previous London Hack Day and the BBC Mashed Hack Day last year, so I was eager to meet up with a few 100 hackers again and see what will come out of it.
During the last two Hack Days I didn’t really get around to making or finishing my hacks, instead I spend time making swedes, which meant I never had a hack to present. This time I didn’t have any genius ideas either until the Friday before when we were having some food with some fellow Geeks after watching the new Star Trek movie (more on that soon).
The idea was to have a single-serving-site that would tell you wether or not it’s smart to go and backup your Yahoo data. It started as a joke, but I noticed the potential of it being both funny and an interesting way for me to explore some of the new APIs that I wanted to play with. For those of you who are not too familiar with Yahoo and therefore not totally understanding the joke: Yahoo has been having some financial issues lately and recently decided to close their ones popular hosting service Geocities by the end of the year, spawning an angry response from many geeks who think that web sites should stay online forever.
I ended up going a little bit further though by setting up http://ShouldIBackupMy.com (currently hosted on a sub domain until my DNS registry changes are processed). The idea was to set up a site a bit like http://isneilannoyedby.com/ (currently no longer enabled) where the is able to type in any word to get an answer to the generic question, obviously with some hilarious results to its effect.
So I quickly registered the domain, setup a symfony project, got the basics to work and then went to drink some beer. This all left me to do the cool part in the morning at 8am when I was only half awake. I played a bit with the new Guardian APIs (which is really easy to use and thank you Simon for helping me out with the API key process) and imported some relevant articles, then threw them through the YQL term extractor and made a decision on the state of the company.
The resulting pages show the user a guess on wether or not it’s wise to backup the data or not, show a link to some backup tools, and some news articles surrounding it. I added a little admin interface for myself which allowed me to quickly customize some of the pages with some other details (other colors, custom answers, logos) and all was done.
I finally presented my product on stage with the following keywords: geocities, magnolia, yahoo, flickr, delicious, google. I honestly thought the Yahoo search would have lead to a “probably not”, but it turned out all the Yahoo products returned a “probably” which made me look more brave on stage than it should.
I didn’t win a price (really didn’t expect too either) but I’m glad that quite a few people did like the idea and thought I should have at least have won the prize for “best mockery of an event sponsor”. In the mean time I will just keep on continue using a lot of the Yahoo services and hope that they’ll survive and run more hack days, and I then hope to hack something more impressive together at the next Hack Day London.
Last weekend saw the first Liverpool Barcamp and I have to admit it was a great one. I gave two presentation, one on Saturday and one on Sunday. The Saturday one was an introduction to Facebook App Development and the slides can be found below. The slides actually made it to the frontpage of slideshare! On Sunday I gave a talk based on my blog post from a few days back on how to integrate OpenID in Wordpress.
I will be heading to Liverpool tomorrow with some other BarCamp veterans to attend the first BarCampLiverpool. They invited a few people with some experience at BarCamps to bring the spirit over to the North, so Mel and I were happy to go.
But what to talk about? I am currently fully with my head into Facebook development for my work at Nudge London. This might be very interesting although I probably have to think out how to limit myself to just 30 minutes. Alternatively (and unlike most London BarCamps) I can probably talk about some of the topics that I talked about before because they haven’t heard it in Liverpool yet.
So here are my ideas:
I have been running with the idea of a PhotoCampLondon for a while, and under pressure of some friends I decided to finally go with it. So what can I tell you for now? Actually, not much yet, but I can point you to the website and I can you tell you this.
When, where, what, how?
So the idea is to have a photo themed, BarCamp-like, unconference, somewhere in Q1 2009. The photo theme will extend to everything related to photography, ranging from the actual photography, to third party services that provide creative outlets for your photography, to law and copyright. We want to get people from as many different photography and photography-related areas to come and attend.
While it being a BarCamp style event, I doubt we need to make it a true BarCamp with a sleepover (unless demand says otherwise), but I still have to figure out if we want to make it a one or two day event. I think one day should be enough but if we can get enough people attending and a big enough venue two days might just be possible.
Attending
The most important thing that anyone interested in PhotoCampLondon can currently do is put their name (or pseudonym) on the PhotoCampLondon wiki so that we can get a rough estimate of how many people are interested in this event. I also set up a blog on the PhotoCampLondon site so subscribe to that RSS for more news.
Organising, Sponsors, and Venues
The second most important thing you can do is help out organising this event. There is already a few great people helping out, creating a permanent look for the website and designing a real logo, but we need more. The most important thing for now is to probably be able to get our hands on a venue, but I think that highly relies on first getting some fix on the number of people that might want to attend.
Finally, we’re looking to get in contact with as many potential sponsors to see in how far they are interested. We’re not just looking for random sponsors to pay for food and t-shirts, but also for sponsors interested to bring valuable knowledge and hardware to the event. it would be great if it would be possible to get some major market players to come and give a large group some kind of workshop.
Further Information
If you want to know more about PhotoCampLondon, have a look at the site or contact me on cristiano[at]photocamplondon.org.
Cristiano on Tech/Life 
