Right now I am a very happy bunny:

The reason is that more and more great data sources and mashup competitions are cropping up in my surroundings right now. One of the things that got me most excited is that the UK government is opening its data and calls for a mashup competition. I’ve been at the Guardian last week before leaving for Vienna and Prague to look at the data sources and plans in place and there is a lot of cool data to play with. I found the data format of RDF and SPARQL a bit on the confusing side (yes, it is open, but why make it hard, SPARQL is not the most intuitive of languages) and it seems there will be easier ways to get to the data. If you are interested in the data and the competition, check out the Government open data google group.

Me pimping that on Twitter also brought the Australians out of the undergrowth pointing out the Australian government data competition. Sweet stuff, but zipped excel sheets are not really usable data sources. Maybe hosting them on Google Docs and writing a YQL table to point to them would be a more successful approach?

The next thing I got involved in is the Science Museum of London’s Cosmos and Culture mashup competition. There’s a blog post with more details and I’ve done an interview with Mia Ridge, Lead Developer at the Science Museum where she points out that there is a wiki to collaborate in teams to hack something for the competition. Mia also talked about a wiki of all kind of Museum APIs.

As mentioned before here and on the YDN blog, the National Maritime Museum in London still has a call for developers to astrotag photos and mashup that data. The driving force behind this is Jim O’Donnell who uses YQL extensively to make this data very easy to use.

It is on! Get your keyboards ready, give YQL some thought and let’s show the government and museums what stories geeks can find in data sets.

Some days ago (I lost track with all the travelling and time differences) I gave the first talk at Yahoo7’s Open Sessions in their ludicrously beautiful offices in Sydney, Australia.

• You can also download the slides PDF if you don’t want to sign up for SlideShare

In order of appearance I talked about:

• The Yahoo Design Patterns
• The design pattern stencils
• Graded Browser support
• The Yahoo User Interface library
• The YUI CSS grids builder
• YUI widgets
• Information how to skin YUI widgets
• How to extend YUI widgets by subscribing to custom events
• Progressive Enhancement with Autocomplete
• Progressive Enhancement with Data Table
• Yahoo’s exceptional performance information
• YSlow
• Yahoo BOSS and examples I built with it like Keywordfinder and Unsafe Search
• Yahoo! Pipes
• YQL and how to use it to retrieve creative commons licensed photos of Sydney.
• YQL open data tables and how to use them

Things that made me happy this morning:

• Currently being in Taiwan after a long flight from London via Hongkong (Slumdog Millionaire – win, Memento – win, Marley and me – surprising win, Bolt – looks like put together from recycled other animated movies) and scoring a room on the 35th floor with view of Taipei and 101: The hotel also is the first one not to have a complimentary bible but a nice novel to read on the bedside table. Today and I will be interviewing with the media. What I was very positively surprised about was that the media wants to chat predominantly about accessibility ! This afternoon and tomorrow and then speaking at two universities about best practices in web development. Check out the cool icons for people attending at the bottom of the page. Saturday there’ll be an open developer evening together with Rasmus Lerdorf.
• Started reading Crowdsourcing by Jeff Howe on the plane which reminds me of The Starfish and the Spider
• Getting ready to go to Australia for the Web Directions Roadshow and speaking next Wednesday in our office in Sydney at the first Yahoo7 Open Session about YQL and other open things full of awesome.

Things found on the intertubes:

• Pulp browsers re-enacts the iconic pulp fiction scene with Safari, Firefox and IE6. Yes, IE6 dies.
• Brothercake gives us 10 cool things we can do once IE6 is dead
• An amazing singer on Britain’s got talent (a rare occasion in itself) shows us that you should never judge a book by its cover.
• Apparently all squeaking doors in old horror movies were really a Chihuahua
• I am not sure if we really needed a chair that sends twitter updates when the person it it farts but the hardware behind it is cool.
• Scott Schiller shows his take on the Digg bar – his numerous manifestiations of a fetish for rubber chicken lately worry me though.

Things that made me happy this morning:

• The video of the Koala bear drinking water from an Australian fire fighter after the bushfires. Awwww….
• A quite extensive list of printable vouchers and cheap coupons for UK companies
• An interesting hack to make Firefox log which fonts get rendered on web sites
• When can I use… is an interesting site featuring compatibility tables for features in HTML5, CSS3, SVG and other upcoming web technologies – watch out PPK, you got competition.
• Steve Outing wrote a good piece on monetization of online editorial content – Forget Micropayments—Here’s a Far Better Idea for Monetizing Content introducing Kachingle as a company that has a good plan
• An interesting Matrix of fonts bundled with Mac and Windows operating systems, Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Suite
• Finding out that YUI has a nifty date formatting tool like strftime in JavaScript
• An OsX hack to allow quicklook to show markdown

This April I will go down under to be part of the Web Directions South Roadshow. On Tuesday the 21st I’ll be in Melbourne and Thursday the 23rd in Sidney to give a one day workshop on Pragmatic, accessible JavaScript in a web services world.

JavaScript is an amazing amount of different things to different people. There was a time when it was a plaything to make web sites shiny and interesting. Nowadays you would be hard pressed to think of any web product that does not use it. Using JavaScript is easy. Making it mesh with other technologies like the backend, CSS and HTML less so. We’re moving further and further away from a world where you’ll be asked to code something from scratch. Instead we’re using frameworks and APIs, and consuming web services.
In this workshop we’ll start from an everyday situation – a rather messed up old web product. We’ll clean it up to make it accessible for everyone, easy to maintain and hand over to third parties, and always up-to-date by piggy-backing on web services like Yahoo’s YQL and Pipes, and social systems like Twitter, Flickr and Delicious. You’ll walk away with a new enthusiasm for Javascript, but also armed with a whole collection of rock solid techniques that will let you save your company time and money by doing the job right the first time.

I am very much looking forward to this, not only because I’ve never been in Australia but also because of meeting John from Web Directions in Denver two days ago and getting infected by his enthusiasm on the subject.

If the normal pricing of the workshop is too much I got good news: by using the discount code is WD-CH the price for the workshop back to *$499*.

Hope to see you there!

Chris