I am currently in Madrid, Spain for the La Red Innova conference. My talk was a hybrid of explaining the social graph and Yahoo Firehose and showing off some of the free technologies Yahoo has for publishers and bloggers.

I’ve recorded the audio of the talk and will publish it once I checked the quality (the stage was very noisy so I am not sure if it worked out). I’ll also upload the official Yahoo slide deck once the connection here is a bit more stable.

Here are my slides and links:

The slide deck

Yahoo – opening the web for you

Notes and links of the conference

Blogs I write for:

• http://wait-till-i.com
• http://ajaxian.com
• http://smashingmagazine.com
• http://thinkvitamin.com
• Microsoft Script Junkie

Links:

• Yahoo Developer Network
• YQL console
• YQL demos (open in the console): – Getting photos from flickr – Finding Madrid on this planet – Finding photos taken in Madrid – Finding New York Times articles about football – Getting headlines from elpais.com – Extracting keywords from elpais.com headlines – Elpais.com headlines in English – Searching Bing, Yahoo and Google in one statement
• GooHooBi
• Screencast how to build GooHooBi
• Yahoo Pattern Library
• YUI grids builder
• Yahoo User Interface Library
• Yahoo Performance Tips
• YSlow
• Yahoo Geo Platform
• GeoMaker
• Around You
• GeoPlanet Explorer
• Adding a map to any HTML content

Warning: The YouTube API is flaky at the moment, so there might be some outages!

At this year’s Accessibility2.0 conference in London Antonia Hyde from United Response asked the audience for technological solutions to make the social web easier accessible for people with learning disabilities.

Her presentation Rich Media and web apps for people with learning disabilities is available on slideshare.

Whilst not being able to tackle all the issues mentioned (probably the biggest one being captioning) I took some time to play with the YouTube API to create a much easier interface to watch videos. The following screenshot shows the Easy YouTube Player in action:

Using the player

You can use the player in several ways, the easiest is to just copy and paste a youtube url in the url field. However, there is also a sort of REST interface that allows you to do more:

Shows the player without any movie loaded, empty search fields and playlists.

Pre-loads the video of this YouTube address and shows the preview image in the player.

Performs a search on YouTube for the term panda and shows links to the videos in the playlist on the right. You can use more than one search word by adding them with a “+”. For example:

One last option you have is to bookmark certain videos on del.icio.us and tag them for a user. In order to show these videos as a playlist you need to provide your user name and the tag separated by a dash. For example my user name on del.icio.us is “codepo8” and I bookmarked some videos with the tag “easyyoutubeplayer”. The following link will show them all in the playlist:

You can mix and match the different options. If you for example want to show a video and perform a search for other videos you can use:

Documentation

The full player documentation with instructions on how to host the player yourself is available in the docs folder Easy YouTube Player documentation.

Download

You can download the player with all the demo files here:

• Download Easy YouTube Player V2
• Download Easy YouTube Player V1.5
• Download Easy YouTube Player V1.0

Changes

12/06/08

• complete re-write of code
• new buttons – glass were too complex
• added video size control
• added search and playlist support
• added address field to send to friends
• player now template driven – no more changes in main code needed
• added documentation
• added RESTful interface

28/05/08

• moved buttons to the bottom of the player
• text is now below the buttons and has an invisible extra “use this button to ” text for screen readers
• pause button now toggles pause/play
• mute button now toggles mute/sound
• the URL of the buttons is not an anchor but a url now (that goes nowhere, but this is just to read out the right command)
• removed the “current highlight” state
• added a volume level indicator (as a visual bar and a hidden form field)

Once in a while you realize that a lot of people are like you. When I joined a big internet corporation a lot of people asked me if I will shut up about bad things on my blog or if I will become a company drone now. The joke never gets old and I told some other people in the same situation about it. Well, we drank some beers, chatted and now it is time to take action:

PlugLondon is a meetup for developers in London in December sponsored by ebay, Yahoo, Skype and Paypal.

The catch? All of the people involved agreed on leaving both HR and PR out the door and do the thing ourselves. So on the 8th of December we want all the London people who drive software innovation to show up, chat with us about their products, how they use our APIs, get info from our experts and of course have several beers and food.

We are planning on repeating the exercise every half year and basically want to show that London can be as cool as the Valley but not as annoying to get to for UK folks.

The event has no branding yet and we invite people to give us logo ideas. The audience at the first meetup will choose which is the best and we go from there.

So come around, check out the different parts:

• PlugLondon web site
• PlugLondon wiki
• The Flickr Group to upload your logo design
• Upcoming site

See you there,

Chris