Things that made me happy this morning (just a few cause I am on my way to the airport – Sunnyvale, California for a week)

• The Benny Hillifier because every YouTube video gets much better by adding the Benny Hill theme
• An interesting hosted development environment in JavaScript for Freebase
• Urban Knitting – we are not too far from Monty Python’s Hell’s Grannies
• You know you are too much into Pokemon when it gets this far
• A look at the Raptr office – lots of ex-workmates there

Enough, I need to go and take out my laptop, take off my shoes, my belt, shift my change….

Happy Birthday tooo youuuu, Happy Birthday tooo youuuu, Happy Birthday dear evolt! Happy Birthday tooo youuuu

Evolt.org turned 10 yesterday and I can safely say that I wouldn’t be where I am now without evolt’s thelist, the browser archive and being the first online mag to publish my articles. I’ve met so many genuinely nice non-rockstar people who made the social web what it is (especially in England) there, that I must say I am proud to have been part of this whole gig. It is sad that the site had a sleep period for far too long now (and no good articles where submitted as I am one of the editors) but maybe we can re-vamp what is going on there.

Evolt rocks, there is no doubt about it.

Things that made me happy this morning (well technically it is morning and the aftermath of the BBC party):

• ZooBorns is a blog about newly born animals in zoos around the world – instant win (via Simon Willison of course)
• My esteemed Austrian colleague who now moved to the valley Klaus Komenda had his university thesis published as a book well done my friend (I should write another one – itching)
• Talking of books, Google released a CC licensed wiki/book on browser security cheers for that big G!
• If you thought Casino Royale was the first big movie to feature awesome parkours scenes (OK, the running through the wall was an easy way out – shame on you Daniel), check out this 1930 footage of a parkours-style running and climbing oddball
• If you really want to impress the ladies, make sure to wear a life size Link/Zelda paper hat – also a great idea for the next meeting in the office.
• Three people at the BBC Backstage party telling me independently that they love TTMMHTM - I never knew it’d be a success.

Also, a great reminder that you should ask to be able to get:

Things that made me happy this morning:

• Paul Carr from the Guardian’s amazingly funny writeup of LeWeb.

But I’m not being entirely fair to LeWeb. Not all of the speakers were dull (some were just batshit weird)

Earlier this week, just before the start of LeWeb, Lord Drayson, Britain’s Minister for Science and Innovation, announced plans for a £1billion investment fund to support technology startups in the UK over the next few years. The plan was initially greeted with excitement by those startups, but already British cynicism has kicked in and questions are now being asked about how exactly the money will be divided up. Fortunately, my plan takes care of that too. I’m all about 360-degree thinking. ... A few hours ago I sent an email to Lord Drayson applying for all of the money. Every single penny of the one billion pounds. And when it arrives, I intend to spend it all organising the most earth-shatteringly brilliant two-day conference Europe — and the world — has ever seen. Unlike LeWeb, there will be no panels, no “fireside chats”, no goody bags, no live webcasting and absolutly no keynote speakers. Instead I’ll blow the entire budget by constructing a gigantic sauna, right in the middle of London … and surrounded by a moat of liquorice vodka. ... Every entrepreneur in Europe will be invited, and encouraged to bring a long straw … it’s almost impossible not to network when you’re crammed into a giant sauna with ten thousand entrepreneurs, investors and industry journalists, wasted on liquorice vodka. A ton of business will get done, a thousand partnerships will be made and after two days everyone will go home hungover, happy and filled with enough morale to easily ride out the recession And even more satisfying than all of that is the fact that the idea of a huge state-sponsored piss-up is such an anathema to Americans that there’s no way they can outdo us. Instead Kara, Michael and all those other smug Valley dwellers will be forced to look on enviously as Europe drinks, sweats, networks and bonds its way to a new dot com boom.

• The great responses I got on my Ajaxian article explaining YQL – so there are still sensible comments out there!
• HTML-ipsum already preformatted Lorem Ipsum nonsense. I might turn this into a textmate bundle.
• Super Stacker a terribly cute and addictive game
• A sincere and very important Christmas message – befriend a geek

Yesterday I wrote a blog post on YDN about opening the web covering curl, pipes and YQL and today I did a more detailed deep-dive on Ajaxian about how YQL can help you to convert the web to JSON.

Suffice to say, I like YQL a lot – it is the command line interface to the web (and a text version of Yahoo Pipes). Go and play with it yourself:

As explained in the Ajaxian article, all the non-authentication web services can be accessed through a public REST API. Simply add your YQL statement to http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q= and add a format=json parameter and a callback parameter with the name of your callback function and you are set.

This would for example to allow you to search for rabbit images on the web and display them quick and dirty with a few lines of JavaScript:

YQL allows you to access any freely available data service and even scrape HTML, how cool is that?