I’m just enjoying the complimentary wireless on the National Express train from Newcastle to London and uploaded the presentation I’ve given at Sunderland University to start the Hack Challenge they are giving their students. Together with Yahoo Developer Network Sunderland Uni is asking their student to spend a month to build a web application using Yahoo services and mashing them up. The hacks will be judged by Yahoo for prices and graded by the professors as a part of the course deliveries.

My presentation was meant to inspire the students to find good hack ideas and realize that innovation is not something you are paid or told to do, but something that everyone can be part of by concentrating on what you want to make better and finding the right tools and people.

[slideshare id=937827&doc=hackingforinnovation-1232551242755069-2&w=425]

The initial hack ideas of the students were very encouraging and I am looking forward to the next video conference where they’ll pitch the ideas in detail and show the technological decisions they’ve made to build their apps. It is great to be able to partner with universities to see what potential is there.

Things that made me happy this morning:

• The UK Policy Hub have released a comprehensive document of transport statistics – a shame that it is a PDF, not XML or CSV but it looks like interesting mashup fodder
• Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics is Danah Boyd’s dissertation on social networks and the American teen – she interviewed and observed hundreds of teens across 16 states, tracking the rise of Myspace and Facebook in the process
• Danny Stack got permission to reprint an interview with Joss Whedon containing his top 10 script writing tips – if you haven’t seen Firefly, Dr.Horrible’s singalong blog or even Buffy yet, go and do it!
• A nice R2D2 Chorus Line makes me want to have one. Cause I don’t have space in my flat for it :-/
• 4000 more visitors on TweetEffect as Tim O’Reilly liked it.

Things that made me happy this morning (and I tell you about in the afternoon):

• I spent the morning chatting with JGP about a job portal for job seekers with disabilities – this will be massive!
• Obamiconme is a Flash app that allows you to vectorize your photo into one that looks like Obama’s HOPE poster (or well, close) – via Emily Lewis
• The $300m button is a nice case study that shows that making a form more usable can have quite a monetary impact
• Robert Nyman explains how to extend browsers with your own scripts – beyond GreaseMonkey
• My own little hack TweetEffect, showing you changes in your follower numbers went nuts (2000 visits in 30 minutes) after Guy Kawasaki twittered about it
• Inspired by Bhasker V Kode’s comment on Jonathan Trevor’s blog I found a real use case for the Microformats data table in YQL: Getting microformats information from Wikipedia as JSON – in this case I did a mashup showing meteor craters on earth

This is a new series of posts I am starting, tying in with things I’ve been saying in presentations and at interviews lately: I think it is time we mixed the speaker circuit up a bit and hear from different people than the “rock stars” of web development.

In this series I will talk about people I very much enjoy following and had great experiences witnessing as presenters or colleagues. Hopefully it’ll inspire some conference organizers to consider them and you to have a lookout for them.

First up is Nicole Sullivan, which is the name of her real life mild-mannered self.

On the web she is known as Stubbornella and writes a lot about performance, image optimization, CSS maintenance and other things that are both highly technical and very related to the grey area of web development that is the blurry border between design and engineering.

Nicole is right now writing on a book about image optimisation together with Stoyan Stefanov one of her partners in battling those extra bytes clogging the web. Together they built Smushit, a ridiculously useful tool to optimize your images without changing their visual quality. She used to work in Yahoo in the exceptional performance team and was a large part of the research team that brought the best practices for images and CSS when it comes to performance.

Nicole gives presentations both in English and French and has a wonderfully pragmatic approach to her work. While a lot of performance presentations can be highly technical, academic or deal with edge cases, Nicole keeps her “down in the trenches web developer” hat firmly on that curly head of hers and gives advice you can use immediately and get a result for your sites. Want proof? Check out this video of her speaking at the internal Yahoo developer summit:

I’ve seen Nicole several times, been with her at Paris Web and The Ajax Experience and can safely say it’ll be cool to have her share her wisdom with more people out there.

I’ve just finished uploading and fixing TweetEffect a web app that allows you to check which of your latest http://twitter.com updates resulted in people following or leaving you:

With the demise of Qwitter there was no real update mechanism to know when you lost followers, this might be a step to fill this gap. TweetEffect does not tell you who left you, only the number of people. The reason is the draconic rate limiting of Twitter. This is also the reason why the app largely runs in JavaScript and only does checks server-side when you provide a user ID on the URL. This allows for bookmarking and sharing with others.

Check out some examples:

• My Twitter Updates
• TechCrunch
• BBC

What do you think? Anything else to add?