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?

Things that made me happy this morning:

• The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Mark 2 are finally officially available only 8 years later!
• Theres a rather cool CSS3 test suite for browsers
  available now
• My perfect job has been advertised (except for the pay)
• You can learn a lot in Las Vegas, even Good Web Design principles
• Ever wondered what those awesome Chinese Tattoos on the bloke in the pub mean? Well most are misspelled actually
• Financial Crisis company logos
• The Library of Congress talks about the success of crowdsourcing their photos on Flickr – YES!
• Finding the National Geographic Cafe in Swallow Street on my way back from the Apple Store. Good food, gorgeous interior, great coffee and free wireless FTW. Oh yeah, and it is full of beautiful women.

Chris Brogan has put together a nice to-do list on how to start speaking at events and there’s some great information in there (some of which I am not doing yet, but will start soon).

Right now I am a “international developer evangelist” which is a nice title but sadly enough does not come with Q gadgets like Bond or a private jet like Iron Man. What it means is that I spend most of my days looking at what my company is doing and how it would matter for the outside world and to see what the world is doing to feed back to the people too busy in the company to have a look around themselves. In between I am translating these from one language and interest to another by creating easy-to-grasp examples and show improvements that can be done. And of course go out there and give lots and lots of presentations (last week I had 3 days in 2 countries with 7 presentations and 2 media interviews).

It is a sweet gig, and I am happy that I arrived at it after being a developer for a long time battling both the technologies of the web (and their creative implementations in browsers) and the internal hierarchies and politics of the company that pays your wage.

This does not really stop when you go into a speaking role though, if anything, the politics become even more problematic:

• Event organizers are less likely to pay you or your expenses when you work for a large company. Surely the company is happy to dedicate its time and money to support some random event someone else does make money with, right?
• Your colleagues are likely to constantly nag you that you are not coding any more and are just a speaker or front man now. This is sad and can be terribly annoying and a lot of people should not be surprised that you drift apart over the month as the job of a public figure is tiring and means a lot of work. Hearing that you do nothing is not very encouraging and does make you feel like you’re wasting your time.
• Marketing, PR and HR will be all over you to either march along with them for the good cause (which in a lot of times is directly in the opposite direction of yours) or keep a very close eye on you so that you don’t do anything silly in public that could harm the company.
• Random people will come to you with a very specific agenda and try to convince you that this is what the world needs to hear about.

In general, I am trying my best to walk the very narrow path of being an “evangelist” and not losing touch with what is being done in the company and the market. My own mental checklist is:

• It is not about you. You have a knack of speaking and explaining but if you really think you are a rockstar or people should read about you and your life, get one. This is a very small community with a very specific market that is not even defined properly yet.
• Do not overpromise. If you don’t believe in something or you are not sure if it really works, try it first and make sure. Come from a base of confidence not “woohoo this is sooo coool”
• Give people things to take away. This is my pet peeve about presentations. If there is nothing in there I can bring back and impress my boss with or make my life a lot easier, what was the point? Yes this is terribly pragmatic, but I am just not easy to get interested in theories or visionary speeches – I’ve seen too many be totally off the mark.
• Speak the language of the audience. Is the level of complexity the right one for the audience? Are they native speakers? Will pop references and jokes work?
• Find something new for yourself. Even if you’ve given dozens of talks about the topic, make sure to get a new, fresh angle that challenges you and the audience alike.
• Do your research. There’s nothing better than referencing other good examples and articles for people to read on about the topic.
• Have your handouts ready. Don’t just promise availability of your talk and examples, have them online and as a link to download before you even start.
• Go into sponge mode. The people you are about to talk to are even more interesting than you are. Chat, listen, invite to communicate, ask for things to look at and you’ll get a lot of inspiration for the next gig.

This works quite well for me and if you are interested, I can go on about planning your trips and what to make sure before you go in another post. Should I?

Chris

Other speaking tips:

• Speaking at alltop
• Make me a speaker – we should revamp this idea – I know

Things that made me happy this morning:

• Let’s all go Squirrel Fishing
• A Chiptune Christmas Album for free 8 bit Jesus
• Having inspired someone immensely to use Yahoo Pipes at GeekMeet in Sweden
• Seeing that annoying crowds in public transport can become beautiful, spooky clouds when shot with the right camera
• A full list of references and samples used in Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique – someone really researched there!
• Microsoft releasing a t-shirt series called softwear goes in the WTF category
• A very clean and well coded DHTML snowstorm by Scott Schiller – who says we cannot upgrade useless 1997 effects?
• Valleywag defining ‘Irony’ by wondering and complaining that all the news media is overly involved with the Yahoo layoffs. Wait, if we were to delete all blog posts mentioning Yahoo from your DB, what would be left?