It is pretty cool to see what is happening right now in the UK when it comes to mashups and data. Show us a better way is a web site and competition that asks ethical hackers to come up with ideas to use a wide range of public data for the good of the public. Straight from the horse’s mouth this sounds like this:

The UK Government wants to hear your ideas for new products that could improve the way public information is communicated. The Power of Information Taskforce is running a competition on the Government’s behalf, and we have a 20,000 pound prize fund to develop the best ideas to the next level. You can see the type of thing we are are looking for here. 

To show they are serious, the Government is making available gigabytes of new or previously invisible public information especially for people to use in this competition.  Rest assured, this competition does not include personal information about people.

We’re confident that you’ll have more and better ideas than we ever will. You don’t have to have any technical knowledge, nor any money, just a good idea, and 5 minutes spare to enter the competition.

There is a vast amount of APIs available to play with so what stops you from giving it a whirl? My own idea, cabsharing is something I was actually planning to do for quite a time, maybe even as a start-up, but why not here?

Dees Chinniah just emailed me with details about Barcamp London 5 on the 27th and 28th of September in the ebay offices in Richmond.
It is quite a trip to get there from Central London, but if the weather will be nice the location is the bomb – and there is enough space to park if needed.

More information on the BarCamp Site and of course on Upcoming

Let’s give Dees and of course Jonathan from ebay our support and make this a great unconference.

Adobe just announced the new searchability features of Flash complete with a specifications document of the SWF format. Google already announced that they are indexing SWF as of now to a full extend and according to Adobe Yahoo! are soon to follow.

This is splendid news, as it will allow people to write APIs to get text information out of SWF movies in a much easier way. Sure there were several Flash Decompilers already available, but this will make this much more mainstream and people will take adding text information to their Flash movies much more seriously.

On the other hand, this will also lead to more security exploits, but that is to be expected from any disclosure of file format specifications.

Thanks Adobe!

Just like last year, Patrick Griffith managed to assemble quite an impressive group of JavaScript experts to talk about all things Ajax and Scripting. This year’s schedule reads very nicely indeed and I am happy to see that all aspects of using JS are covered, including a session by Richard Rutter of clearleft on how to wireframe Ajax interactions.

This is especially welcome to me, as JavaScript is so omnipresent in web development these days that we all need to know about it and bring in our different skills to make great products. JavaScript should not shock Information Architects and Designers, but help them make things easier for the end users.

This also ties in nicely with my session which is, not to anyone’s surprise on using JavaScript to increase the accessibility of products, named Scripting Enabled, the same as the event I am organizing revolving around the same topic:

Scripting Enabled

The relationship of JavaScript and accessibility has never been a good one. A lot of myths circulating around the use and capabilities of assistive technology branded JavaScript as a bad technology and Ajax as a total faux pas. This is changing as a lot of companies now open their systems to developers with APIs that are Ajax and JavaScript driven. This session will explain how some of these can be used to make data available to users with disabilities that were blocked out before. Accessibility is first and foremost about removing barriers for users, regardless of ability. Using JavaScript and Ajax to work around accessibility issues of rich media applications is one way of doing that. It is like creating mash-ups to test out some APIs – only that the benefit is much higher than just proving a point.

I am looking forward to @mediaAjax, having had a great time there last year. I might be a bit knackered though, as I will be at the Fronteers conference in Amsterdam just a few days before :)

I wanted to give a list of all my presentations on SlideShare right here on the blog and started playing with the SlideShare API in earnest. As I failed in just including my results in the blog, I wrapped them in a WordPress plug-in in case you also feel like listing your SlideShare achievements.

You can see the plugin in action on the presentations page and here’s a screenshot:

Notice that I am offering a link to Easy SlideShare as an option so that blind users can only go to the transcript instead of having to try to understand the Flash embed. The API actually has a transcript element, but there is no content in there right now. Would be cool to see it enabled :)

Update: The Plugin now also allows you to copy and paste the “WordPress” code from SlideShare into any WordPress blog running this plug-in.

This screenshot shows what the inital state of a post (with some CSS) looks like:

When you click the “here and now” link you get the “normal” SlideShare experience:

The plug-in is open source, BSD licensed and if you want to use it you need to get a developer key from SlideShare

Once you have those, simply change the variables in the slidesharelist-config.php file accordingly. Say SlideShare gave you a key of “minor” and a secret of “I really like Weird Al Yankovic” then you’ll have to change:

to the following:

That’s all you need to do, simply FTP the whole folder over to your plugin directory of WordPress and activate the plugin inside WordPress.

All you need to display your list of presentations in a blog post or page is to add the following:

[*slideshare-username-amount]

For example the following would show my latest 5 slides:

[*slideshare-cheilmann-5]

The other option you have is to copy and paste a single presentation into the blog post. You can either use the following syntax:

[*slideshare-presentation:url]

An example would be my “Creating Happy Little Web Sites” presentation:

[*slideshare-presentation:http://www.slideshare.net/cheilmann/creating-happy-little-websites]

Alternatively you can use the copy and paste code slideshare offers you for blogs hosted on slideshare from the SlideShare presentation page itself. For example my presentation “Yahoo is Open for Developers” from the Ankara Open Source event:

[*slideshare id=477388&doc=opensourceankara-1213971414957829-9&w=425]

This is taken from:

http://www.slideshare.net/cheilmann/yahoo-is-open-to-developers

New in 1.10:

As requested in the comments below, you can now also list slideshows for tags and groups. The syntax is the following:

[*slideshare-group:{group}:{amount}]

For example:

[*slideshare-group:yahoo-developer-network:3]

And if you want to see slides for a certain tag:

[*slideshare-tag:{tag}:{amount}]

For example:

[*slideshare-tag:ajax:3]

• Download the SlideShare List Plug-In for WordPress 1.10
• Download the SlideShare List Plug-In for WordPress 1.05
• Download the SlideShare List Plug-In for WordPress 1.00