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

Things that made me happy this morning:

• An interesting Nielsen research on iPhone vs. Android
• Jason Fried on hiring in never read another resume (part of Rework if I remember correctly).
• PHP is 15 years old – and a day
• woe db is another visualisation of the GeoPlanet Data data much like the GeoPlanet Explorer
• How an engineer folds a T-Shirt is a good use for an old cardboard box
• Dr. Watson can teleport – at least in the latest Sherlock Holmes game.
• Things Romanian senators watch on their laptops – FAIL - you got to love his face when he detects the camera
• Marca has a very cool Worldcup 2010 visualisation
• Talking of the world cup, Google has a nice easter egg – any search related to the cup has a Goooooal! instead of “Gooooooogle” above the pagination links.
• Norwegian Ninja could beat Chuck Norris
• My Fronteers talk video is out – learn about Hamsters, feature creatures and missed opportunities
• Everyone dials in can make phone conferences of distributed teams much less confusing
• Good tutorial on creating an iPhone optimised web site with jQTouch
• A simple introduction to E4X – great for YQL open tables
• NASA allows you to put your face in space – win, despite the cheesy launch sequence.
• The Protovis primer is a good introduction to this JavaScript visualisation library
• If San Francisco crime were elevation is an awesome visualisation – scary, too.
• Vanity is an A/B testing framework for Rails
• IMified is a IM posting framework for your scripts
• If you want lightning fast PHP, check out PHP-FPM + NGINX + APC

I am currently at Launch48 in London – a weekend for entrepreneurs and startups to network, get inspired and come up with a new business in 48 hours. I will be here tomorrow for a more in-depth mentoring sessions but today I was asked to give a 15 minute presentation on scaling products. So I’ve put together a short deck on the train over (I arrived yesterday night at 1am from SWDC) and here it is:

• Audio recording of the talk – MP3 6.41MB

The resources I talked about:

• Amazon S3
• Amazon EC2
• Google App Engine
• Joyent
• Microsoft BizSpark
• Winter Olympic Medals
• Guardian data set on Winter Olympic Medals
• Yahoo YQL
• Yahoo Design Patterns
• Yahoo Grids Builder
• Yahoo User Interface Library
• Yahoo Exceptional Performance
• Yahoo YSlow

I am currently at the Scandinavian Web Developer Conference in Stockholm, Sweden (flying back to Blighty tonight) and gave the final talk of the first day yesterday. In a fire and brimstone sermon I complained about how as web developers we do far too much navel gazing and play with our technologies building prototypes to impress each other rather than solutions for real end users.

In the talk I show how you can use progressive enhancement without doubling your efforts but instead build things that work for everybody.

The slides

The audio

• Progressing and enhancing MP3 - 15MB
• Progressing and enhancing OGG - 20MB

The resources

• Warwickshire government data mashup – (source code warwickshire) – (screencast warwickshire)
• Flickrcollector – (source code flickrcollector) – (screencast Flickrcollector)

The evil masterplan

One of the things I speak about in the talk is a social engineering and devious plan to get rid of Internet Explorer 6 called the Amelie approach – read up and become part of the solution.

Things that made me happy this morning (all on the lighter side – it is a day off)

• Exit Path is another very simple but addictive game from Armorgames
• I also want to have a job where one of your deliveries is to tickle baby Gorillas
• I do love news that are concise and short
• Hello worlds is an interesting game concept that needs you to play with two connected players.
• Find the IT guy in this profiles page
• headmap.py creates beautiful heatmaps from your GIS positions
• Smokescreen promised to be a Flash to HTML5/JavaScript converter – it unpacks SWF files in JS!
• In the “ouch you idiots” department: company sticks with IE6 to block Facebook – with FBs good move backfiring
• The Star Wars iPad briefing – loving the yawn at the beginning
• DHTML5.com is coming soon