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.

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?

Just got this sent in from Isac Lagerblad asking me what I think. If you go to Stockholm.se and you tab through the links you’ll find that the connected target gets highlighted on focus. I like it, what do you think?