dConstruct06

Last weekend Ian, Mei, Sions and me enjoyed our last glimpse of summer by going down to the seaside in Brighton for the dConstruct Web 2.0 conference. It was a great excuse to catch up with each other before the end of our course and the conference was excellent.

Almost all the speakers were fantastic, delivering informative and entertaining presentations. 'Mashups' was definitely the running theme of the day, with plenty of examples on the web at the moment and advice on how to develop your own using APIs. A web 'mashup' is basically an online application that pulls in existing information from two or more other web services (e.g. Flickr and Google Maps info). Here are a couple of interesting examples:

• Flickr/Yahoo Maps mashup - the link shows you all the photos that have been geotagged on Flickr as having been taken in Cardiff, not many so far but it was only launched a few weeks ago so is sure to gain popularity and gives you a different way of exploring photos.
• Chicago Crime Map - Here a mashup of crime statistics and Google Maps allows you to identify the locations of criminals and reported crimes in Chicago!
  

What I found particularly interesting is how much the likes of Yahoo, Google and Amazon are now encouraging the development of mashups and other applications that use their APIs even for commercial use (although you usually still need to get permission).

Another hot topic of the day was 'microformats' with Jeremy Keith very passionately encouraging their use.

It was a really great day and I left with a greater insight into the current trends in the web industry and some new ideas for future projects.