While I’m there, I’ll be hanging out at the usual places – I’m staying in the Mission so it’ll be Ritual Roasters by default. I’ll also be at the following events:

• SXSW (including Music for the first time this year)
• IA Summit (on a Web Of Data panel with Tom Coates and friends)
• ETech

I hope I see you there.

I learnt a lot about the current state of broadband and digital strategy in NZ. I’m very grateful to TV3, TVNZ, the National Library, the Film Archive, Telecom NZ, Catalyst and Serato for taking time to talk to me about my work with the BBC Archives, hardware prototyping and open data.

Foo Camp was tons of fun: the best of the three Foos I’ve been to, I think. There’s no way I can list every one of the fascinating people I met, but check Planet NZTech for pointers. Special mentions to Jonathan Oxer and Phil Lindsay who stayed up late with me on Saturday night Bluetooth-enabling a toy car with Arduino.

The theme for this year’s conference is “The Ubiquitous Web”. As the web reaches further into our lives, we will consider the increasing ubiquity of connectivity, what it means for real world objects to connect to the web, and the increasing blurring of the lines between virtual worlds and our own.

The technologies underpinning these developments include mobile devices, RFID, ultra-wideband, Second Life, location-aware services, Google Earth and more. The issues surrounding them include privacy, intellectual property, activism, politics, regulation and standards.

A special mention for some of the talks I particularly liked last year:

• An open (data) can of worms by Paul Hammond, Yahoo
• Hijax: Progressive Enhancement with Ajax by Jeremy Keith, Clearleft
• The power of declarative thinking by Steven Pemberton, W3C
• Ignorance is not a defense by Suw Charman, Open Rights Group

Although it’s no substitute for simply avoiding wasteful airtravel, after doing the calculations for this post I paid for a 15,000 lbs CO2 carbon offset from TerraPass.

My final stop on the current journey is the Near Field Interactions workshop at NordiCHI in Oslo. I’ll be representing Thinglink along with Ulla-Maaria Mutanen.

On October 17th I’ll be back in my own flat in Hackney, East London and considering my next steps. 2007 has a lot to live up to. Of course, the planning for XTech 2007 has already begun and I’ve just submitted my talk proposal for next year’s ETech.

I’m heading to Helsinki in a few days for the next Thinglink workshop. My lovely hosts Ulla-Maaria and Jyri have organised a chance for me to give an Aula talk on “the Open Data Movement”. I’m honoured to be part of a series that has included Ben Cerveny, Henry Jenkins, Joi Ito and Lawrence Lessig.

Here’s the invitation:

OPEN DATA MOVEMENT – THE NEXT WAVE OF OPEN SOURCE

Matt Biddulph
www.hackdiary.com

Thursday August 17th at 18:00
Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT)
6th floor, Pinta-building, High Tech Center (HTC), Ruoholahti
Tammasaarenkatu 3, Helsinki

Tilaisuus on avoin ja maksuton. Luento on englanninkielinen.
Welcome – Tervetuloa!

* * *

The Wikipedia is only the tip of the iceberg of information that is becoming freely accessible on the internet. Following the success of open source, an open data movement is occurring online that seeks to gather, publish and enable the reuse of rich machine-readable datasets – like all programs ever broadcasted by the BBC.

By opening up these wellsprings of information, which were previously only accessible to large institutions, the open data movement has unleashed a new wave of creativity on the Web. Programmers, students, and companies are building mashups by overlaying photos, blog posts, and other objects to open datasets like the BBC Programme Catalogue, Wikipedia, Open Streetmap, and Thinglink.

As a case in point, Biddulph will describe how the BBC’s database of programming from the 1950s to the present day was transformed from an internal green-screen application to a public Web 2.0 service using Ruby on Rails. Expect to see some playful examples of what you could do with it and other open datasets.

* * *

Matt Biddulph is a freelance software developer based in London. He previously worked at BBC Radio and Music Interactive as the leader of the software architecture team, aka Head of Plugging Things Into Other Things. He blogs on Hack Diary (www.hackdiary.com).

* * *
The event is organized by Aula (www.aula.org) in collaboration with HIIT. Aula is an open network that promotes the exchange of ideas across boundaries.

It’s been a fun and worthwhile trip that’s introduced me to a whole new community. Unlike an ETech or an XTech, there were only a few familiar faces from my usual conference circuit. I think I made a reasonable impression on my new friends with my talk on Saturday morning: Putting the BBC’s Programme Catalogue on Rails. There was a great turnout and people hung around after the talk to ask some very interesting and intelligent questions. I spotted Martin Fowler at the back of the room, which threw me for a few seconds. His books on refactoring and software patterns are essential reading for any developer and I have enormous respect for his opinions.

Without the audio, I’m afraid the slides are just a vague visual outline. There was a dedicated team recording the talks throughout the conference, and I’m told that the audio will be available soon. Sadly you’ll have to pay for access to this, although the cost may be justifiable judging from the quality of the talks that I was able to attend.

Looking back at the schedule and the flickr photos and taking stock, I’m even more thrilled about the lineup and the people than I was before it all started. I’m very proud that I could play a small part in putting together the XTech programme.

My talk (on the BBC Programme Catalogue work) and our tutorial on Ruby on Rails went pretty well according to the attendee evaluations. I saw a ton of really thought-provoking talks and got to hang out with some very smart and lovely people.

Even putting together a list of URLs so I could name-drop my old and new friends took about 15 minutes; here goes: Marco Wessel, Ulla-Maaria Mutanen, Andy Smith, Freeman Murray, Suw Charman, Paul Hammond, Deb Bassett, Rob Lee, Tom Coates, The Ryan King, Brian Suda, Ralph Meijer, Thomas Vander Wal, Uche Ogbuji, Edd Dumbill, Jeremy Keith, Liz Turner, Simon Willison, Nat Downe, Dave Beckett, Matt Patterson, Max Carlson, Paul Prescod, Libby Miller and Pete Ferne. There were many more, and surely more still that I didn’t get a chance to meet. If you didn’t make it to either of the events, keep an eye out for the next time round. You won’t regret it.

Latest itinerary:

• 1-8 April – Snowbombing in Mayrhofen, Austria with some much-missed clubbing mates from London
• 24 April – return to London for some meetings and to drop off my winter gear
• 29 April – relocate to Amsterdam
• 16-19 May – XTech 2006. I’ll be co-teaching the Get Started with Ruby on Rails tutorial with Edd Dumbill and speaking on Putting the BBC’s Programme Catalogue on Rails
• 14-18 June – in Barcelona for the Sonar festival
• 22-25 June – off to the US to speak again on Putting the BBC’s Programme Catalogue on Rails at RailsConf in Chicago.
• July/August – living and working in Amsterdam
• 24-28 July – OSCON in Portland, Oregon (possibly)
• 25 August until late October – California

Gosh, that looks like quite a lot now I’ve written it out. My trip to ETech, SXSW and London was just wonderful, and if I have even half as much fun and meet half as many awesome people on the next trip, I’ll be over the moon.

Time has flown, and I’ve only got two months left before the winter season is over and the snowboarding is done. It’s time to get on a plane again and reconnect a little with the tech world.

Here’s my itinerary for the next three weeks:

• 4 March: London
• 5 March: Amtrak Surfliner from LA to San Diego
• 6-10 March: San Diego for ETech
• 10-15 March: Austin for SXSW Interactive
• 15-19 March: A suite at the excellent Farmer’s Daughter Hotel in LA
• 20-? March: A few days back in London before returning to the Alps

As usual, get in touch if you fancy meeting up anywhere along the trail.

Tagging, open data, reusing legacy information, APIs, Ajax, frameworks, browsers, firefox extensions, annotation, mashups, community, social software, databases, RSS, Atom, web applications, open source, web standards, information architecture, design, privacy, identity, digital rights… what have you got to say?