Mashed 2008

An excellent mash-up again at Alexandra Palace this past weekend.

Front-end development skills were, perhaps predictably for an event based around rapid prototyping, not in demand again, especially my brand of rather flawed Zope3 servers!

However, the whole event was veritable food for the brain, and fired many sparks in my imagination. I made many new contacts and friendships, and caught up with many others. What's more, the fact that transport, food and 'board' were all free, made it unmissable.

Lots more pictures at Flickr.

I'm not sure if anyone made a full list, I'll expand the list and add urls later, but some highlights of the presentations for me were:

• Social flight sim - Google Earth based flying - An inspired idea, which I almost want to replicate at home. Kept me smiling all weekend. The event as a whole would be a lot less fun without Ewan Spence.
• Sam Machins Blue Oyster Video - prompting video downloads from home, to your phone, from fixed terminals in public, was a really good, marketable mash-up.
• Lots of moblogging mashups, they've been around a long time, but it seems like Fire Eagle et al are really beginning to make it easier to develop them.
• Loved the current cost subtitle hack - Displaying domestic data on your TV has a big future IMHO.
• Not only was Julian Todd and Dan's police helicopter notifier brilliant, it was great to hear Dan, who's .Net, non web based, enthusing about Python and what he'd learnt over the weekend.

A couple of other thoughts on the event as the whole:

• I was disappointed by the direction of the Guardians talk (although not by the schwag, drinks and newspapers provided by their sponsorship). The presentation/presenter and content in itself was fine, but I was expecting more discussion around social responsibility and living our lives on the web, rather than just environmental issues.
• I know there was only 8 people on the Bristol/Cardiff bus and some problems with the other buses, but not having to shell out £50-£100 to get to London on Farce Great Western trains made a big difference to all 8 of us. Thanks BBC!
• I'm not sure how useful the talks at the start are, as much as they fire a few sparks, you could probably miss them and not loose any value.
• Matt Cashmore wondered if the smooth organisation took a little of the edge away. It did, but I'm not sure I'd exchange it for haphazard organisation to get it back.
• The food was much, much better, especially as it was free. But I could have done with more fruit during the day. I overloaded more than once on too many chocolate bars and fizzy drinks!
• Rockband was an inspired choice to have on one of the many XBoxes. But seemed less inspired at 3am, or when trying to concentrate on the Sunday.
• As an aside, I also played GRID on one of the other XBoxes, which I've never heard of before and was mightily impressed by.
• WiFi was much better this year.
• Shame the live BBC subtitles were so hard to extract, even if you were a BBC engineer it seemed! This completely scuppered our mash-up.
• Not many hardware hacks, would love to see a few more next year.
• Sylvestor McCoy. Brilliant.
• Having to explain to a colleague who Sylvestor McCoy was. Less brilliant, and rather ageing!
   

Overall though, 8.5/10. Matthew Cashmore, you deserve a huge pat on the back (again), well done!

Comments

[Phil Wilson]

Good summary Jon.

There's also a good list of the presentations here: http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/digitalcontent/2008/06/_mshed_2008_the_final_furlong.html