The screencast demo is here:

Although the menu is in Korean, you can probably understand how it works without reading. The Open API wizard automatically makes basic skeleton HTML according to the options you select. Thanks to the YUI team for providing the tools to build this.

Attendees walked away from Gugi Map Day with a new puzzle in hand -- a Y! Maps jigsaw puzzle. This swag came in four flavors, including puzzles for Seoul, Korea and Paris, France.

If the jigsaw puzzle is too hard to solve, you can take a peek at the hint here.

Jinho Jung
Yahoo! Developer Network,
Korea

On the train down to Brighton this morning I was considerably more bleary-eyed than yesterday, which may or may not have something to do with playing Call of Duty 4 until midnight last night. Consequently I was up late and didn't get time for my ritual cup of tea or to grab any breakfast, so my sleep-filled train journey was punctuated by dreams of pancakes, waffles and muffins. Having arrived in Brighton and sated my caffeine thirst and hunger thanks to the Millies Cookies stand at the station, I headed to the dome for one last day of inspiration and learning by the sea.

Rob Bateman: Finding Away3D
---------------------------

I was spoilt for choice on the first session of the day, with all of the session descriptions tickling different parts of my inner geek (okay, okay... maybe it's more of an outer geek). In the end I opted for Rob Bateman's session on Away3D as I get a real kick out of interactive 3D interfaces but know virtually nothing about the Away3D project.

From Rob's description, it seems like the Away3D team are in an arms race with the Papervision3D team, with each project pushing the other one forward in terms of features and performance. Both are open source, and while they differ slightly in terms of their development philosophy I'm sure there's plenty of code sharing going on too. After all, Away3D started as a fork of the Papervision3D code.

Rob started the session with an award winning old-school demo that was created using Away3D. If you're not old enough to remember the early 90's demo scene, fear not: there's still a pretty active community. They may use new tools like Away3D rather than coding in x86 assembly language, but the community has lost none of its creativity. Check out demoscene.info if you want to know more.

After the kick-ass demo, Rob showed off a whole bunch of features of Papervision3D's lesser known (but slightly prettier) cousin. He showed us demonstrations of phong shading, normal shading, specular lighting, triangle interpolation and caching, texture projection, bones and a whole bunch of other features and techniques I can't remember. Every time I see 3D in action in a Flash movie I can't help but gawp and realise how far we've come in such a short space of time. I get the feeling that this is what all the PC programmers were feeling when John Carmack started showing off the Doom engine, and I can't wait to see the Flash community really let rip with tools like Away3D.

Rob finished off the session with an interactive 3D scene featuring everyone's favourite mushroom-loving Italian plumber. Rob had hooked up four Wiimotes to his Mac via WiiFlash (specifically the Mac version), and used them to individually control each of Mario's limbs as he sprinted comically around a barren landscape. A fittingly hilarious end to a great session.

Seb Lee-Delisle: Papervision3D Simplified
-----------------------------------------

Seb's mission for his session was to debunk the myth that it's difficult to get started with Papervision3D. He managed to pack a heck of a lot into his session, starting with setting up a simple 3D scene in under 20 seconds and finishing off with 3D space cow pong. If that doesn't make sense (and unless you have as twisted a mind as Seb, it probably doesn't) then you can always download the examples and see for yourself.

Seb is a great speaker, and despite being intimately involved with Papervision3D's development he was able to convey the basics of Papervision3D development to a jam-packed audience of eager developers. I've flirted with Papervision3D in the past, and Seb has convinced me to find an excuse to play with it again.

André Michelle: Adobe made some noise!
--------------------------------------

Last year André delivered a session on generative audio in Flash, and he ended that session with a stark warning. From what I can remember, André's technique was to generate sound data in a `ByteArray` object, and then load that data into a `Sound` object for playback. However, for this to produce continuous uninterrupted audio the Flash Player has to give precise notification of when the current sound finished playing, so that the next lot of audio data can be generated. To fix an audio/video synch issue in Windows Vista, Adobe had to make some low level changes in Flash Player 9 that meant the `SOUND_COMPLETE` event occasionally fired a few milliseconds before or after the sound finished playing, causing breaks in audio playback.

André mounted an online campaign to get Adobe to fix this issue and provide a way to dynamically manipulate audio being sent to the sound card. Adobe responded with a low-level API that allows ActionScript developers to write data directly to the sound card's audio buffer, with notification ahead of time that more audio data is required through the `SOUND_DATA` event.

Explaining all of the above, some basics on generative audio and a walk-through of how to use the new low-level APIs took up most of André's session. He finished off by showing off AudioTool. André used to be a DJ in the days before he became an A-list Flash celebrity, and this really showed as he worked the dials and knobs on a series of virtual TB-303s and TR-909s wired up to a variety of effects boxes, mixers and some more obscure pieces of audio equipment I didn't recognise. If he wasn't playing to an audience of reserved, socially awkward geeks I'm convinced he would have had the whole place jumping.

AudioTool is free and available to play with online now. The current demo uses Java in the background to overcome the current limitations of the Flash Player, but André says that the new version in the works will be 100% Flash and released on or around the same time as Flash Player 10.

Jonathan Harris: The Art of Surveillance and Self-Exposure
----------------------------------------------------------

Aside from having a very apt title for a conference called Flash on the Beach, Jonathan's session was also the very last session of the final day and was for me the only notable session of the afternoon. Jonathan worked on the Yahoo! Netrospective: 10 Years, 100 Moments project for Yahoo's 10th birthday

I'm finding it really hard to put Jonathan's session into words - every time I try I can't seem to express what I saw and felt. Instead, I'm just going to link you to some of Jonathan's online works and let you experience them for yourself:

- WordCount
- We Feel Fine
- The Whale Hunt
- I Want You To Want Me

Jonathan also challenged the Flash community, and the producers of online media as a whole, to actually start saying something. He compared the tools we use to language, and made the point that language isn't worth a damn if we don't actually say something meaningful. After three days of fun and frivolity, this was a little bit too profound (and, to be honest, a little too serious) for me to comprehend.

End of Day 3
------------

So, that's it. Flash on the Beach is over for another year. I am exhausted, buzzed, inspired, and slightly disappointed at not having won anything in the mass giveaway at the end of the last session, all at the same time. I think I've consumed my body weight in tea, and absorbed more information than I can rightly expect to fit into my puny human brain. I'm sure there are going to be consequences for that, like forgetting my wedding anniversary or something, but I'll worry about that later. For now, I can't wait to get home and start playing.

If you're going to be in or around Miami between the 5th and 8th of April next year, I highly recommend booking tickets for Flash on the Beach: Miami as soon as they become available. And, by-the-by, if you need someone to blog about the event, and you have room in your suitcase, I'm sure I can make myself available.

Steve Webster
Front-End Engineer
Yahoo! Europe

The Waterloo University Hack Day has finished. We had a glorious 24 hours of hacking where Search Monkey tech lead Paul Tarjan, and I helped students with CSS, BluePrint, BOSS, YUI, PHP, Java, SearchMonkey, XSLT, SQL, and lots of Javascript questions. We hacked alongside the students, making a webpage(1) which shows all your open socket connections on a map. See the links section at the bottom of this post for links to most of the hacks mentioned.

The real stars were the students. Many of the teams lasted the full 24 hours. We camped out in the lounge on the 3rd floor of the Math building. Pasta for dinner, then a midnight pizza delivery along with more Twizzlers than anybody should ever eat. Breakfast, then lunch, and before you knew it the deadline was on us. There was a lot of last-minute hacking to get the hacks to a presentable state and in the end the quality of all the hacks presented was amazing.

Photo Credit Jamie Lockwood

Like the hack day at UIUC last week we had special categories for BluePrint, BOSS, and SearchMonkey along with our top-3 overall prizes. Unfortunately we can't give prizes to everyone. A few of my personal favourites didn't end up winning prizes: The Tiny Vector Graphics(2) editor was one. That slick little vector language brought back memories of Logo and Turtle for me and it is great fun to play with it. Try it out. I also liked the ideas in the CalendrViewr2.0Beta hack(3). Are they perhaps trying to poke a little fun at Web product names, numbers, and everlasting beta cycles with that name? MaybeNotSpam presented an interesting way to give our sent messages that ended up in someone's spam folder on Yahoo Mail or GMail a second chance to be moved back to the Inbox. In the process of building this hack, Holden caused a bit of a stir with his Slashdot posting on how the Zimbra Desktop client communicates with the Yahoo IMAP server. And Edgar A. Bering gave us a lesson in quantum computing and Scheme that I didn't grasp a word of, but
was fascinating nonetheless.

Other highlights included a mobile RSS reader written using the BluePrint API called Feedy! and a Web directory index enhancer simply called DIR. We also saw another stellar batch of SearchMonkey apps: the simplest and funniest being the "Canada Eh?" app that added an "Eh?" to the end of all Canadian URLs. A combination of IMDB, Torrent searches, and Last.fm apps along with a tv.com app, a WorldOfWarcraft app(4), and a nice Map Infobar with driving directions from your geoip-located location.

In the end we had to pick some winners. In the BOSS category, we liked Clustr(5) by Alex Leong, Nick Engelking, Danielle Alessio, and Josh Lamontagne. It does a number of BOSS searches to determine the relationship between search terms, finds images to represent each and gives you a graphical cluster where the size of the images and the distances between them indicate correlation between them.

In the BluePrint category, we chose Mobill(6) by Chong Su, Toshio Wang, Carol Yu, and Jason Cham. It keeps track of your expenses, giving you some nice sorting and graphical visualization tools right on your phone. Also included: a Web service where you can download your expenses into a spreadsheet.

In the SearchMonkey category, we chose Jeff Pound's API Monkey app(7). It is able to provide language-specific reference help for a number of languages. And it does a really nice job of showing the most relevant parts of the various reference docs. He did a cute hack to pull out the query string and found a bug in our URL parsing.

Overall third place went to a friend-visualizer hack called Globami(8) by 1st-year student Renaud Bourassa. It let you easily see where anybody's friends are on a couple of networks either in a nice Web UI or in a SearchMonkey Infobar.

Second place went to Flare(9) by Michael Campagnaro and Niall Wingham. Flare is a semantic markup tool written in JavaScript. Anything that helps push the Web towards more semantic markup is important. Flare currently only supports RDFa, but I really hope Michael and Niall continue working on it and add eRDF and all the popular microformats to it. They parsed the vocaulary file and pulled out the definitions, which in theory could let a user apply it to any arbitrary vocabulary. I can see myself using this constantly to go back and fix my Web content
written before I became semantically enlightened.

And finally, the first overall prize went to an impressive hack by Addy Cameron-Huff named HackDemocracy(10). Addy managed to organize an incredible amount of data and put an easy-to-use and very polished UI on top of it. In the end what we get is an incredible political research tool that allows us to dig into how your local MP has represented you by looking at what he/she has said on-record in Parliament. You can see see the excerpt about the topic you care about or the entire speech. You can also see how the parties stand on issues you care about based on how often they talk about those issues. And finally he added a simple RSS API for you to fetch the text of speeches by topic to let you build off of his hard data mining work.

Photo Credit Jamie Lockwood

I graduated from Waterloo 15 years ago. I spent 5 years in a dingy Systems Design classroom. I see the poor Systems students are still stuck with those same old classrooms, but I am told there is hope for a change soon. We didn't have laptops with wifi in class. We didn't have the fancy food court in the Campus Center. The Bomber
was called the Bombshelter and we didn't have the Tatham Center with its computerized co-op system. We shuffled papers around in Needless Hell, watched lectures written in chalk or on overhead projectors instead of Powerpoint slides and I don't think I ever set foot in the Math building. Even though just about everything has changed, and I felt every bit of the 40 years I will be turning next month walking around campus, somehow Waterloo hasn't changed at all. It is full of bright kids with a fire in their eyes bound to change the world.

Rasmus Lerdorf
Technical Yahoo

(1) http://progphp.com/sockets.php (only tested on OSX/Firefox)
(2) http://www.jimmyhe.com/
(3) http://www.forgethotchicks.com/calendarFinal/calendar/testo.php
(4) http://gallery.search.yahoo.com/application?smid=ajv.s
(5) http://clustr.wolfjourn.net/
(6) http://beta.m.yahoo.com/w/devtest-chongasu-mobill
(7) http://gallery.search.yahoo.com/application?smid=09H.s
(8) http://globami.rhinosphere.com/
(9) http://flare.impact.org/
(10) http://yahoo.summerhilldesign.com/

When the organizers asked me to come around and speak about something YUI related I was very flattered and happy to take the 6 hour hop from London to Boston. In terms of weather there is no difference between the two anyways.

I managed to sneak into the 'Top 10 Cross-Browser Issues' keynote panel moderated by Peter-Paul Koch of Quirksmode.org on day one to represent YUI together with the other experts of jQuery, Dojo and Prototype. Despite the four of us looking like we're candidates on the dating game there was a lot of consent on the panel and I hope we managed to hammer the message home that whilst there are many different libraries with different APIs and ideas, all we really want to do is make life easier for developers.

I was scheduled to speak in the last track of the three day conference, which is a bit of a drag as the attendees would be quite worn out from the amount of information and refreshing after-party beverages, but all worked out fine.

In my talk I wanted to make very clear that while YUI is a library much like the others, the real power of it lies in the control it gives you over the whole frontend development process from start to end.

• The CSS components make sure that creating CSS based layouts and typography are as easy cross-browser as libraries make JavaScript development
• The YUI DOM control allows you to monitor the size of the browser window, the position of the document in the window and the dimensions of any element. You can use this power to control things like fixed positioning and element overlap and even monitor font resizing.
• I explained the concept of Custom Events and how the -debug versions of YUI will notify you as a developer at any moment of execution about the internal happenings.
• I showed the development tools - the YUI logger, profiler and test suite and how they make your development process much less random.

The slides are available on slideshare and here are the code examples mentioned in the slides for browsing and to download as a zip.

All in all I am very proud to have been in Boston and part of a great conference. It was interesting to meet a lot of developers you normally don't meet in Europe or at the West Coast and there was an amazing amount of knowledge and experience sharing going on.

Chris Heilmann
Yahoo Developer Network

The second day at Flash on the Beach started at a much more civilised hour for me. Since I'd already registered, I could afford to spend a whole extra hour in bed before jumping on the train to Brighton. I even managed to grab some breakfast on the way, and the extra brain food that brought was going to be essential in making it through probably the most technical of the three days.

Aral Balkan: Grab the Low-Hanging Fruit
---------------------------------------

The day started with an inspirational talk from Aral Balkan on, essentially, learning to play. The main thrust of his presentation was that we spend way too much time getting hung up on patterns, frameworks, and the best way to approach a particular problem. This leads to procrastination, which means that the cool ideas in our heads are trapped there forever. If we can stop getting hung up on how best to implement something, we can all have more fun (and who doesn't need more fun in their lives, right?).

The one thing he showed that really stuck in my mind was Scratch. Scratch is an MIT-developed tool that makes it ridiculously easy to create simple interactive Java applets graphically, without having to write a single line of code. Aral's point in showing this was that we shouldn't feel limited or intimidated by the tools we are given. Like Java, ActionScript 3.0 is a powerful language, but that added power has made it more difficult for people who have never written a line of code in any language to start learning. The Scratch developers have built a graphical programming environment where you don't need to know a complex language like Java to create simple or even moderately complicated interactive projects.

I think Aral is planning on running the same talk at a number of conferences this winter. If you get a chance, I highly recommend this session to get your creative juices flowing. It's inspiring stuff.

Niqui Merret: Accessibility - Beyond the Basics
-----------------------------------------------

After a quick slurp of tea (mmmm... caffeine) I dashed into the Corn Exchange for Niqui Merret's session on accessibility. I've seen Niqui talk maybe half a dozen times on Flash and accessibility, and I always come away from those sessions having learnt a lot about what it means to develop for people with disabilities. This session was no exception. Rather than spend a long time on the basics of accessibility, after a quick introduction Niqui dived into some of the more advanced areas of creating accessible Flash sites.

There was some really great advice here on how to implement accessibility as painlessly as possible. After talking briefly about what you get for free in terms of accessibility from Flash's default behaviour, Niqui moved on to show off some of the base ActionScript classes she has created to make her life a little easier. One class makes decorating a UI element with accessibility attributes as easy as a single function call, and then a set of base UI classes for various different types of control makes use of that class. Creating accessible controls is then a simple matter of extending those classes and overriding the appropriate methods.

The talk itself was intentionally kept short. After her presentation, Niqui opened the floor and spent the rest of the session engaging the audience and answering questions on accessibility. It always gives me a buzz to see how many people in the room actually care. Niqui's passion for accessibility is infectious. As I left the room, I caught snippets of conversations from other attendees about putting their new-found knowledge to use in their own projects.

Joa Ebert: Audiotool's Private Parts
------------------------------------

Just before lunch, with my stomach already rumbling with hunger, I took my seat back in the Corn Exchange for Joa Ebert's session on all the behind-the-scenes stuff that makes AudioTool tick. The actual process of programatically generating audio will be covered by André Michelle's session tomorrow, but Joa promised to cover as much of the other stuff as he could in the allotted time. That turned out to be just enough to make my brain explode.

If you've not played with AudioTool, I highly recommend you check out the AudioTool video tutorial. The user interface is stunningly gorgeous, essentially replicating real-world pieces of audio equipment all wired up with cables to produce, modify and output all those screeches, pops, and whizzes that dance music producers love so much. If you've ever played with Propellerhead Software's Rebirth, you'll have an idea of what I'm talking about.

Joa spent a while talking about the impossibly complex problem of routing and drawing the connecting cables so they don't overlap any of the pieces of audio equipment you have on the stage. It turned out that routing wasn't the problem - it was doing so in a way that didn't adversely affect the performance of the application or (most importantly) the audio playback. The answer Joa arrived at was to use a quadtree to divide the stage and limit the amount of elements to be tested. This is a technique commonly used in gaming (3D games use octrees) to improve collision detection performance.

Once we were done with quadtrees, Joa showed off something he'd worked on that simply blew my mind. Graphically, Flash has always had an issue with having lots of elements on the stage at once. Although the performance is getting better with every version of the Flash Player, it still lags behind the performance of hardware-accelerated solutions like OpenGL. Joa rebuilt the entire Flash display stack in Java using OpenGL, and then ported parts of AudioTool to run on that system, just to test the relative performance gains. He also built an entire interactive shell in AudioTool so that he can debug the application while it is running.

Needless to say, I came out of this session with the sad realisation that I am an average coder at best. I guess if all else fails I can always limp my way into management, where you're not really expected to know what you're talking about, and you just need to make sure that the people you're hiring are smarter than you.

Jam Session
-----------

The only really notable session that I attended after lunch was the jam session, which was a last-minute replacement for Nando Costa's "Motion Graphics, One Step At a Time". Apparently poor Nando is stuck in the US until FedEx finally get around to delivering his green card, so John Davey convinced a bunch of the speakers to get together for a code jam session. The result was possibly one of the best sessions so far, with really smart developers like Keith Peters, Joa Ebert and Ralph Hauwert showing off some of the cool experiments they just happened to have lying around on their MacBook Pros.

I really dig this kind of stuff, and it reminded me of all the awe-inspiring experiments from people like Joshua Davis, Jared Tarbell, and Manny Tan that got me interested in Flash 11 years ago.

End of Day Two
--------------

Once again, my train ride back to London and my duty to you, loyal YDN blog reader, meant that I had to skip the inspired session and the after party. Tomorrow is the last day of Flash on the Beach, and if it's even half as good as today I'm in for a treat.

Steve Webster
Front-End Engineer
Yahoo! Europe

One thing they've been pondering a lot about lately is image optimization for file size. Image editing tools come with all kind of great ways to optimize images for visual quality and file size, but when you look at the image in a text or hex editor you'll find that there is a lot of extra information in the file, for example the name of the editing suite, dates when the picture was created and lots more.

There are a lot of tools that remove this information safely and get the most out of the images without having an effect on their visual quality. The catch is that there are a lot of tools for a lot of image formats, all of them on the command line.

So Nicole and Stefan took their research findings, fired up their code editors and built a web app that does all the optimization for you:

Smushit.com allows you to upload some files or give it a URL. The tool then takes the images, optimizes them and tells you how many bytes you can save. You then get a zip of all the images for download and can replace them on your site.

Here's a video of Stoyan and Nicole presenting Smushit.com at The Ajax Experience in Boston (sorry about the audio):

Chris Heilmann
Yahoo Developer Network

This morning, having arrived bright and early in a cold but sunny Brighton, I eagerly made my way to the Brighton Dome to register for this year's Flash on the Beach conference. This is the third year in a row that I have made the journey down to the South Coast for the conference, and once again the line-up of speakers over the three days is stellar. After grabbing a cup of YDN-sponsored tea (yes, we're doing our bit for all the caffeine-addicted Flash developers out there) I headed into the main auditorium for the start of the day.

Adobe Keynote

John Davey, conference organiser supremo, dropped a bombshell in his introduction to the keynote session: Flash on the Beach will be coming to Miami in April '09. If you've always wanted to get to Flash on the Beach but didn't want to brave the chill of the UK in October, then maybe Miami is more your style. I am assured that tanned, toned bodies and manicured poodles are welcome but strictly optional.

The keynote, delivered by Richard Galvan and a few other Adobe folks, showed off some of the features that are shipping with the Flash CS4 release. It's been a while since I've played around in the Flash authoring tool, but judging by the spontaneous applause from the audience it sounds like the new animation system is going to please the designers amongst you. We also got a tantalising glimpse of the new features in the Drawing API, including what looked like live video being projected onto an animated distortion mesh. I don't know what practical applications that might have, but it sure looked pretty. Richard promised that there'll be more information on this and other new features in some of the other Adobe sessions at FotB, so I'll keep you updated.

Mark Anders: Flex 4 and Thermo

After some more tea (or should that be moar tea) I switched venues to see Mark Anders talk about the new designer/developer workflow in Flex 4 and a tool known only by its codename: "Thermo". Having been on the wrong end of a few "misinterpreted" designs (and on both sides of the designer/developer fence) I was interested in seeing how Adobe plan on tackling this thorny issue.

The upcoming Flex 4 has a radically refactored component architecture and a handful of new MXML elements to represent vector graphics, the latter of which exist as a subset of MXML knows as FXG. If you've had any experience with the excellent degrafa library, you'll feel right at home with FXG.

With these two additions, and the introduction of Thermo (think Flex Builder but with the scary ActionScript stuff being replaced with new designer tools), Adobe seems to have completely separated the look and feel of a Flex application from its underlying logic. Developers can round-trip their designs using the new FXG format, and then integrate into their code either at compile time or runtime.

To demonstrate this improved workflow, Mark showed off a weather application that consumed Yahoo's Weather API. The application had several, radically different skins that changed not only how the application looked but also how the user interacted with it. He went from a debug view where all the information was visible, to an accordion-style view with animated open/close states, and finally to a mobile view which looked very much like iPhone's Weather application, complete with flick scrolling. The skins were all created with Thermo without a single line of ActionScipt code in sight. Impressive stuff indeed.

However, as excited as I am by all this, I can't help but wonder why Adobe created FXG and retrofitted all their creative tools to read and write the new format, when SVG is already here and supported by all those tools and more. If I bump into Mark or any of the Adobe people over the next few days, I'll be sure to ask.

Eric Natzke: The Art of Play

The last session of the day was back in the main auditorium, which was just as well as it was absolutely packed. Graphic Designer come Flash hero Eric Natzke showed off some of his latest artwork, and talked about the process of generating that artwork with Flash.

I think I can safely say that everyone in the room was inspired by Eric and his amazing graphical style, not least because there was a mad scramble at the end of his sessions to get one of the free postcards he was giving away. I didn't get a postcard, but I'm seriously tempted to order a few of his canvases for my living room.

End of Day One

Sadly I can't attend James Paterson's "inspired session" or the party this evening as I'm currently on the train back to London, but rest assured I'll be back again tomorrow for more Flash-related fun.

Steve Webster
Front-End Engineer, Yahoo! Europe

The new sections cover Accessibility with an article from yours truly on accessibility basics and another by Yahoo!'s Ben Hawkes-Lewis on accessibility testing. The section on CSS is also available with an introduction to CSS from YDN's Christian Heilmann. Other industry stalwarts, such as Tommy Olsson, follow on the CSS section with more detailed articles on specific topics.

I'm glad I've been able to contribute to this great introduction to web development. If you are looking to learn the basics it's highly recommended.

Tom Hughes-Croucher
Yahoo! Developer Network

Evan Goer
Yahoo! SearchMonkey Team

The <head> conference is a world-first virtual conference that gives attendees access to watch all the presentations live on the internet using only their browsers and the Adobe Flash player.

The line-up is impressive: Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, Inc., Jason Fried, director of 37signals, Lynda Weinman, president of Lynda.com and Richard Moross, CEO of MOO.com are just a few of the large amount of speakers that signed up to be part of <head>.

The best news is that if you sign up until the 30th of September, you'll get access to all the talks for only 99 US Dollars (that's the early bird discount)!

The benefits of virtualization

Virtualization is a hip new thing - we create virtual computers for heavy computation tasks and virtual worlds to be able to communicate outside our physical boundaries and be whoever we want to be. The next logical step was to lower the burden and cost of conferences by making those virtual, too. Conferences on the internet mean more refreshed speakers (no jetlag), less money spent on travels and hotels and above all we don't increase our carbon footprint by attending or speaking.

The brain behind the <head> is Aral Balkan, well-known Flash and Flex guru and speaker at several conferences himself. He partnered with several companies to get initial funding and started cracking on the software to make the conference a reality. Apart from pushing the boundaries of Flash the conference software and web site is also the first large commercial application to run on Google App Engine.

Let's get physical

Whilst all of this is pretty cool and bleeding edge there is something nice about meeting in person. For starters you're able to share some food and drinks without holding your pints up to the webcam and probably damaging your laptop.

This is why <head> also has some physical locations where people from the same area can congregate and follow the proceedings together on a large screen. These are all located in the UK and sponsored by several different companies:

• London, UK - Sponsored by Yahoo! Developer Network and O'Reilly. Venue: The Magic Circle in Euston. Capacity: 163.
• Manchester, UK - Sponsored by BBC Backstage. Venue to be confirmed.
• Brighton, UK - Community hub at The Werks.

So what are you waiting for?

All good arguments? Why don't you just <head> over and sign up for your ticket on the conference web site and we'll see each other (virtually, of course) on the 24th. This could be internet history in the making!

Chris Heilmann
Yahoo Developer Network

Photo Credit Brad_Crooks

Both panels were well received, if I say so myself ;). As much as I enjoyed participating and attending the other sessions, the best part of BlogWorld Expo was investing some time in the blogger community and meeting many of the people I've been exchanging emails and wiki edits with over the past year.

One person that I finally got a chance to meet face to face was Chris Saad, of the DataPortability group. DataPortability is a grassroots effort to promote the idea that users should be able to move, share, and control their personal data online: identity, photos, videos and all other forms of personal data. I've been honored to be a part of this group since December of last year, and though I've been warned by many naysayers that "no group like this can ever enact real change", I'm more encouraged with each passing week. If you are at all concerned with the portability of your data and your users' data, I'd encourage you to get involved.

Here's my "why I want data portability" video, though I must warn you, I'm OBVIOUSLY not a professional talking head so be gentle.

Robyn Tippins
Community Manager, YDN

Sponsored by IBM and ours truly, the organizers managed to invite and attract an impressive list of speakers, including Chris Wilson of the Internet Explorer team and Daniel Glazman from the W3C CSS working group. From Yahoo! you'll see Eric Daspet, yours truly and the other curly - Nicole Sullivan from the exceptional performance team.

You can find out who else is coming on the full list of speakers and you can get tickets starting at 100 Euro per day. Just like last year there'll also be 10 Euro workshops for those short of cash.

Be aware that the main conference is in French. Nevertheless even if your French is not that good you can get by and I had a great time last year - the value for money was amazing. Let's hope this year there won't be a train strike, though :)

Chris Heilmann
Yahoo Developer Network

What is structured data, and why is structured data good for search? Traditional search engines crawl the web and extract what metadata they can: the page title, an autogenerated summary, the file size, the MIME-type, the last-updated date, and so on. However, this sort of analysis pales in comparison to what a human being can do simply by glancing at the page. A human can look at the words "Joe's Home Page" and infer, "ah, this page probably belongs to Joe," or look at an image and infer, "ah, that's probably a picture of Joe, the owner of the page." That's easy enough for humans... but what if the search engine could pick out this info and display it directly in the search result?

RDFa relies on using attributes to embed structured data in XHTML. These attributes are not valid in HTML 4, but the W3C has provided an XHTML DTD to validate against. The following example illustrates a simple home page marked up with RDFa data (in bold):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML+RDFa 1.0//EN"
          "http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/DTD/xhtml-rdfa-1.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
      xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
      xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/"
      lang="en" xml:lang="en">
<head>
  <title>The Amazing Home Page of Joe Smith</title>
</head>
<body>
  <h1 property="dc:title">Joe's Home Page</h1>
  <div rel="foaf:maker">
    <h2 property="foaf:name">Joe Smith</h2>
    <div rel="foaf:depiction" resource="http://joesmith.org/images/jsmith.png">
      <img src="/images/jsmith.png" alt="Smiling headshot of Joe" />
      <p property="dc:rights">Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported</p>
    </div>
  </div>
</body>
</html>

In this page, the designer has explicitly stated that the image is a "depiction of the person who made the web page." Adding this information as RDFa can potentially benefit many applications. In the case of Yahoo!, we've designed our search index to extract and store this information.

RDFa support has already enabled some interesting new SearchMonkey applications. For instance, Creative Commons has recently started to deploy RDFa across the web in the form of copyright and licensing information. Every time a Creative Commons user selects a CC license, the generated HTML badge contains RDFa markup indicating the nature of the license. The Creative Commons Infobar uses this data to selectively trigger on pages that declare their license using structured markup:

To get started with RDFa:

• Learn the basics with the W3C RDFa Primer
• Dive into the details with the full RDFa Specification
• Join the community at the RDFa homepage
• Test your structured markup skills with the RDFa Distiller
• Filter on RDFa in Yahoo! searches with the searchmonkeyid:com.yahoo.rdf.rdfa parameter
• Start displaying RDFa to millions of users with the SearchMonkey developer tool

Evan Goer
Yahoo! SearchMonkey Team