Spent the weekend of 28-29 March 2009 at the excellent BarCamp London 6 at The Guardian offices in the swish new Kings Place building in London N1.

Here’s some of the sessions I participated in:

• ABC of the new guardian.co.uk – Nik Silver led a session, based on his Inside guardian.co.uk blog posts, looking the Guardian R2 web CMS and its development since the start of the project in 2006 using domain driven design and agile techniques. It was interesting to note the project is ahead of schedule and under budget.
• The guardian.co.uk API – Simon Willison demonstrated the features of the recently released guardian.co.uk Content API and Data Store.
• Making kick arse video navigation – Chris Jackson gave a presentation on the recently launched URIplay, an open media metadata aggregator. It’ll be interesting to see how this develops.
• The challenge of archiving the BBC’s content – Jonathan Tweed outlined preliminary work on bringing the Corporation’s vast archive online, building on the current /programmes and /music architecture.
• What I learnt organising a conference – Dominic Hodgson led a session on his experience of organising Think Visibility.
• The web of data and personal information – A thought provoking session on the semantic web by Mischa Tuffield.

Two days of varied and fascinating sessions, millions of Lego pieces, a great bunch of attendees and crashing overnight after beer and pizza resulted in a great weekend.

• Interesting Semantic Web links [Tom Scott] Tom asked on Twitter: “What are your top 5 URLs to explain to a Senior Exec type what the Semantic Web is and why it’s important?”
• Ten years [A List Apart] A celebration of the first decade of A List Apart – the site “for people who make websites”.
• Information architecture for audio: doing it right [Boxes and Arrows] “When using audio today [on the web], we face challenges similar to those of written text about a decade ago.”
• New NASA law allows for possible shuttle extension [New Scientist] The problem: “how to get crews to and from the space station between 2010-2011 (when the shuttle stops flying and NASA’s current contract to use Russian Soyuz spaceships runs out) and 2015 (when the agency’s Ares/Orion programme starts flying, maybe)”.

• Why the BBC removed Microformat DateTime patterns from bbc.co.uk… [BBC Internet Blog]
• DateTime design pattern [Microformats wiki]
• Gestures are the new multi-touch? [Ben Hanbury]
• Pies are great [Neil McIntosh]

• Warning to copyright enforcers: Three strikes and you’re out [Guardian]
• Hackers fan the flames of imagination at Mashed [Guardian]
• London SearchMonkey Developer Evening a great success [Yahoo Developer Network blog]
• Firefox download record official [BBC]
• The machine that copies itself [Guardian]
• Merger forms transatlantic union [BBC]

• TV consumers ‘do not understand’ digital message [Guardian]
• What does Microsoft really want? [All Things Digital]
• Yahoo’s executive tumult: can they make yogurt out of sour milk? [paidContent]
• Microformats and RDFa and RDF [BBC Radio Labs]

Went to the Yahoo SearchMonkey Developer Event last night.

Presentations by the developers of SearchMonkey was followed by a lively debate.

To quote from the SearchMonkey developer home page:

Using SearchMonkey, developers and site owners can use structured data to make Yahoo! Search results more useful and visually appealing, and drive more relevant traffic to their sites.

SearchMonkey seems to be one of few innovative developments in search over the past few years.

Looking forward to meeting again those from the London web development community I shared a beer with last night at this great event.

• Leaked report for NHS reveals full extent of Lorenzo slippage [Guardian]
• Awesome progress on video timestamping [mySociety]
• We’re all ops people now [Behind the Times]
• Plain old semantic HTML (POSH) [Microformats]
• One tonne ‘Baby’ marks its birth [BBC]

• Phoenix Mars Lander delivers soil sample to microscope [NASA]
• Yahoo! succumbs to the power of Google [Observer]
• I’m searching for Google alternatives [Guardian]
• Semantic web – why bother? [Tom Scott]
• How to publish linked data on the web [Freie Universität Berlin]
• BECTU’s response to PSB review [BECTU]

This is definitely excellent news!

Here’s some commentary on the announcement.