The Venture Skills Blog

So now more or less fully restored Hackday I thought I would introduce a few of the more interesting concepts that were being banded around the event some of which are relevant to search engines and online presence. However before getting to anything interesting I thought it was discussing some of the under pinning technologies.

Geo RSS

RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts. An RSS document, which is called a "feed," "web feed," or "channel," contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with their favorite web sites in an automated manner that’s easier than checking them manually. source: wikipedia

Georss is an extension to the standard rss which provides additional location awareness tags in their simplest form these are

<geo:lat></geo:lat>
<geo:long></geo:long>

Yep that’s longitude and latitude so now an RSS node can be given a geographical location but why would you want to do this?

Yahoo amongst others have been busy adding georss to a range of products and services including maps and Flickr both are great examples of what can be done.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sorry I’m a day late guys darn sleep thing caught up with me, just a few things to say on Hackday in london this year and then the blog will return back to normal. Hackday was fantastic and a big big thankyou to the BBC and Yahoo teams, all those people in red tshirts (quick not to the organisers “red tshirts” have you not watched any scifi?) indeed thanks to BT and CISCO for providing the network well most of the time…
Read the rest of this entry »

After showing you our amazing non computer hack it is only fair we allow you explore it fully via our very nifty API (Pipes version might come soon)

This is quite a complicated process so pay attention,
Read the rest of this entry »

Hackday has not quite gone as well as I suspect some had planned, in case you hadn’t noticed
the UK has been suffering rather nasty weather and this descended on Alexander palace with a series of lightning strikes, now you might think a large building with a really large aerial on top of a hill would be use to such strange activity but you would be wrong. An interesting side effect of the strike was the opening of the fire vents in the roof can you tell what happened next?
Read the rest of this entry »

So the blow by blow commentary went out of the window about the time of the Lightning strike on the building… Read the rest of this entry »

New Geo Services
Yahoo development team,

Mor Naaman
http://developer.yahoo.com/yrb

Geo Api mobile
Demonstration of Yahoo maps and flickr but unlike the previous session this is not pulling the pictures but mearly the number of times a location is mentioned. The name of the locations on the map font sizes was based on the number of times its been photoed, he then went on to demo the same technique in London integrated with photomontage which changed based on location.

Read the rest of this entry »

Session 2 is on the sofa’s as opposed to the main stage, lots of apologetic people in red T-Shirts sheepishly avoiding the lack of internet (though to be fair I’m up) the sofa are somewhat dark but comfy!

Read the rest of this entry »

Creating a BBC News widget Session 1

Kent Brewster
http://www.kentbrewster.com/bbc-widget/
Read the rest of this entry »

So its now 8:20 AM I have been on a high speed train (wireless internet!) nearly an hour heading for Hackday 2007, I’m really looking forward to the event which is being hosted by the BBC at Alexander palace. With the wireless internet at the event and through the power of power blogging hopefully I will be able to bring you the various sessions I attend, along with a mystery guest who will also be in attendance so what am I looking forward to?

Read the rest of this entry »

With the launch of Adobe new AIR (Adobe Integrated runtime) and Google Gears it would seem the web is coming off-line, indeed you might have been surprised at launch of 2 similar applications a week apart in truth Google and Adobe have been collaborating on the data storage system used in both Gears and AIR (formally Apollo) since Apollo alpha release when it emerged it did not have any DB support.
Read the rest of this entry »