Spent yesterday at OpenTech 2005. A mixed day, some pretty good stuff, other stuff that was not so much fun. Things I found interesting:
- OpenStreetMap. Mapping the UK using Satellite photos and GPS points. To provide an open source map in a country where most of the maps are Crown Copyright
- Ewan Spence‘s Media Hacking Introduction. Get 5 people all with iPod Shuffles. Take the Shuffle, put them in a box, shake them up and see what you get back – hardware hacking. In this case no-one had identified their Shuffle, including the poor guy who’d put his PGP Private key on it :-o. It all eventually got sorted I think.
- Launch of backstage.bbc.co.uk as it came out of beta. Take BBC content feeds (news, weather, TV programms etc) and remix them as you see fit. This is slowly becoming available for programme content as well as information. My favourite – the difference spotter for BBC News page, from Mathew Somerville.
- Jeremy Zawodny‘s overview of an Open Future.
- The fast runthrough of spacehijackers modus operandi, (a seemingly last minute replacement). Their next project – tracking Charles Clarke‘s every movement.
