YLiveGroups: Live Video at BarcampBrighton2

Madhava — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 13:09:00 +0000

This weekend is BarcampBrighton2, a grassroots technology conference organised and run by the participants. Over the last couple of days, we’ve been piecing together a special Greasemonkey userscript for the conference, which enables Yahoo Live users to broadcast live video as a group. We call it YLiveGroups.

» Install the script

We first used Yahoo Live at last month’s SemanticCampLondon and there was a great buzz of conversation from people who were watching from other countries, discussing the topics of the talks, asking questions and learning about the subjects.

For BarcampBrighton2, we’ll help people get broadcasting and we’ll use YLiveGroups to bring them all together. Viewers from around the world will be able to tune in and keep track of the many talks taking place.

Yahoo Live

Yahoo Live is an interesting new experiment. It makes it possible for anyone to create their own live video channel, available to anyone who cares to watch. As has been pointed out before, there is plenty of scope to increase its potential for social networking. YLiveGroups is our attempt to do just that with some rudimentary group functionality.

YLiveGroups

To use YLiveGroups, you will need to use the Firefox web browser, along with the Greasemonkey add-on. Then, install YLiveGroups and head on over to Yahoo Live.

At the moment, the only group available is BarcampBrighton2. However, we intend to develop the code so that anyone can create their own group. These groups could be used to tie broadcasts together at events, connect people around a single topic or simply bring together a group of friends.

Techie Details

In case you were wondering…

The userscript interacts with both the Yahoo Live API and our own simple YLiveGroups API. Our API uses XOXO microformat HTML documents to exchange data (as opposed to standard XML or JSON). The script then uses JQuery to interract with the XOXO documents and the web page that the user is currently viewing. Premasagar will be talking more about this in his presentation at Barcamp.

We’d love to work with other developers to take this project forward. If you’d like to get involved, or have any feedback at all, then please leave a comment here.

HackHUD

Premasagar — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 17:52:24 +0000

Well, this one didn’t get blogged yet… Back in June, we stayed up all night at the BBC / Yahoo Hack Day in London. The task was to combine data sources and build something experimental – and a little bit edgy.

We forged a script to enhance mainstream news sites (such as BBC News) with a layer of grassroots community content – from bloggers, photographers, and the like. The idea was to propagate the news and views from the streets, alongside mainstream media. The result: ‘HackHUD‘.

It’s a Greasemonkey userscript and it uses a number of Yahooey things (Pipes, YUI and Term Extraction), to display content from Flickr, Technorati and Newsvine.

We were clackety-clack on the keyboard, non-stop for over 24 hours. There were tears and laughter… and in the end, a prize.

» The HackHUD Project
» Install the script (quickly, before the BBC redesign their site ;)

Changelog