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.

This weekend was SemanticCampLondon (alt) – a grassroots conference of semantic web developers.

Semantics is all about meaning – and the idea of the “semantic web” is to use techniques that add greater and greater meaning to web content. The intention is for computers – as well as humans – to “understand” something of the content, allowing them to make associations with related content and to present options to the web user based on those associations.

When web developers agree about standard ways to add semantic meaning to content, then some pretty amazing things become possible.

Tom Morris and Daniel Lewis did an excellent job of pulling the event together. It seemed to me that they acted as a bridge between developers who approach the Semantic Web from quite different angles. There was a spectrum of perspectives and some tangible synergy taking place…

Niche TV

On a whim, I started using Yahoo Live to stream live video of the conference from my webcam. The service launched last week and is so easy to use – just plug in the webcam and “Go Live”.

It was pretty effective. There were viewers from different parts of the world tuning in, asking questions and educating each other on the fine points of the technologies being presented. In this way, something of the event spread beyond the confines of London. I will try to encourage a handful of people to stream video from next month’s BarCampBrighton…

Compound Microformats

For my session, I put together an interactive demo of Compound Microformats – a way of combining simple building blocks of HTML, so that their combined semantic meaning becomes greater than the sum of their parts:

(Image from Microformats wiki)

We talked about people innovating on new patterns for combining microformats. We also discussed whether software that understand microformats should consider the configuration of compounds, to glean something more of the semantic meaning intended by the coder.

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What’s RSS?

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RSS Feed Readers

• Google Reader is a pretty handy online reader
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Any other recommendations? Feel free to share them in the comments…