"It's a fucking web browser. It runs JavaScript a bit faster than other web browsers. That doesn't add up to a Windows killer.

...

People are calling Chrome a cloud operating system because it is a "platform for running web apps". It renders HTML and interprets Javascript, you know, like every fucking browser made since 1995. It's also got Google Gears built in. Great. I'll alert Tim Berners-Lee.
"

I'm *really* enjoying this guys writing.

So, Barcamp Brighton 3: absolutely fantastic. I'll scratch down a few thoughts before they evaporate:

• Really annoyed I missed Paul Silver talk on social networks and death: he brought it up at Tuttle last week and it sounded really great;
• Saw 2 talks on Selenium: I am going to be force-feeding this to our QAs until they burst;
• The last afternoon was appropriate New Age, given that we were in Brighton. Sunday closed for me with a yoga session with Jenny, meditation and GTD with Michael Rose, then a retrospective on the whole of Barcamp ably facilitated by Joh;
• The highlight was Rebecca talking on typography and design, which seemed to be the best-attended of the whole event (necessitating a mid-point shift in venue) and generated some really good debate afterwards. No Tantek, there is no repository of mobile typography. Yes Tantek, mobile fragmentation really *is* that bad.
• I also really enjoyed James' skit on Derrida and XKCD (so much that I forgot my promise of a good kicking if he ever mentioned Big D again), and the session which combined Thai OCR, DNA sequencing and minority African languages... but ended up being a database optimisation back-and-forth with the audience :)
• We decamped to a dark corner for the warts and all of Scrum - my talk on the last year at FP, which I may be repeating locally in the near future...

The only low point for me was the university food - but hey, out of everything that had to be organised and put together to bring an event of this scale to fruition, that's quite properly a long way down the list.

Already looking forward to the next one :)

The next few months will be interesting, I think. I've been asked to join the W3C Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group as a W3C Invited Expert. Specifically, I'm going to be contributing to the work of the Content Tranformation Task Force over the next few months.

If you've been reading this blog, you may know that the task force's attention is on a topic which interests me: over the last couple of years the deployment of transforming proxies within network operators has caused headaches for mobile content providers, and led to some quite fiery debate in various online forums. I'm looking forward to contributing a perspective from the corner of the mobile ecosystem where Future Platforms and our clients sit: independent software developers and content providers.

And - I appreciate these words may come back to haunt me - I'm really looking forward to seeing the work of a standards body from the inside. This is an aspect of the industry I've never experienced - other than through the artifacts the W3C etc. produce - and I'm curious to understand it better.

dConstruct 2008: The Jones/Biddulph Connection: Designing for the Coral Reef

I shut the laptop and just watched this one :)

dConstruct 2008: Steven Johnson: The Urban Web

Wants to start with "a rousing speech about intestinal disease".

London, 1854 - mired in its own filth. A Victorian city with an Elizabethan health structure, creating a smelly environment regularly swept by cholera, particularly in the summer. The smell was seen to be the cause: the miasma theory "all smell was the disease".

A public watering hole in Broad St gets contaminated. August 28, 1854 the first victim dies, and following on 10% of the neighbourhood dies in the next 2 weeks.

The story: John Snow works out that cholera is caused by filthy water and creates a map visualising deaths and their relation to contaminated pumps. Snow was a local physician who saw the concentrated outbreak in his community as an opportunity to identify the source of water and thereby prove his theory. He produced a diagram showing location of deaths plotting on a street map - though this itself was nothing new. But he also plotted on the map the area within which local residents would walk to get water - i.e. showing who would be affected by this pump. This disproved the link between miasma (smell) and disease.

Another significant individual: the Reverend Henry Whitehead (local vicar, 25-26yo) was well known in the neighbourhood as a "connector" figure. The pump was well known for its water quality (!) so Whitehead set out to disprove the theory through interviews with local residents, in the process often uncovering data supporting a link back to the infected pump and identifying individuals who had left the area. Whitehead eventually discovered "patient zero".

Snow & Whitehead has access to archives of open data, created in the previous century by William Far (sp?) and in a standardised format allowing consumers to identify deaths from cholera by geography. The idea behind this was that third parties might do interesting things with this data: Snow & Whitehead's first mashup!

Snow's incredible intellectual skill was the ability to move between levels - individuals up to the water system of all London - and draw conclusions. His map was "a social network of dead people" - those united by their disease.

Cholera never returned to London after 1866.

So, to the geographic web. The initial web kicked off in part because of having a standardised means of locating pages: the URI. Stacks can be built of top of this information only because you know where it is. We're now starting to get standardised geographic formats for data online (e.g. Google/Yahoo mapping APIs).

We have local expertise (knowledgeable sources of local information, spread via self-publishing in blogs), open standards for information, and visualisation/mapping tools.

We should be able to filer queries and provide results by "what people near me are saying". Yet in real life things that are said near to us matter more than things said further awau.

Demos "outside.in GeoToolkit" - to help authors Geotag their content properly, then examine it.

Another product: Radar. Takes a location, shows you what's happening in 1000ft from you, your neightbourhood, your city...

Amongst startups doing location products, there's a disproportionate emphasis on finding restaurants, local businesses, etc. Whilst this is valuable, there's a lot more to geography in everyday life.

Outside.in seems to provide a twitter-like feeling of connection to a location.

Geoweb could provide "eyes on the street" (quotes Jane Jacobs, "The Death and Life of American Cities" - sure I remember Adam Greenfield mentioning this at LIFT or PICNIC last year). These eyes, and the intelligence behind them, are what make cities great.

- snow go ethno

- what geo formats?