Tom Anthony

BBC News Map Mashup

Is 2006 the Year of the Mashup? I think not. Mashups are at the stage that DHTML was at before it matured into Web 2.0 - lots of bells and whistles, but little real meat. 2006 will see people acclimatise themselves to the principles and technology, and maybe the best thought out mashups will become established. But it will be 2007 that will truly be the Year of the Mashup.

Programmableweb.com currently tracks 979 mashups, and 269 APIs, and shows a rate of 2.7 new mashups per day, so mashups are obviously very popular, so what’s the problem?

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d.Construct 2006 is over and it seems a great deal of fun was had by all.

Lots of people have commented on the day as a whole, so I’ll save repeating what they have said. To read them check out Technorati or Aral Balkan has made a list.

Overall, I had an fantastic time down in Brighton, the presentations were both fun and informative and I had a great time at the after party, meeting some awesome people who I really hope to meet again.

An extra bonus of the day was I won a prize for the Morse Code message I left for the podcast. I won several books, provided by Apress, all of which will be very useful.

On a side note: The Mac to PC ratio was about 9:1, which was much higher than expected. I’ve always been an Apple fan, and worked for Ambrosia Software for a number of years before moving to the web industry, so it was great to see the glowing Apples everywhere I looked.

Technorati Tags: dconstruct06

If you’ve been listening to the d.Construct podcast prior to the Brighton based web conference, you’ll know that Jeremy Keith got a strange Odeo message he pondered might be morse code.

Well, that one wasn’t, but Jeremy appealed for more Odeo messages, so I thought it would be fun to send him a real one.

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So, the 2006 d.Construct conference is very almost here.

I’ve seen various other posts about the conference. But they seem to be missing the most important aspect of the conference…

The geek golf tournament!

Yes, this is incredibly exciting - there is a geek golf tournament at the conference after party (sponsored by Snipperoo).

My schedule for tomorrow actually looks like this:

9am: Practice Mini Golf.
4pm: Drive to Brighton.

To prove I’m not kidding, tomorrow I’ll be uploading some photos of my practice.

Update: Here are a couple of photos of my golf practice!

Technorati Tags: dconstruct06, dconstruct

If you want to get into search engine optimisation/marketing (SEO / SEM) then you need to quickly accept this fact: You are going to read. A lot.

You maybe are not in charge of 10 sites, do not have a long list of clients whose websites you work on, but are simply trying a DIY approach to getting your site better ranked in the search engines. However, when you search for “How do I rank better in Google?”, you are likely overwhelmed by the amount of information; SEO companies, blog posts, articles, forums, news articles and more.

So I’ve compiled this list of articles in the hope that at least some of budding students of search will find it. This is by no means all you need; SEO is ever evolving and you need to keep up to date (there are plenty of good blogs to help with that, which is another list for another time), but this list of 10 resources that will get you off the ground.

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