Mashup University Day 1

Here's a quick overview of Day 1 of Mashup University:

It seems many people didn;t show up after signing up. Please be careful if you sign up for a free unconference that you don't inadvertantly fall into this practice of skipping it. It's a shame since it's free, so many people put so much effort into the event, alot of food goes to waste, and it prevents someone else from attending because all the slots were filled. Thankfully the extra food ended up donated to a local shelter. Nice job David!

My day started with "Speed Geeking" where we saw small presentations on the following Mashups:
- mashup helping flood victims return to New Orleans called "After Katrina"
- AOL's Microformats
- IBM's "Enterprise Mashup tool" call QED (Quick and Easy Design)
- Amazon's Mechanical Turk (http://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome)
- LignUp - "a comprehensive IP communications system as well as a development platform that allows for quick and easy integration of voice and rich media into web applications and portals"

Following lunch was a presentation from AOL on "Microformats + DOM/AJAX to create mashups" by Kevin Lawver. This was interesting as I like the idea of setting more web hypertext into microformats that can make the web more structured and usable. A great example that was used was if you enter your events in microformats it becomes so much easier to cross refernce who else is going to the same event. Even the idea of microformats leading to imroved SEO made alot of sense. Kevin touched on how search engines are starting to understand these microformat. Hopeful this will truely lead to a more semantic web!

This was followed by a presentation on OpenAIM API and another presentation on Boxely. Both technologies worth looking into.