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Last night James (the Oxford branch of Google Sightseeing) did a very quick, but thoroughly entertaining, presentation about Google Sightseeing at this month’s Oxford Geek night. You can watch the 5 minute video of his Micro Presentation in mp4 format directly via this link.

Oxford’s premier tech event returns tomorrow night, in the form of Oxford Geek Night 4.

Building on the success of the previous events the night is set to feature many excellent talks on a range of geeky topics including Web frameworks, MythTV and Perl.

I’ll also be giving a short “microslot” talk about Google Sightseeing where I’ll quickly show a couple of my favourite entries from the archives.

On May 31st Google held a Developer Day Conference in 10 cities around the world. I attended the London day and blogged the below text live from the event (with some later clarifications now added).

There were concurrent sessions throughout the day so I had to pick which ones to attend. You can see all the sessions on Youtube.

12.30pm: So, I’ve arrived at Google Developer Day 2007 London, typically late.

Ed Parsons, who is giving the Geo Keynote just said “Some people may be interested in using Google Earth for looking at topless sunbathers, but I prefer looking at planes”. I wonder if he was referring to the Google Sightseeing Top 10?

I was interviewed by a woman for their montage video of the day, but my comments were so heavily laden with plugs for GoogleSightseeing.com that they’ll probably not use me.

Now we’re having lunch ( I only just got here!). Google makes nice sandwiches, and there’s a smoothie bar.

Oh, I got goodies! A t-shirt, a mouse-mat, some “Goo”, a notepad, memory stick, etc. All Google branded of course. Don’t ask me what the Goo is.

My 1st Session: New Features of the Maps API

This talks is mostly going through the basics of the Maps API.

The first interesting tidbit is that you’ll soon be able to embed Adsense within your embedded Google Map. So advertiser’s sponsored placemarks will appear on your map page, and you’ll get revenue, just like any other kind of Adsense.

Google Mapplets look very easy to create, I’ll certainly be creating one of those when I get a chance. Although I do think the various ways of generating and embedding maps and KML are getting very confusing. Would there be much need for Mapplets if everything was indexed KML?

My 2nd Session: Google Earth & The GeoWeb

This talk is mostly just going through KML tags and the things you can do with it. Of course, the speaker is using a Space Navigator to demonstrate Google Earth.

An interesting tidbit: the newly released (yesterday) KML 2.2 has author tags, so you can get attribution on your KML when it’s included in Google searches.

My 3rd Session: Maps API Challenge Thingy

I don’t think I was meant to be in this session but I got lost. Basically, we had to build a maps interface against teams at other Developer Days around the world.

It took up a fair chunk of the day, but I did win myself a SpaceNavigator.

I haven’t noticed it announced anywhere else, but apparently UK geocoding was supposed to be added to the Google Maps API by today. It will apparently be available very soon.

The End: Keynote Speech

We’re watching a live keynote speech which is going on in California. There’s very few people in this room… I wonder if they’ll announce anything.

So, we’re watching the streamed keynote, mostly recaps at the moment. Looks like Frank at Gearthblog is also liveblogging the keynote.

First product announcement: Mashup Editor, which sounds like Yahoo Pipes. He’s showing us how to build such a mashup, but the feed isn’t high resolution enough for me to make out what the code looks like. Sounds simple enough though.

He’s talking about Google Gadgets now. The second announcement is Mapplets, even though they were launched the other day.

He’s talking about Google Gears now, which allows you to use your Google online applications offline. I missed the talk earlier today but I’m told it was very impressive. Gears runs on major browsers (although I read somewhere that for Safari you’ll need a nightly build) and was in a collaboration with Adobe, Mozilla and Opera.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin has arrived: “I’ve made loads of money, wohahaha!”. Not really, he was suggesting caution and responsibility when using tools. Or something, I wasn’t really listening.

I think I’m going to stop there, this is starting to turn into a Crazy Apple Rumors keynote live blog (which are always very funny).

Afterwards

After the event Google treated us to Drinks an canopies in a bar across the road, which was nice of them. All in all, a very good day.

Geo-conference Where 2.0 has launched in San Jose, where all the big players in everything geo will be giving presentations and launching new features.

Microsoft seem to be first out the gate with loads of new imagery for Virtual Earth, including Bird’s Eye coverage of London.

Google have also launched new imagery in the form of street level views for 5 U.S. cities. It’s similar to A9’s version, but with a much nicer interface.¹

Culminating with the end of the conference is the Google Developer Day, to be held in ten cities worldwide. Google will surely be launching a few new features at this event, whilst teaching all those in attendance how to best make use of their various APIs.

I’ll be at the London Developer Day, but unfortunately it’s too much of a trek for Alex to make it down from Edinburgh. So, if you are at the event and you see a man in a Google Sightseeing T-shirt please come and say “hi”.

This weekend Edinburgh was graced with Scotland’s first “proper” web conference: The Highland Fling. The speakers were all excellent, and gave me loads of ideas for things I’d like to implement in both my day job and night job. Stand-out talks were Mark Norman Francis on Graded Browser Support and Andy Budd on some of the best features we should be trying out from CSS3. Olly has a good write-up of the day.

The next day the tables were turned, and some of the speakers from The Highland Fling saw what Scotland had to offer at the Refresh Edinburgh conference. Matt Riggott and John Sutherland were the hosts, and Matt’s employers, Line had kindly offered up a fantastic venue. The room promoted a laid-back feel with Tennent’s artwork and a Tuk-tuk in the corner.

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After years of not much happening, there’s been a sudden surge of Web Development related events happening around Scotland.

The only proper web conference Edinburgh has had in the past was WWW2006, but the cost was stupidly prohibitive (£750 a person!) so I didn’t bother attending.

Now, over the next couple of months, there are at least 3 major events on my calender:

March 3rd - BarCamp
I’m still holding out for an invite to this year’s Foo Camp, but the “anyone’s welcome” un-conference of Bar Camp will be a good start.

April 5th - The Highland Fling
The Highland Fling is all about “Progressive enhancement” and has lots of big name speakers over the course of one day.

April 6th - Refresh Edinburgh
Refresh is about “refreshing all aspects of new media endeavours in and around Edinburgh”. There’s plans to hold an event the day after the Highland Fling where Scotland’s developers and designers can get together and get drunk.

Myself and Alex are planning on doing a short presentation about the technical underpinnings of Google Sightseeing at Refresh, so if you are near Edinburgh please come along and heckle us.