Last year’s event was simultaneously held in various countries, and I sort of liveblogged the experience. It was a great day, but the “worldwide” aspect was a let-down, with the last session of the day being wasted on watching a live video stream from the states. So that’s been sorted, and this year the events are staggered out. It also looks like the London even is going to be huge – it’s being held at Wembley!

The day before I’ll also be attending the Geo Developer Meetup at Google’s London office, where there’s going to be a couple of geo-specific talks and maybe a beer or two with fellow KML fans. I’m also hoping to find an API developer who I can bend the ear off, regarding my unresolved Google maps API issue.

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.

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.

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”.

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.

Alex and I were the first speakers on, talking about Google Sightseeing and how we’ve tried to promote it. We enjoyed giving the talk, and most of the feedback described it as “entertaining” so I think it was a success.

We were followed by the much more useful Meri Williams, who explained the key points of Project Management and her essential toolkit for a web developer.

After the break there was a run of shorter talks starting with Tony Farndon, explaining why we should try out social web browser Flock. I’d previously seen Tony talk at BarCamp but this time he demoed a Web Snippets sidebar, which seemed very handy. I’m currently running one of the Nightly Builds which (so far) is working well.

Next up was Andy Cavers’ entertaining demo of Edinburgh Menus. I was very impressed by his manual Geocoding, which sounds like a lot of effort but allows for very natural search terms such as “Indian restaurants near the New Town”. Andy recently broke his arm so the release has been delayed, but it’ll certainly be a great service when launched.

Brian Suda gave a quick explanation of Microformats, which unfortunately got overtaken by a heated debate on if the abbr tag should be used for geo location. I could see the argument that the microformat was not really a correct usage of the tag, but the alternative method, putting the lat/lng in plain text and then setting display:none on the surrounding div, is just as messy. I’m still debating which method to use when I (finally) implement Microformats on Google Sightseeing.

John Sutherland then planned to give a talk on “The Business Argument for Web Standards”, but based on what he heard the previous day had since decided there was no such thing. His very short talk was entertaining none-the-less when he admitted “It’s all shit”.

Another break and we were into the final full length talks for the day. Firstly Dan Champion talked about his community book review website Revish, which he recently launched. There’s only a couple of reviews on the site at the moment, but he’s built a great platform so I expect it will take off quickly.

Lastly we heard from Tom Griffiths who, along with his team, have created Groopit: a social organisation website. The idea is a simple one but I think it could certainly be a big hit, especially with the younger internet crowed. I was also very glad to hear that the development is being supported by the University of Edinburgh (where I studied).

The whole Refresh event was recorded, but unfortunately there was only one lapel mic. And I kept dropping it. Therefore I doubt they’ll be much to hear from us on the final Podcast, but I would recommend having a listen to the other speakers.

If you too are a Web Professional working in Scotland then make sure you join the Google Group to hear about future events.

Technorati: refreshedinburgh

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.