Use like this:

$(selector).youtubeUploadsAndFavorites();

Download from GitHub here: https://gist.github.com/4052752

My first idea for this was to use Yahoo! Pipes to combine the two feeds, which would have been better (better cacheing, etc.), but as I’ve found is often the case, the service was too slow, flakey and cumbersome for me. I ended up with something working only to find that all the module previews stopped working. Oh well.

I’ll try to keep a record of the presentations as they go, wifi permitting…

15:50

Emma announcing the winners! Five in each prize stream… Was trying to cover write them all down and got lost when both our teams got through! Yeah!

Introducing the judges: Lily Cole, Conrad Wolfram, Aral Balkan, Jonathan Luff, Thomas Grassey.

All the hacks have been uploaded to the YRS site – browse for them here.

Each team had 3 minutes to present with another 3 minutes for Q&A.

I wish I’d Thought of That stream

Clever Wherever – geolocates you and tells you if they are near a crime or accident hotspot, to help them avoid these hazards. To make it attractive to teenagers, they also tell you about fun points of interest near you. A six-person team, including two well-spoken little girls who delivered a pitch with more confidence than many adults I’ve seen.

Digital Ticket – digitaltick.it – a prototype for a train ticket carried on your mobile. Also carries live information about your journey, your aggregate travel data and finds people you know who are also in the station. It is a great idea that shows there is much more to the idea of digital ticketing than just QR codes.

Humap – http://www.github.com/Stansbridge/Humap – I saw this group earlier on. It is a great concept, making satnav directions understandable by including obvious landmarks, such as a churches or a Tesco.

TwitTone – two-person team – turns tweets into sounds, so you can listen to Twitter.

Alertify – two-person team – a notification service for upcoming books by your favourite authors, such as Katie Price. Uses Twilio and the Amazon API. Is thinking the idea could be used with any type of new release you want to know about.

Best Examples of Code stream

New Neighbourhoods – iPhone app to show you broadband speed, crime and schools information for your local area. They also made a web app, an Android app and a SMS interface. Blimey.

Postcode Wars – six-person team – take two postcodes and they battle it out. Compares house prices, crime, etc. across several categories. The app looks really nice. Mobile-optimised too.

A Nice Day Out – helps you find beaches to go to, and lots of photos and information about them, such as whether the water is swimable. They made use of the DEFRA API, but found it tricky, as you could only query by a square of latitude and longitude coordinates, and they wanted to query by a radius around the person. This involved a lot of complicated-looking maths.

Streets of London – Shoreditch Works team! – team of 5 – strategy game where you govern a London borough, adjust policy to raise money and make people happy, then try to win election campaigns to take over other boroughs. Very funny presentation that got a great response as they taxed the residents of Hackney into oblivion.

Marauder Map – marauder.me – Max and Lisa (and Ed in absentia) – app based on the mapp of the same name from Harry Potter. Signing in with the voice recognition API received a big round of applause. Loads of people signed in and were plotted on a map, and the map moves around as all the marauders wind their way to their destination. Great presentation. By the way, Max is 12 and Lisa is 11.

Code A Better Country stream

Closed Circuit TwitterVision – displays CCTV images tweeted by the Cheshire police of people they are looking for. Scrapes the pages the police put up and displays the images in a better interface.

Bike Safe – one-person team – to make cycling around the UK safer by showing you all the cycling accidents on a map. You put in a starting point and destination, and it will tell you how many crashes are on the route. You can adjust your route by dragging on the map, and the accident count is updated. He found that the data he wanted from the police needed to be altered because the accident IDs were longer than Google would allow him to use. This seems like good feedback for the police API.

World Wide Health – an educational site about the risks of smoking and alcohol consumption. Had a BASIC app embedded in the page to show you the stats for countries. There was a survey to fill in that affected the country stats. They showed a deeply funny video about smoking and a bottle-smashing Flash game. Oh, and an anti-smoking Flash game. Very prolific, very diverse, disconcertingly young.

Why Waste A Vote? – Shoreditch Works team! – a website to inform young people about the basics of politics and get them engaged with their local MP and voting on bills. Picked up on the idea of getting to youngsters before they can vote for real. Great response on Twitter and lots of interested questions from the judges.

City Safe – a game to test your knowledge of how to be safe when you are out of the house. Prevention by education. A three-person team. They mocked the game up in Scratch, which was very funny given the 8-bit style graphics. They also had a road safety mini-game made in Blender.

Best In Show stream

This stream had 6 minutes to present.

TruMPs – toptrumps.rosspenman.com – three people, Ross, Miles and Brandon – solving the problem of not knowing how MPs compare: Top Trumps using MPs. Some very lovely card-flipping animations using CSS3. They had to scrape some of their data, but part of it came from TheyWorkForYou. They had play-tested this with the MP for Carlisle. Also… Brandon, the 8-yr old third member of the team, built an Android version using Google App Builder, which is now in the Google Play store (Chums for Android). There was a cool little video to illustrate Brandon’s progress through the week. The judges loved this and played around at the end on Brandon’s iPad.

Bookify – five-person team called HyperText – a mobile site that helps you track your reading, gives you recommendations based on what you read, and shows you whether you can get it at your local library. Funky interface based on the idea of books stacked on top of each other. They wanted to recreate the discovery experience that you have in libraries.

Way To Go – wtg.dytry.ch – fixes the problem of badly designed products intended for disabled people by crowdsourcing what they themselves think about them. A mobile web app, which had a high-contrast mode for people who are colour-blind. They had some plans for the future which all sounded really useful, and I think this app is a brilliant idea that would help a lot of people. It shows the benefit of choosing to fix a problem that you are intimately familiar with.

Manchester Image Archive – this was great the first time round (Jack was presenting in Space 2 earlier) and it is still great. This opens up the whole idea of using crowdsourcing to add meta data to historical archives. This app lets you match up Google StreetViews with photos of Manchester drawn from the Manchester Archives. Jack then imagined an augmented reality app where you hold your phone up to a building and see what it looked like in the past.

SmartMove – a visualisation tool for comparing qualities of areas, such as primary schools or crime, and then finding a house to move into in that area. What makes this different is that you can rank the qualities to reflect your own take on social compromises. A very slick iPad app, written in Objective-C. They have released an API that the third member of their team used to create a web app.

11:25

Manchester’s MadLab are up first. The presentations are meant to be 3 minutes with 3 minutes Q&A. Apparently, Tina the compere is going to be a dragon about timing.

Who’s scraping medals? – a newly written scraper for country-by-country display of Olympic medals. Also, a Kinect hack to scan your body proportions and compare you to Olympic athletes! Strong message to Microsoft to improve their Kinect API.

Youtilities – youtiliti.es/projects/YouTilitilies/ – a local search engine for commonly-needed public utilities like toilets and payphones. Visitors can add their own suggestions.

Social Games – visualisation tool for IRC, with sentiment analysis. Also, a version of MineSweeper using Twitter followers as nodes and mines. Next, Olly talking about anti-social Twitter – a sort of Sensible Software zombie-killing game where the zombies are your Twitter followers. Much hilarity.

11:55

News Recommender – Joseph presenting – helps you see news that matches your interests. Grabs a bunch of RSS feeds, then you rate the items, and the system works out what you are into. Nifty tag cloud viz of the words you are interested in. That’s nice, good to see your behaviour analysed and reflected. Maggie Philbin asked why do it when other apps do it – “I thought I could do it better”. Impressive for a 1-man team. Also outputs an API of your recommendations.

Manchester Image Archive – Jack loves history. Wanted to do a “before and after” of the Manchester Image Archives, but found the old images lacked location info. So he wrote a program to extract street names from the photos. Uses Google Street View to find a view matching the old photo. Has a social rating system for the quality of the location matches. The output of lots of people using this could be an archive of 80k old photos with perfect location metadata. Very impressive app with obvious and powerful consequences, as well as an interesting new model for crowdsourcing improvements to archives.

LobbyMatic – http://www.toastwaffle.com/lobby-o-matic – getting young people involved in politics – lets you write to your MPs about bills and search for bills you are interested in. Two person team, 18 year-olds.

Danger Chorus – 3 people team – to raise awareness of endangered species by creating a sonic representation of how much peril the species are in, and providing information about the animals. Data from the ZSL London Zoo, WikiMedia, Google Maps. Whacky. Audio is definitely an under-used medium for communicating information. The audio was done in JavaScript, which is pretty cool.

TV Reminder – solving the problem of missing shows on TV you didn’t realise were on. Scrapes the Sky listings and sends you a SMS to alert you. Helps you find shows by aggregating all channels into a single list. A simple idea to solve an annoying problem. Strikes me that Sky and its competitors would please a lot of people by adding SMS alerts!

Wood Street Mission – Amy, 13, presenting – iPad app to raise awareness of child poverty in Manchester by letting you compare your own area’s child poverty stats with Manchester’s and encouraging you to donate if your area is better. If you want to donate items rather than money, there is a form to fill in to tell the Wood Street Mission about it. This was made as a mobile app because the charity already has a website. Apparently, the charity are hard to get in touch with to book a slot for dropping of donations, so this has genuine utility. Pretty smart for a 13-yr old!

12:35

Bump-o-matic – 5 person team – starts with pretty cinematic intro and demo video. It’s an Android app to detect potholes in a road when you are cycling and posts the location of the pothole to the web. In the Google Play store already. That was a frickin cool presentation. But does the app actually work?? Reality check: the 3-minute video took 5 hours to make and was most awesome. Video editing industry – watch out.

Project Space – I missed most of this as I was helping set up for our presentations, but a group of about 5 seven to ten year-olds took to the stage and got a hugely warm reception. Including this.

Shoreditch Works

(I am totally biased towards this centre, so apologies for any unfair coverage. Well, not really, they were both awesome and had very polished presentations.)

Streets of London – a strategy game set in a fictionalised London where politics has gone crazy and the only sane borough is yours, and you are the governor. You can change taxation and spending policy to raise money and/or happiness and then try to take over other boroughs with election campaigns.

Why Waste A Vote? – engaging young people with politics by providing basic information about politics and connecting them with their local MP. Shows bills in Parliament and lets you vote them up and down, as well as plenty of opportunities to tweet and share your opinions.

YRS Norwich

Rewired Olympics – yrs2012.benholloway.co.uk – a digital Olympics card game

Humap – Solving the problem of satnav’s giving you directions humans can’t understand because we don’t know all the road numbers or names. They tried to add landmarks into the directions to make them more understandable. Very cool idea. Data from CultureGrid and other point of interest data from satnav’s, and Google Places.

CagedFish

Kivu – Kivu.co.uk – an app to find where your friends are and find points of interest around you. They had thought through the privacy problems of taking people’s location data. Their approach is to only store it for 30 minutes or until you log out. They had Kivu t-shirts!

University of Edinburgh

Fringe Dodger – two-person team – helps you avoid Edinburgh Fringe Festival crowds by showing you a heatmap based on the capacity of venues and the start and end times of the festival shows. They found the Fringe API hard to work with because they needed to supply a proof of concept before they would be granted access to the data. Which is a bit chicken and egg.

Song Magic – two-person team – a Spotify app plus a barcode scanner to let you scan CDs while you’re out and have them appear in your Spotify inbox. Genius.

Innovation Martlesham

Outrunners – a cops ‘n’ robbers game using crime data to set the difficulty. Written on top of Unity, an engine for 3D video games. Team of three ten(ish) year-olds.

Restaurant Locator – one young chap presenting, three in the group – helps you find restaurants with available tables. Used an animated demo. He showed wireframe designs for the website and a basic site. Great idea though.

CyberDuck

Crime Viewer UK – yrs.time4tea.net – two guys – mobile web app to show you crime statistics near your location. They talked about their process – they used Kanban-style development using cards.

13:50

That’s your lot! More coming after lunch, when it’s the finals. Circa 1 hour from now.

After my friend Nick Webb said he was impressed by how much content had been added since launch, and that he’d spent 5 hours on a Sunday night eating it all up, I thought it was about time I had another look. Immediately, I realised that the site is a great example of an interactive web app, where the design of the experience has been responsible for the great reactions people are having.

I couldn’t help but note down a few things as I was thrashing my way through the introductory course…

Great bits of experience design:

• playful intro to the editor from the word go (and the immediate cursor focus on the console), resulting in your first badge, which hooks you in
• letting you get started without creating an account (my name is “New User”!)
• …and then making me register once you’re into the swing of things and want to keep going
• building up when you’re stuck through hints and then forums seems like a good idea
• the warnings in the editor is helpful (if a bit keen to tell me I’ve written invalid syntax when really I’m just typing)
• it’s clever that it can test you on syntax even if that bit of the code is not executed in the console – so the exercises themselves can get pretty “non-trivial”
• you can move to sections you haven’t completed (a la Angry Birds), which is cool since you are trying to build up a body of understanding, and earning points gives you a reason to want to hit 100% complete
• the challenges are like exams; the decision to show the % complete on the Courses menu prods you to want to complete them

Not so great bits of the experience:

• calling me a “User”
• switching back to “Section” from “Scratch Pad” leaves the console at the top, not the bottom where you were; moving to next exercise doesn’t keep console at bottom either, which just means you have to move the scrollbar down
• completing last exercise in a section doesn’t give you a link in the console to take you to the next section, which is inconsistent; nor does getting to the end of a course doesn’t present you with any direction of where to go to continue
• it would be really helpful if they captured infinite loops e.g. while(true) …

• you can type in the console whilst it is loading
• the console loading bar can hit full without it completing (looks like failing to handle an error in jsrepl.js)
• CTRL+Enter doesn’t work (on mac at least), despite claiming to be a keyboard shortcut

Not sure about these bits of experience:

• is auto-save of versions good or superfluous? I’m not sure why I’d use that

A few thoughts on the quality of education:

• some of the answers to puzzles are loose e.g. “Saturday” being accepted instead of “Sunday”, but that seems a good thing
• some of the looseness is on the logic e.g. accepting “less than or equal to” when you’ve been asked for just “less than” – that is probably not such a good idea
• you can also cheat, e.g. if asked to do “i–” twice and you just say “i=0″, it works; this also seems bad and unnecessary given that the editor seems capable of marking your syntax
• the explanation of “var” as something you have to accept to declare variables seems a bit pointless without any understanding of scope, which is when it starts to be useful
• some concepts e.g. “&&” introduced without the same level of explanation as others (but I guess a bit of a challenge is no bad thing)

To handle, the Chromebook (the UK gets the Samsung Series 5) is chunky, lightweight and quite a bit slimmer than my 11″ MacBook. To browse upon, things move along smoothly (until you hit 1080p HD video or Angry Birds) and the little keyboard changes, such as a search key that opens a new tab, are kinda fun. Sadly, the whole thing feels experimental, since several of the Chrome extensions I tried don’t work properly, nor do some websites. As examples, the LoveFilm website wouldn’t stream films; the Chrome store let me install IETab, but then it wouldn’t run (no IE, right? For a moment, I thought they had conjured some magic).

I do try to keep all my documents, code, email and the rest on the web, so I figured I’d be in a good place to adopt a web-only computer as a lightweight, portable all-purpose machine. And I would be willing to give the Chromebook a go. But not for £400. And here’s the big problem – £400 buys you a lot of laptop these days. I figured I’d pick up a Chromebook for a couple of weeks and try it out – if it bombed, I could always return it. However, true to form, PC World’s legendary customer service team were unable to give me a straight answer about their returns policy. So I’m still on the fence.

Incidentally, since the Chromebook has 3G built-in, this makes it, in a connectivity sense, awesome. It actually has a SIM slot, so you can stick in whatever SIM you like. This is a part of the future Apple are most definitely not making a big noise about. I don’t think a hardware manufacturer is going to overcome all the necessary hurdles to make a machine that can roam on 3G, and roam affordably. However, mobile operators and specialist firms (WorldSIM, abroadband) probably can, so letting people put their own SIM in your device makes a lot of sense.

Fortunately, from the point of view of amateur photographers and professionals all over, Twitter looks like it is maintaining its existing copyright policy, whereby the submitter maintains copyright over any content.

The full terms page is here, but here are the salient parts, with comment:

“You retain your rights to any Content you submit, post or display on or through the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed).”

You keep your rights over your content, but as far as the use of it on Twitter goes, you don’t have a say.

So far, so straightforward. The next part I am quoting in full:

“You agree that this license includes the right for Twitter to make such Content available to other companies, organizations or individuals who partner with Twitter for the syndication, broadcast, distribution or publication of such Content on other media and services, subject to our terms and conditions for such Content use.

“Tip – Twitter has an evolving set of rules for how ecosystem partners can interact with your content. These rules exist to enable an open ecosystem with your rights in mind. But what’s yours is yours – you own your Content (and your photos are part of that Content).

“Such additional uses by Twitter, or other companies, organizations or individuals who partner with Twitter, may be made with no compensation paid to you with respect to the Content that you submit, post, transmit or otherwise make available through the Services.”

This is one place to signal caution – whilst you do retain the rights over any imagery, Twitter are allowed to make use of it to their advantage, and you’re not entitled to claim a slice of any pie.

In case you don’t know Airbnb, Brian describes the company as “a community marketplace for space” – essentially it’s a way for people to rent out apartments, bedrooms, castles, private islands…

One of the most interesting things from the video was the description of Airbnb’s strategy for getting press coverage during the 2008 Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Denver. Brian and friends spotted an opportunity, since there were an expected 80k visitors and only 28k hotel rooms. The challenge was how to get CNN to cover them.

Their story pans out something like this:

• local Denver bloggers were writing about the problems of fitting all the convention attendees into the city’s hotels
• Airbnb went to Google News and typed in “DNC Housing Crisis” to find the bloggers
• Airbnb wrote to all the bloggers saying there was a new way for people to list their bedrooms for rent – Airbnb
• Denver bloggers started to write about Airbnb
• Airbnb contacted the Denver local news to say what they were doing
• local news Googled Airbnb and saw that people were writing about them and did a story about them
• regional news (Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News) saw that local news were writing about Airbnb and did a story about them
• CNN were following keywords about the DNC and saw that everyone was writing about Airbnb and did a story about them
• BOOM

Incidentally, Airbnb almost became a cereal company, launching “Obama O’s” and “Cap’n McCain’s” when they were stuck for traffic and cash.

I see the operator pick up two cardboard cups. They have a terrible pattern on them. So I say,

“Sugar in one please”. I’m hedging my bets. “Brown.”

The ground coffee comes out of the hopper without a whiff. There is a light tamp, if you can call it that, when it comes at a 15 degree angle from a small plastic roundel, attached at thorax height to the hopper. I suspect a force of 20N at best.

Now it starts.

The portafilter is screwed in place, the cardboard cups are put straight under the nozzles and the button is pressed - the little button, which could have served admirable duty not ten seconds ago, flushing tepid water from the front of the boiler tube – the little button, with the two silhouettes of shot glasses on it, trying its best to remind the operator which vessels to extract espresso into.

“How many shots do you put in your cappuccino?”, I ask, smiling.

“It’s up to you”, is the reply, as the operator picks up a dirty milk jug.

“Oh. Well, how many normally?” I pursue.

There is a pause, before the operator says,

“We normally fill half coffee, half milk”. This starts a shiver of panic.

The steam valve is turned and the banshee is unleashed. The wail is awful to hear, high-pitched one moment, low and gurgling the next. I wonder how many times this same, poor batch of milk has been exhaled. Steam rises and there is a smell.

The pour passes by without incident. The operator’s back is turned and I am staring at my croissants. I am given the two cardboard cups with thin, white plastic lids, on a recycled cardboard tray.

I like to take my first sip from a cappuccino with the lid off, and cover my tongue in silky milk foam. I take the lid off the coffee with the sugar in it. There is a surprisingly gentle-looking white layer, powdered with brown. I sip.

I can’t be sure which hits me first – the bitterness or the scalding heat. As my eyelids close in recoil, I think about saying something, but of course, I don’t. I put my £3.80 down on the counter. Ten minutes later, I drop both cardboard coffee cups into a nearby bin.

I really like what Sauce are doing – amongst other things, they automatically video the tests, and they’re making it really easy to use their hosted service from behind your company firewall. What I didn’t like up until now was their pricing model. Sauce offered a 30-day free trial, which one would think would be ample to figure out whether you could get value out of their service.

However, this “free trial” model misses the mark for me. I find that my interest in (and therefore my signup to) a new service is piqued several weeks or months before I am actually in a position to use it. And once I do start to test something new out, my usage is faltering and tentative to begin with, only ramping up once I have accrued experience, reflected on it and figured out how the service fits in with everything else I use.

Big congratulations to Sauce, then, for twigging that there is another way to bag new customers – offering a small, but effective amount of their product, which you can use at your leisure. You could call this the “drug dealer” model.

The drug dealer model makes a lot of sense for online services, where the incremental cost of adding a new account is minimal, and the cost of usage is easily measured. In Sauce’s case, their free account comes with a cap of 200 minutes of testing per month – easily enough for me to run a few tests, see if they help my development cycle and build up the use of the tool – at which point, I expect I’ll be hooked.

I am not saying I had anything to do with the decision to offer a capped free account, but… http://twitter.com/#!/hugs/status/31074705414819841