Web Lego And Format Glue, aka Get Yer Mashup On

Another week, another presentation… I dunno about death by Powerpoint on the audience side, but even though I’ve started finding ways of reusing slides, it still takes me forever and a day (well, 4-6 hrs), to put a slide deck together… One day – one day – I’ll have to produce a presentation I can just give over and over again… ;-)

Anyway, here are slides for a presentation I’m due to give tomorrow (Thursday) at the University of Portsmouth. The plan is for a 1 hr “lecture”, and a 1 hr hands-on workshop session. The slides are for the talk – but also set the scene for the practical activity…

So what’s the practical? (For anyone reading this in advance of attending the session, I suggest you get yourself sorted with accounts for Google/Google Spreadsheets, Yahoo/Yahoo Pipes and IBM/Many Eyes and Many Eyes Wikified.) As time is tight, I suggest the best way in is to just try recreating some of the demos shown in the presentation above, and then going from there…. A good alternative would be to start working through this intro to Yahoo Pipes:

For the more adventurously minded, looking through the pipework category on this blog might provide a little more inspiration…

If it’s Google Spreadsheets hacks you’re after, searching for Google spreadsheet import formula should turn up some example posts…

Many Eyes and Many Eyes Wikified demos can be found by search for “Many Eyes”

For treating Google Spreadsheets as a database, here’s the Guardian Datastore Explorer, and here’s half a how to about using it.

NB there are are actually two ways of using a Google Spreadsheet as a database: form a third party page via a query API; and within a spreadsheet using a =QUERY() formula;

JQuery you should be able to find, but here are a handful of Javascript visualisation libraries that you might also like to try out at some point…;-) To find my list of flash visualisation libraries, look at the URL and use your initiative…

I was hoping to put together a couple of rather better structured self-paced workshop examples, but I’m afraid I’ve run out of time for today…:-(