Hackday London

Thank you to everyone that came along to hackday and made it a very special event for everyone involved. It was quite a rollercoater ride.

In between the lightning bolts and outages of wireless, 73+ hacks and prototypes were created by the 400+ crowd of hackers, developers and designers. The prototypes ranged from Hacked! A live conference game involving yellow post-it notes and Google Smite which poked fun at the lightning bolts on the Saturday morning. To a real virtual blimp simulated on Y! Maps and Coke Mentos rocket ship with some great pictures.

We're planning to go through the range of hacks and see which ones could be developed further. Looking at the long list of hacks there certainly was some fantastic hacks including the winner of the BBC prize - BBC Nwsr 24.

While at Hackday a couple of extra sources were released into the wild along with the wild west/playground servers. But expect to hear more about those in following posts.

Oh about 5000 load of the pictures can be found on flickr using the tags Hackday, HackdayLondon or Hackday07

Chris Valance from BBC Pods and Blogs interviewed a lot of hackers and has made the audio interviews available for all to hear on blip.tv.

Hackday caused quite a stir not just in London but also in the blogosphere and media spaces.

Even BBC News wrote,

Web developers are gathering in London for the first BBC/Yahoo hackday. The free-form event aims to show web developers how to get more out of the data feeds and interfaces the two organisations make available. Those attending will be encouraged to play around with the technology to see what kind of innovative applications they can produce over the weekend.

On-hand will be developers from the BBC and Yahoo to provide advice about how best to use the technology.

On the blogosphere Josh Brain summaries most of what happened,

Lightning struck (twice!).Rain followed.Submarines mobilized.Tomatoes flew.Yahoo knitted.Dr. Who descended.Werewolves prowled.Rabbits flagged semaphore.Blimps flew (kind of). And friends, much code was hacked.

The Ten word review says,

God produces amazing hack that almost electrocutes 400 internet geeks. - isofarra

and

Like a slumber party for nerds, but without any makeovers - katemonkey

Back to the press, the Guardian wrote a small post

But the concept was simple: get a bunch of geeks in a room, give them goodies and assistance from some of the people behind the Yahoo Developer Network and BBC Backstage, and let them build what they like.

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