So, I went to opentech 2008 yesterday. There was quite a lot of exciting stuff going on there, and I got to see quite a few people I know !

Most interesting speaker I hadn't seen before was the somewhat legendary Danny O'Brien talking about the formation of the open rights group and his "Living on the Edge" presentation.

I also got to meet Ben Goldacre, whose work at his Bad Science blog I admire alot.

Lunch with Jon Lim and Tom Morris and some others was great.

The most interesting thing at the conference for me was getting more information about show us a better way, which I became aware of in the last week or two. This is an initiative by the Power of Information Taskforce. They've gotten lots of sources of data from different parts of government, and made them available for people like myself to make mashups with. The most interesting data set to me was the London Gazette - a sample set of which was available as zipped XML, but there is an ongoing project to make the current site include RDFa, which Jeni Tennison and John Sheridan are working on.

Also, John mentioned the Public Sector Information Unlocking Service, which is a service to help people get information in the right formats or with the right licensing where they're entitled to it. It's really good to see government slowly catching up with providing data for re-use.

Interestingly, they also have a prize fund available to help build ideas (of which there already a large number !).

In the evening, I had the pleasure of eating at Strada with a bunch of people including Rain, Ian Forrester, Emma Persky, Tom Morris, Jeni Tennison, coldclimate, David McBride, Glyn Wintle, Sheila Thomson and some others, which was a perfect end to the day (and the less mentioned about having to sleep for three hours in my car at Fleet services on the way home, the better.)

Photo courtesy of "rooreynolds" on flickr ( http://flickr.com/photos/rooreynolds/2640334628/ ) creative commons