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…but I still need to decide for sure what I’m going to go and watch. Here’s what I’m really looking forward to, and the choices I can’t quite decide on just yet.

Day One, Thursday 9th October

Obviously I’ll be first second (sorry, she’s ahead of me) in line to see Kevin Rose talk on The Future of News, but the choices for the rest of the day are:

• Matt Webb talking on "What web design brings to products" or Blaine Cook (ex Twitter) and Joe Stump (digg) on how "Languages don’t scale"
• "The future of enterprise web apps" by Kevin Marks of Google or something on Dopplr by Matt Biddulph

After lunch I’m looking forward to seeing Ron Richards from Revision3 talk on how to bring Internet television to the masses. At 5:50 that afternoon Mike Butcher of Techcrunch UK has an interview with three new startups which looks to be fairly good.

Day Two, Friday 10th October

Early morning we’ve got something from Sun Microsystems titled "The Fear Factor: What to be Frightened of in Building A Web Application". After lunch I’ve got a couple of tough ones to pick:

• Something called "Beyond Google Maps" or Jason Calacanis from Mahalo talking about startups
• Cloud computing from Jeff Barr of Amazon Web Services or Meebo on Scaling the Synchronous Web

After a couple more talks, there’s a cosy little (ha, yeah right) chat with Mark Zuckerburg. You might have heard of Mark, he makes some tiny social networking site that nobody uses. And then… we have something a little bit special.

Diggnation!

Kevin and Alex by Andrew (Creative Commons licensed)

Yep, those two jokers are back here again. I am looking forward to this so, so much. Oh, and there’s a party afterwards as well. Smile.

If you’re going to be there, let me know – it would be nice to meet up with some similarly inclined people. If you’re not going to make it along, take a look at the timetable of talks and give me your opinion on what’s hot.

I’m really into my Google Maps at the moment. With the amount I’m using it, it’s easily my favourite Google service, except maybe Gmail. Or Reader. Or Analytics. Screw it, they’re all brilliant.

The latest creation comes from a service called map a list, which Lifehacker played with a month ago. I couldn’t think of a decent use for it myself, but someone pointed out that it would be fantastic for mapping customers who have signed up their details with a company. A massive advantage is that a business owner can immediately see whether handing out leaflets or flyers has had the intended effect. It works really nicely: link it to your Google account, select a spreadsheet to pull data from, link columns in the spreadsheet to address fields and… boom!

Here’s the service containing a bit of post code data (and with hindsight, I could have used it for my earlier post on mapping friends). Love it.

Spent half an hour this evening trying to think on what the deal with iTunes’ new Genius feature is… nobody’s totally clear on how it works, so I thought I’d half-heartedly check into whether it works better for people with a more mainstream music taste or not. Here’s the results from me pulling a few dozen random opinions from Twitter and checking them against Last.fm profiles. The x-axis is an arbitrary score I assigned based on how the Tweet sounded, and the y-axis is an “eclectic” score given by some service. I’m also doing something fun with tags, but don’t know where that’s going yet.

As you can see, it’s sort-of kind-of maybe conclusive, but nothing that’s going to wow anyone. The people satisfied with Genius tend to have a less eclectic score (more mainstream taste), if that makes sense.

If you want lend me a hand, and can be bothered, give iTunes Genius an overall "satisfaction score" of between 0 and 1. I’ll compare it against your Last.fm music profile (and please leave a link if I don’t know where to find it). This should really be automated, but I don’t have the time, motivation or know how to put it together right now. Cheers!

I’ll post something more substantial when I have something more substantial to work off. Shockingly.

I’m lucky to be going to the Future of Web Apps conference this October… and unlike last year, I’m there on a proper student ticket this time. That means I get to go see talks from the likes of Digg, Google, Dopplr, Rev3, Twitter, Sun, Amazon, and Facebook (deep breath), as well as some from people you might have heard of before… Calacanis, Rose and Zuckerburg? I need to take a look through the schedule properly and think about which I’m going to go and see.

In a simply fantastic move, Carsonified (the gorgeous people organising it) just put 50 more student tickets up for grabs, so hopefully @avalentine can come along for a bit.

Put this map together this afternoon, and it scares me quite a bit. It shows the 25 teenage boys and one girl who have been killed inside the M25 since the beginning of 2008 (I think I got them all).

The Google Map is embedded, so click through if you can’t see it in an RSS reader. It was updated in 2009 with two, bringing it to a total of 28 (using a BBC News article), so it’s now complete.

View Larger Map

What the hell is going on?

No matter how much negative press the App Store is getting at the moment, I’m continually surprised by the availability (and quality) of the software you can get without spending anything at all. Trailguru is a MediaWiki (think software that runs Wikipedia) based site for tracking your running, hiking and snowboarding using GPS.

Sign up for an account on the site, install the application onto the latest generation iPhone (it does work with other devices) and hit “Start”. Location services in the phone grab your position every couple of seconds and record it along with the time you were there. When you’re done, the phone can post the trip directly to the Trailguru site, giving you a map like this. Everything on that page is automatically generated, including the very specific location information in the title.

Of course, it wouldn’t appeal nearly as much to me if there weren’t some nice stats features built in… something a little like my reports page. There’s an argument for not wanting to make this stuff so public, but it doesn’t bother me – getting all this for free means that sharing the data is worth it, in my opinion.

Just in case you were wondering what Asynchronous Javascript and XML really looks like in my mind:

Wish there was an HD copy of that ad lying around somewhere, it’s possibly my favourite of all time. Low res originally found there.

Since I first started teaching myself PHP as well as GET and POST methods back in May to throw together a scrobbler for Last.fm, I’ve wanted to update it to make it a little more… AJAX-y (as the kids are saying today).

Yesterday, I started looking into the best way to go about doing this and came across XMLHttpRequest for the first time. Sitting here reading about it, the grin on my face grew: this thing is absolutely perfect.

XMLHttpRequest is a JavaScript object that was created by Microsoft and adopted by Mozilla. You can use it to easily retrieve data via HTTP. Despite its name, it can be used for more than just XML documents, e.g. for JSON.

XMLHttpRequest (XHR) is an API that can be used by JavaScript and other web browser scripting languages to transfer XML and other text data between a web server and a browser.

My plan at the moment is to update the old scrobbler to make it all pretty and more friendly, but I keep on running into problems. For example, XMLHttpRequest only allows data transfer across a single domain name (I might not have described that well, but that’s the case). A search reveals that this is a fairly widely known thing/issue/whatever, and I’m looking at ways to get around it at the moment. As I’m on shared hosting and don’t have access to the server configuration, I’m going to try doing it via PHP. This LiveJournal post is also applicable to the situation.

Anyway, that’s the stuff I’m getting on with at the moment. Now, back to some coding…

I’m not doing much to counter the theory that there is too much free time in the world. Spent half an hour this evening going through my address book to create a Google Map of people I know, so without saying any more:

To be honest I am a little disappointed in how concentrated the pointers are around the UK. To clarify this map, it’s populated by people who I know well enough to know where their permanent address is. Not that I’m inviting myself to stay or anything…

How data changes over time is starting to really interest me – things like, for example, how listening habits can be graphed year by year to see changes, or the fantastic TweetStats, which gives a whole bunch of numbers and pretty bar charts. I would be very interested in recreating this map in four years time, or maybe even ten years time, and seeing what has changed.

Hope I haven’t forgotten anyone this time round.

Nope, I couldn’t think of a more descriptive title. Michael and I headed along to the Apple Store, Regent Street this afternoon to have a look at the latest (fourth generation) iPod nanos and new iPod touches. Here’s us having a quick go:

New iPod Nanos from Alex Muller on Vimeo. Also on YouTube.

Thoughts on the nano: gorgeous, slim, easily the best looking one they’ve made yet. "Shake to shuffle" is fun, the accelerometer is a nice touch, and it’s much more responsive than the classic has always been. While the screen is incredibly high resolution, it’s still not big enough to watch videos comfortably. Folks were worried about glare from the slightly curved screen; would like to point out that while reflection looks like it might be an issue in the video above, it’s really not bad when you’re looking at it straight on.

As for the touch: volume controls on the side are nice, but Apple have gone and made it too thin. We agreed that it felt slippery in the hand because of the size coupled with the curved steel case, and I almost dropped it the first time I picked one up. The software feels (and upon testing, actually is) faster than my iPhone 3G, significantly so. It’s running the latest version which hasn’t been shipped for iPhone yet, and that might have something to do with it.

Also, a quick note on the new Genius feature in iTunes 8. Shockingly, it does actually work as confirmed by Adam, Samarth [protected], burgesg, Will and now me. The thing it does really well is to grab music you like that would otherwise get ‘lost’ in the thousands of songs the majority of us have these days. Apple have absolutely hit the nail on the head with the way they’re describing it:

Genius playlists help you discover songs in your library you never knew you had — and rediscover forgotten favorites.

The overall hardware verdict is: save yourself £60 and get a nano in your favourite colour. Who needs a touch screen anyway?