On Saturday, Andy and I headed up to Alexandra Palace to attend Mashed - a two day hack-o-thon, sponsored and organised by BBC Backstage.

The day started with a whole suite of talks. We saw presentations about Yahoo!'s YUI, SearchMonkey, and FireEagle, as well as BBC Research's Kamaelia project (which allegedly makes writing concurrent applications 'as easy as building lego'). There was also a talk from Lonely Planet (prop. BBC Worldwide) about how they are opening up their APIs. However, the most interesting, if the most speculative, talk came from a NASA employee about how they are planning to create autonomous self-organising nanobots to explore space and other planets!

Then, after a quick lunch, it was over to the core business of hacking. For our project, Andy and I reworked the Journey On GPS Doodle codebase to create a game of realworld Tron. For this, I hooked up a laptop displaying Google Earth's view of Ally Pally to the massive screen, and then sent two GPS-enabled volunteers out roaming the grounds while their teammates directed them using walkie-talkies lent to us by Matt Cashmore. Their paths were then projected onto the view of the surroundings, and they had to run around trying to avoid bumping into their wakes (we wanted to add a Sketchup lightcycle to each runner as a marker, but couldn't get that working in time).

Unfortunately, we had to leave early, so missed the all-night-hackothon, Ant Miller's rocket, and the project presentations the next day, but I did manage to talk to a few people and spot the following inventive projects:

• Carbon Goggles
  Created by Jim Purbrick and a host of others, this sees Second Life mashed with AMEE to create a heads-up display of the carbon footprint of real-life objects that have been placed in Second Life. Click on the screenshot below to see a video.
• SocialFlightSim
  A fake wooden plane that you can sit in and control using an arcade joystick, while views of the (Google) Earth pass by on various screens, and its location is twittered to all who care to listen. Click on the photo below to see a video.

All in all, it was a fantastic event that had been very well organised. I'm hoping I'll see some of the people again at BarCamp 3.

Update 27/6/08: I've just been having a look at the presentation videos, and saw that the overall winner was this great project which uses networked CurrentCost meters to play a game with your electricity consumption.

Also see:

• Other blog posts
• Flickr photos
• YouTube videos
• Footage from BBC Click