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Are you interested to find out what kind of spaces the ´óÏó´«Ã½ are moving into at ? Well, yesterday we got our first on-site visit and as you'd expect it was using . Enjoy!

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This summer the North of England plays host to one of the most respected events in the world in everyone of its major cities.  In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TED has created a program called . TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience.

goes one step further by combination of 5 different TEDx events, one after another so people can enjoy TED for longer.

• TEDxLiverpool - 7th August 2009
• TEDxLeeds - 10th September 2009
• TEDxSheffield - 16th September 2009
• TEDxNewcastle - 30th September 2009
• TEDxManchester - 2nd October 2009

Each event will have excellent live speakers and previous TEDtalks. They promise to bring you a taste of TED without the huge cost and long waiting list.

I'm happy to say the ´óÏó´«Ã½'s famous Studio 7 will also host on the 2nd October. We have room for 100's of people, so it should be one of the biggest events and a great end to the series of collaborative events.

Fear not you guys wondering about TEDx in the south, midlands, scotland or the rest of the world. There are lots of .

So don't forget to sign up early and we'll hopefully see you soon,

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from on .

If you missed out on this year, then here's a video of what you missed. Backstage will be at the next one.

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You can now get .

The 30min versions are the only version available and the asset bundle is still for now available on the ftp site.  But look out in episode 3 there will be more focus on the assets and what you can do with them.

Don't forget to vote for the episodes as you watch them using .

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, Development Producer at ´óÏó´«Ã½ Learning attended OpenTech09 and has written a nice review of the event from his view. As usual you can comment below or even trackback to this blog post.

The conference combined activists, journalists, and geeks who want to change the world. It was informal, cheap, in my former , and last Saturday. Many people there were opening up public data and turning it into useful applications. And there was as much social engineering as computer programming.

Speakers from inside and outside government talked about freeing up data so we can do interesting things with them. Journalist Heather Brooke described how she had hammered away at Freedom of Information (FoI) requests for MP's expenses until one civil servant became that he .

In a meeting room which used to be a balcony for watching concerts, two civil servants talked about their efforts to release information. hoped Innovate would "turn into ". from the asked the audience to build things like which demonstrated the need for data, saying that "compelling examples are the things which make public services better ... simply by sharing the public information". He looked forward to taking data which were already on .gov.uk websites and releasing in more open formats, saving you the trouble of screenscraping. He hoped that the involvement of would encourage more linked data. urged them to release the data raw, without waiting to mark it up as linked data or RDFa. The Digital Britain report was presented .

Some projects were about making existing things easier instead of building new websites. William Perrin's chose not to build a social network site for local communities, and instead help people use the leading blogging and social network sites. Corinne Pritchard's translates official documents into simpler English.

There was a bit of greek pride too. called for new MPs to be offered a computer programming course as part of their induction, the better . praised the science coverage by specialist bloggers as superior to much published journalism.

But geek culture, even in the middle of saving the world, seemed very male. Males who were washed and scrubbed, in ironed shirts of T-shirts of reasonably coruscating wit, outnumbered women nine to one. The Women in Technology session started with jokes about queues being outside the men's loos instead, and ended brainstorming role-models for the next . Just as the men from Whitehall want examples to show the strength of mashups, for the next generation of Rain Ashfords.

It was an interesting Saturday.

You might also want to see:

• Some of the talks have videos and slideshows on the
• Channel 4's and the , who were both at Open Tech
• Accounts of Open Tech by , , and (focussing on Women in Technlogy)

• Martin Rosembaum's ´óÏó´«Ã½ Open Secrets Blog about the Freedon of Information

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Its been on the tip of Javascript developers tongues for a while now, no not the all dominating J-Query. Instead this thing called Glow. So now the JavaScript library Glow is available to the world under a Apache 2.0 Licence.

But the question everyone wants to know is why would the ´óÏó´«Ã½ create there own Javascript Library when there are so many out there and some very dominate players. Well Stephen Elson, Lead Product Manager of Glow explains in this blog post....

Of course, there are many excellent JavaScript libraries available already, many of which are open source themselves, so you may ask why we chose not to adopt one of these? The simple answer can be found in our Browser Support Standards. These standards define the levels of support for the various browsers and devices used to access bbc.co.uk: some JavaScript libraries may conform to these standards, but many do not, and those that do may change their policies in the future. Given this fact, we decided that the only way to ensure a consistent experience for our audiences was to develop a library specifically designed to meet these standards. A more in depth look at this question is available on the Glow website.

If you want to find out more, we recommend you have a look at the Glow website, and if you are of a technical persuasion perhaps even download the library it and have a play. Whatever you think, we welcome your feedback.

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