Just finishing up at my first hackday aka mashed08 I am proud to say the hack was actually completely and ready to be presented. Everyone who knows me knows this is just an achievement in it’s self.

Tim Nash and I following his idea developed an accessible and indexable media service.

Following a talk by BBC R & D we were enlighted about embedded ID3 tags within audio and video files and how the BBC are starting to use version two of these tags (id3v2) to put information about the programs directly within the file . These tags hold meta data and can hold rich information about the file and are directly extractable.  However there are few tools for doing this and the example we were shown used Flash™ and had we felt a number of limitations.

• You had to read the whole file before you got the data
• The current method of extraction did not expose this data in a way that search engines could find it (Tim is a SEO specialist)
• The data in all the example we were given was not presented in a format that was portable
• The data was not accessible.

So in a mear 24hrs we looked to address these issues, hacking away through the night at Alexandra Palace. We put together a service that extracted the data before all the file was loaded and exposed that data as html on the page and as a ATOM RSS feed  and then cached it so people could easily get data out of files. OK it is still a bit of a protoype and the amount of files around with enhanced data like the BBC provided  (Chis Moyles podcasts) I give you We Do ID3 So zip over and have a look below I have embedded our slides (unfortunatly no embedded data in them though and not very accessible unless you use  a hack done this year by Christian Heilmann (EasyslideShare) - I have a hosted version of accessible slides from mashed here ) and we even made a small mention in the Guardian News blogs

The crew at the BBC were great and I had a brilliant weekend with some very cool and clever things being created.  I am definately going to go back next year. Well done Matthew Cashmore for organising it.

Just look for tagged info (mashed08) on flickr,mashed08.backnetwork.com and twitter to hear how good it was. Oh and yes I got a free bean bag, that was interesting getting back on our mammoth 5hr journey for a location that is only 2ish hours normally, gotta love Sunday trains.