I watched Creative Commons champion Prof. Larry Lessig‘s fantastic presentation to the TED Conference earlier today in awe.
How can you take a subject as potentially mind-numbing as copyright law and turn it into a standing-ovation inducing call-to-arms?
Watch the master in action to see:
After Steve Clayton demoed it to me last week, I decided to try playing around with Microsoft’s Popfly. Popfly is a tool for creating Mashups in Silverlight, with a drag and drop interface.
It comes with a tutorial (on right) and the interface is easy to get used to. In fact it is even easier to use than Yahoo Pipes.
I built the app below in a few clicks. It displays the status of my Facebook contacts.
http://www.popfly.ms/users/TomRaftery/FaceBook%20Bubbls.small
This app was created in Firefox on my MacBook Pro.
One glitch I did note was that you can’t write into the Search box (when using Firefox on a Mac).
David Berlind is the executive editor at ZDNet. David is also one of the founders of Mashup Camp.
What is Mashup Camp? According to the About page Mashup Camp is:
an unconference-style event that’s dedicated to bringing together the Internet software mashup community for a face-to-face collaborative meetup where new relationships are formed, old relationships are nurtured, ideas are shared, mutiple balls are moved forward, and innovation happens in real-time.
David is involved in the organisation of Europe’s first Mashup Camp which will be held in Ireland on 10th-12th of November (07).
I will be interviewing David for a podcast tomorrow morning (Oct 25th – apologies for the late notification). If you have any questions you’d like me to put to David, feel free to leave thm in the comments.