Hack Day ended late last night, and the winning entry for best hack was awarded to the three woman team that created Blogging in Motion. Their hack involved a hardware device consisting of a camera embedded inside a handbag that automatically takes a photo every few steps, then ZoneTags the pictures and posts them to a blog. Check it out in action at their site.

I've attached a photo below of Diana, Audrey and Emily accepting their award that was taken using their handbag camera. Check out all of the Flickr photos from the event tagged "HackDay06".

The Hack Day developer's workshops are drawing to a close. The last sessions for today include a few hands-on demonstrations of Yahoo APIs. Then, after the totally rocking party, attendees will head out to their tents and sleeping bags and work through the night on their perfect Yahoo hacks. The 90-second demos are tomorrow afternoon, and then the winners of the "best hack" awards will be announced by emcee Mike Arrington from TechCrunch. I talked to one hacker who's actually more excited to see him than Beck.

We'll be giving you updates tomorrow to tell you about the winning hack!

Hey, kid — wanna sticker?

Tom Coates (left), Yahoo's social software specialist and keeper of plasticbag.org with Rabble from Flickr.

Matt Sweeney of the Yahoo user interface group thinks that the web needs a good scrubbing.

He just finished giving a talk called "Web 2.0: Getting it Right the Second Time." Matt drew nods of agreement from the crowd when he said that many web programmers spend too much time breaking down monolithic blocks of poorly maintained and poorly thought out code from however many years ago.

"Most of us are still cleaning up the past," says Sweeney. He gave the audience three high-level usage practices that should maximize accessibility and reusability: Semantic markup, progressive enhancement, and encapsulisation.

Matt posts frequently to the Yahoo User Interface blog, where he often announces new UI enhancements the various Yahoo products. Plus, the title of his talk is killer.

Some random bits of news from Yahoo Hack Day 2006:

• Chad Dickerson, head of the Yahoo Developer Network, just announced the release of the new Yahoo Photos API with browser-based authentication. This will allow developers to create webapps which can read and write Yahoo Photos data.

• There's also a new API for Yahoo Mail that lets you build services for Yahoo Mail users.

• Flickr has rolled out support for JSON and serialized PHP responses.

• Check out the Hack Day Flickr slideshow at the Hack Day blog. There's a Flash slideshow app pulling photos from Flickr tagged with HackDay06. Anyone here at Yahoo Hack Day who's curious about learning how to build such a slideshow, there's a Flick API tutorial later this afternoon. Lots of photos of Beck's equipment showing up right now…

Up next is Matt Sweeney talking about the promise of Web 2.0. Stay tuned.

I snapped this photo of a Beck roadcase in the loading area behind the stage set up here on the Yahoo lawn.

There's been some buzz at Hack Day about who the promised "very special Grammy-winning musical guest" will be. Well, the word's out now. It's Beck. He even brought his puppets. Apparently, the puppeteers get their own road case (see below).

So go ahead. Tell your friends — but before you get any ideas, you need a Hack Day badge to get in to the show.

Douglas Crockford, inventor of the JSON data format and lead JavaScript architect at Yahoo. 

Douglas gave a talk titled "An Inconvenient API," which included a history of interactivity on the web. He traced JavaScript from its humble beginnings as the Oak language and through the various branches (LiveScript, ECMAScript and JScript) that were the result of the interactive web services race between Netscape, Sun and Microsoft.

He also gave us his browser "A List," the browsers that adhere to the highest web standards that you should always develop for first:

• Firefox 1.5
• Safari 2.0
• IE 6
• IE 7
• Opera 9

With the introduction of IE7 and Firefox 2 and the continuing development of Opera and Apple's Safari, Doug sees a new browser war on the horizon  "There are now 4 major browser makers," Doug says, "and they will be flooding the web with bugs. So watch out."

He also talked about something he calls "The Wall," which I think is an interesting concept that certainly applied to many of the mashers and hackers in the room. The Wall is what you hit when you push the browser too far. The web browser wasn't designed to be a general purpose application platform, Doug says. You can't expect all browsers to handle massive web services, otherwise you'll cripple users' computers and make them unhappy.

Doug is an interesting guy. In addition to being a deep-thinking programmer type, he's a video game designer, a linguist and a singer.

Yahoo's Andy Baio talks about "The Weird Guy," the person in an online community who first suggests an offline meetup. Every community needs a Weird Guy to facilitate real life activities. He's the guy (or gal) who posts the "hey, let's meet at the pizza place and get to know one another" message to the BBS, or the one who sends around an email asking for suggestions of a date and time to meet.

Andy identifies with the Weird Guy, as the slide behind him indicates. He once tried to organize a meetup among Metafilter members.
 

Andy Baio, co-founder of Upcoming.org, at Hack Day 2006.

Andy gave an engaging talk about online communities and the unique ecosystems that they create. As the founder of a site that encourages real-life social interaction, he was interested in examining the history of meetups, the face to face meetings that have a strong tradition within geek communities. He thinks that we can learn more about how online communities work by studying how and why these communities come together in real life.

Andy started by talking about the original geek community: amateur radio operators. He gave us a brief history of the HAM radio community and drew an interesting parallel: HAMs are geeks with funny handles chatting with each other over long distances (sounds familiar). HAM radio operators also have  their own shorthand, much like instant messenger users.

Some more notes from his talk:

For every online community, there has always been a subset of members that ends up meeting face to face. It's not for everyone within the commons, but people do eventually feel the need to seek each other out for "eyeball contact."

Andy identified three key reasons members of online communities seek out face to face contact with each other.

High bandwidth. Talking to somebody face to face, you can much better infer details like emotion, sarcasm and subtleties in tone.

Trust. When you meet somebody and talk to them, you feel more willing to trust them. Humans are trained to evaluate people based on body language and speech, and you only get that when you actually talk to somebody.

Emotional connection. Having dinner with somebody or engaging in a long talk introduces a level of emotional connection that is totally impossible to find in online communication.

Andy also demostrated that some communities aren't really conducive to meetups. Del.icio.us and Slashdot are examples.

Nice Door Hack. 

I'm here at Hack Day 2006 on the Yahoo campus. The developer workshops are just getting started. A little late, but we're almost underway.

The first presentation is from Andy Baio, the co-creator of Upcoming.org who is now working at Yahoo. He's giving a talk about social software and communities called "Step Away from the Computer." More on that to come.