I've started preparing for the first panel at next week's Mashup Camp on OpenAjax Alliance: Why Ajax Standards Matter. Some things I'm reading and synthesizing:

• naturally, the OpenAjax Alliance website
• John Resig - Thoughts on OpenAjax -- the post by the master JavaScript developer from 2007 presents some good critiques of OpenAjax -- I wonder whether they have been adequately addressed.
• coverage of OpenAjax on Ajaxian
• Apathy comes easy to OpenAjax Alliance -- The Register -- a not-so-nice piece on OpenAjax -- but what do you expect from theregister?

A big question for me: what hands-on stuff is there to try? How hard is it to download code from Open source projects and take the projects "out for a spin"? Is there a screencast showing OpenAjax in action so that we can quickly see its purported benefits rather than just read about them?

It's also a good time to study Google's AJAX Libraries API ("a content distribution network and loading architecture for the most popular open source JavaScript libraries") as a way of comparing various leading JavaScript libraries. I plan to use it in the next "Mixing and Remixing Information" course I teach in Spring 2009.

Later this month (from Nov 17-18), I'll be attending the latest Mashup Camp. I've been mulling over various sessions that I like to propose. This afternoon I finally wrote up one of them: "Learning and Teaching How to Create Mashups":

In this session we will share our experiences about how we teach others to create mashups, as well as how we ourselves learn about mashups. What approaches do you use? What has worked and what hasn't?

I hope to write up a few more proposals, including ones focused on mashups in research and and mashups for personal information integration.

On Monday, I gave an introductory talk on mashups at Mashup University.  I created a few notes while I talked. Here they are:

Raymond Yee
Lecturer, School of Information, UC Berkeley

Feel free to send me email:

yee@berkeley.edu / raymondyee@mashupguide.net

Book URL:

http://blog.mashupguide.net/toc/

or

http://tinyurl.com/2shmy9
A project that I'm associated with:

http://zotero.org

Some burning questions from the participants:

• How to apply to business and making money?
• How to pick a "winning" API?
• How to make code work better?  less cache?
• security issues for users
• How to handle authentication of various services?
• Legal issues
• cross-platform compatibility
• accessibility
• What are the different tools you can use?