Voting is now open for DDD North 2014, which is excitingly going to be in Leeds. There are a lot of good talks to vote for, but my biased opinion is that the following Leeds Sharpers should all have their talks voted for.

Micro Services: conquer monoliths, before they own you - Kiran Singh

BDD, Why you should be doing it - Richard Tasker

Using Xamarin Forms to make a cross platform Agenda App - Richard Garside (AKA me)

So look through all the proposed talks and vote now (voting now closed).

I went to TEDx Bradford on Friday. I kept visual notes of the talks using Paper for iPad. I got better at using Paper with practice so my notes start to look better in the later talks. I had to leave a little bit early, so I didn't get to make notes on all the talks.

Tim O’Reilly

Jane MacDonald, Tales of Things & Electronic Memory

Mark Graham, Internet & information geographies

Maureen Pennock, Archiving the Web

Dominic Smith, Open source, Art & Wizardlyness

Dr Kieran Fenby-Hulse, The Modern Mixtape

I love Brighton and I loved dConstruct last year when I came for the first time. So it was hugely exciting to get an unexpected email inviting the Jam Jar Collective to come and show off FriiSpray. The Jam Jar Collective are a group of geeks and artists interested in making interactive stuff and FriiSpray is an interactive graffiti wall that we made. The rest of them couldn't make it down, so my good friend Dave is helping me instead.

I always like to see behind the scenes, but when I arrived today with my suitcase full of projectors and laptops all the doors at the Brighton Dome …

Joshua Porter talked about the various biases that people have and how being aware of them can make our sites more effective. You might want to encourage more people to sign up to your site, or to incourage people to behave constructively in a forum. Understanding our natural social biases can help you do this and it's not evil as long as you've got good intentions.

He opened by showing us a video of a lift experiment where a test subject copies what the other people in the lift are doing. This starts with the direction he's facing in the lift and ends with him taking his hat off, and even …

Aleks Krotoski gave a talk at d-Construct this year called 'Playing the Web: how gaming makes the internet (and the world) a better place'. This is my summary of what she said and the bits of her talk that I liked the best.

Aleks talked about the shared goals of the web and games industry, how we could learn from each other, but how we don't seem to talk much to each other. The games industry needs to learn to build better community and could learn a lot from what the web has accomplished. We need to learn to achieve the 'stickiness' that the games industry has acheived. I'm not completely …

Steven Johnson gave a talk at d-Construct 2008 on the Urban Web. This is my summary of what was said, and the bits I found most interesting.

He told us a fascinating story of the Cholera Epidemic in London and how one outbreak, a map visualisation and combined local knowledge helped them figure out that contaminated water was the cause of the disease. It was a brief summary of his book 'The Ghost Map'. He then went on to talk about how the web, combined with geographical data could bring us all closer to our communities and local knowledge.

He mentioned Tufte, who I've heard people talk about …