Week notes: 'Europe', guide improvements and the chance to join our team

Sunday last week we excavated and shipped one of our oldest tickets from GitHub: we implemented Europe.

We use Yahoo! GeoPlanet for our places metadata. GeoPlanet is a hierarchical collection of countries, regions and towns - it lets us do things like show events that in London or Brighton on the England page as well. Previously we only included pages for countries, but we now have the ability to combine countries and places in to arbitrary groups such as Europe or Silicon Valley.

These pages (we call them Combined Places) behave just like regular place pages - you can subscribe to Atom or iCal feeds from them, and you can also filter events around topics in those places such as Startup events in Europe or Mobile events in Silicon Valley.

We've also been improving our Guides feature based on your feedback. We now have invitations for guides. You can create a public guide that is open to anyone to join as a curator, or create a closed guide and invite others to help you curate events. You can invite people through Twitter or just by emailing them a secret URL.

A quick highlight of some interesting guides created in the last week. We particularly like:

• Geospatial Loveliness covering cartography, GIS etc.
• JavaScript meetups around the world.
• Open Aid Data: "Transparency and accountability in international development cooperation through open data"
• Public Works Conferences - conferences covering transportation, wastewater, civil engineering, solid waste and so on.

Keep them coming! Do you have a specialist area or a particular interest? Let others know which events to attend.

You might be interested in the amalgamation of project management techniques Sophie and I employed for the Guides project. We experimented with bits of the KJ method, Kanban boards and, as always, significant amounts of post-it notes. For an explanation watch the video I produced.

Sophie, Simon and I headed up north to Nottingham this week for the second New Adventures in Web Design conference. Having watched last year's event enviously via Twitter from Mountain View we were very excited to be there in person this year. Colly and his team put on a great event with some exceptional speakers (and a beautifully designed goodie bag).

The conference opened with a grid showing the Twitter avatars of the attendees that Simon (our Simon) made using data from Lanyrd. Let us know if you'd like one of these for your event.

Also this week: We entered another testing cycle for Project Hamster. I managed to break it in ways Jake didn't expect. I had a lot of fun.

We were included in an article on SEOmoz titled 21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic as Tactic #15 - Attend and Host Events.

In other news, we are hiring a graphic and user experience designer. If you want a chance to work with us in our office in London please send us your portfolio and CV / resumé. We'd love to hear from you!