I'm here in sunny Las Vegas attending the Mix conference. Last night I was at the mashup social hour (mashups + free martinis = goodness), and am looking forward to tonight's Mashup After Hours.  This is an event / contest with some great prizes for folks to show off your mashup skills (or if just starting out, it's a good excuse to dive in and build a mashup). The top prize is a new Xbox360 Elite, which is the current definition of the word sweet - black case, HDMI, and a 120 gig drive.

I'll be on hand, as will a number of team members from both the MS Live APIs, some of the other Microsoft teams, as well as from some non-MS folk.  I was talking with people from StrikeIron (http://www.strikeiron.com) and infragstics (http://www.infragistics.com), and weather bug (http://www.weatherbug.com), and they've got technical folks in town who'll be stopping by as well.  If you're in town and would like to get started, it all starts at 8 tonight and runs to 2am.

Just like I did for the Web20 conference earlier in the month, I've made a special landing page that's being used at the event, http://www.mashupguy.com/mix.  Right now the site has links to details on APIs, content, videos, etc.

Once we hit the 8 oclock hour, that page will change to include registration and gallery info.

If you're looking to build a mashup, you're going to need data. Sometimes this will be your own, other times you'll bring together data from one source and a visualization (such as Virtual Earth) from another.

For people that are looking to try doing mashups with data, one of the recommendations I have is to check out the SuperDataPack from StrikeIron. This is a set of data services that you can get access to for no charge (up to 10,000 hits/month), and there's some great data to use for your mashups.

Today, I posted a new sample in the resources section called 'Personal Government'. This takes a single piece of information - a 5 digit zip code  and then interacts with 5 different services to retrieve information provided by multiple different sources within a common area, government. The sources range from the federal government (senators), state government, county government, and city government. In addition, it also retrieves census data for zipcode as well.

Both a PDF of the lab, as well as a completed solution have been posted.