So next week I’m going to facilitate a discussion over at CPSquare‘s Web 2.0 online conference about mashups. CPSquared is a community of practice about communities of practice.
I’m not going to pretend that mashups are something I know a whole lot about, but degrees of knowledge are relative and I think I’ll be able to show some people some things they hadn’t seen before and inspire them to do some things they might not have done otherwise. That’s the plan anyway.
I wanted to post an outline of my intro here and get some feedback. Plus I imagine there are readers here who would enjoy seeing these resources as well. So let me know what you think:
Background info on mashups
From music (Mashuptown.com) to Housingmaps.com (Craig’s List housing search plus Google Maps)
Open source ethic of small pieces loosely joined
Contemporary Mashups
On the technical level, it’s all about the API
examples
Programmable Web-mashups
A dynamic list of mashups. For example, see:
Libraries 411 Google Maps + Library directories for US and Canada
IAMCalTrain very nice Yahoo Maps +Flickr + Cal Train Schedule
Diggdot.us a mashup of most popular posts in Digg, Slashdot and Del.icio.us in one location and feed.
See also Terrafly.com, especially the “experimental data” link on the bottom of each local data page. (Thanks to Gary Price of ResourceShelf.com for this one)
Future Directions
What are the issues they’ll be exploring?
Leveraging the Mashup ethic as a non-developer
Many tools can be powerful together, and certain tools are good for bringing other things together.
You can “mash up” your geographically inclined data, whatever it might be, with Google Maps using tools like Community Walk (see, for example, this write up of our map of the case studies over at Net Squared)
RSS in general is a great example of data that is just as portable as music. RSS feeds too can be mashed up with very little technical knowledge.
Key tools:
FeedDigest
FeedJumbler
FeedBurner
Examples of things like this that I have done:
nptech meta feed
*combine data from multiple tagging platforms (del.icio.us, furl, flickr, upcoming and more)
*turn it into one feed with subscriber analytics
*make it available to display it in HTML on a web site
select sources on search alert
*automate near real-time mining of select sources for news on a particular topic
*recieve rapid notification of new information available
similar elsewhere…
Superglu – it’s just feeds displayed on a page.
Squidoo is similar, but with lots of exras like tagging and ranking. (See, for example, this Squidoo “lens” on Wikipedia or this one on Understanding RSS)
So keep your eye out for mashups and don’t be afraid to “make” some of your own!
Hokey? Or a good presentation outline? Somewhere in between? Please feel free to share your thoughts with me so I can make the best presentation I can.