I have a confession to make. When I received the Internet Librarian program several months ago, and noticed that there was an entire track related to mashups, I had only one question...what's a mashup? Since then I've seen mashups referred to in a number of different contexts, so by the time I arrived in Monterey, I had a limited understanding of them. In fact, I was listening to a KM presentation from the recent ILTA conference in the car on the way to Monterey, where one of the speakers referred to West KM and Lexis TotalSearch as mashups.
First, the definition; a mashup is a new breed of web app that uses content from more than one source to create a completely new service. It's very common for mashups to use Google Maps as one of the sources, combining the map info with specific spots to be displayed. For example, here's a route map for deliveries mashup created by the Lewis & Clark Library.
Anyone can create a map-based mashup using CommunityWalk.com. Other Google map builders include YourMap.com, MapBuilder.net, and GoogleMapBuilder.com.
Mashups are not limited to simply Google Maps. Here's a very cool non-map mashup, Suprglu that will bring together information that you have stored in several different places, Flickr, del.icio.us, blogger, etc. into one page.
If you want a mashup more directly library-related, take a look at the book cover browser created by Mike Cunningham using the Yahoo carousel component.
To encourage the creations of library mashups, Talis Shared Innovation sponsored a Mashing Up The Library contest The winners were announced on Tuesday at that day's keynote.
Most of the information in this entry were gleaned from the Cool Tools & Mashups for Webmasters program, starring Darlene Fichter and Frank Cervone. Their presentation included some neat non-mashup tools as well. For a complete list, see the presentations themselves soon to be posted to Darlene's page, and/or the Internet Librarian site. The Powerpoints aren't there yet, but hopefully they will be soon.
If you'd like the complete Internet Librarian conference on CD, it will be available from Digital Record.
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