October 31, 2007
Mashups and Data Visualization (Internet Librarian 2007)
I'm SO behind on my blogging Internet Librarian. The conference is almost over, and I haven't posted a thing and I have lots of stuff to share. So I'm going to try live blogging. That seems to be my only hope. Please excuse typos, grammatical errors, etc. I'll fix later. Be forewarned, this will be fairly stream of conciousness.
Luckily, the Steinbeck Forum is the BEST place to blog. Good wireless connection, comfortable seats, and even a little desktop. Can't ask for much more.
Here's a good blog post from the Infotoday blog, including some of the graphics from the presentation, as well as a picture of Darlene in her M&M costume! (No, not S&M, M&M, as in the candy!)
Presenter: Darlene Fichter
Yahoo Maps - example, map of earthquakes, combined maps with information from the geological survey
Flappr - good at bringing a community together http://www.flappr.com/blogginglibrarians/ Uses Google API and community contributed content.
Google Maps - Google My Maps, go to Google maps and there's a new tab. You can add pushpins plus notes to create a map. Embed the code in your library site. Useful for library branches, historical buildings, locations in stories. Chocomap.com - all the different chocolate store locations. McMaster Aerial Photos: Western Springs history - http://www.westernspringshistory.org/map/
Yahoo Pipes - More powerful. There's a lot of logic you can add into it. You can manipulate, refine, filter. You can clone an existing pipe to get started. Adopt one and change it. Book cover mashup - took book cover data and created a slider. Shows top 20 new books.
Unintended consequences - Garbage in, Garbage out. They don't always tell you the source of the data. There are client side mashups that change the pages you look at. Can modify all the words on a page to say different things.
Data Visualization Tools
More news sites are trying to provide information visually.
http://www.time.com/time/covers/20061030/where_we_live/
New tools making it easier to make data visualizations:
Map your web site structure: http://www.aharef.info/2006/05/websites_as_graphs.htm
Newsmap - http://www.marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/newsmap.cfm
Facets as Elastic Lists
http://well-formed-data.net/experiments/elastic_lists/
Social data sites - contributions you make should add value to other people using it. The organization hosting the site should derive aggregate value.
ManyEyes - http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/home; view and discuss visualizations, view and discuss data sets, create visualizations from existing data sets. If you register, you can also rate data sets and visualizations, upload your own data.
Swivel - Hedge Fund Compensation
IL2007
October 24, 2007
Track California Fires with Mashups & Twitter
You may not think that mashups and twitter have any relevance to your life. Okay, I'll admit, I've been having a hard time thinking of practical uses for twitter, myself. But when you're threatened by fire, there's no such thing as too much information. I'm not in a fire area this time around, but just about anyone who lives in California knows someone who is. Forget hourly updates, when fire is involved a minute by minute account can be critical. With so many fires in such large areas going on all at once, watching the news for information on evacuation areas and fire perimeters can be decidedly unsatisfying. TV news can't report on every fire in every neighborhood when there's so many burning at the same time.
But when KPBS, a local San Diego public radio station, combines information collected by their reporters with the detailed geographical details offered by Google Maps, you end up with a very valuable example of a mashup that shows detailed information on evacuations, shelter locations, and as of 57 minutes ago, a Metrolink shut down. Icons show evacuation centers for displaced people and animals, and areas that are safe for return.
The L.A. Times offers a similar mashup showing the fires currently burning in Los Angeles, Orange and Ventura Counties, some of which are threatening homes, but not getting as much air time as the huge conflagration in San Diego.
The KPBS Twitter feed logs short, random bits of information, allowing the dissemination of up to the minute news including reports of blocks where homes were destroyed and roads closed, making the twitter feed a social networking tool with a serious purpose.
Traditional news leveraged by quick and easy web applicaitons can have an significant impact in desperate times.
November 21, 2006
Vendor Creates the First Legal-Tech Mashup
If you read my entry on mashups, you might have wondered what possible application they could have within the legal environment. It didn't take long. Synaptec Software has integrated a mashup in a recent version of its Lawbase software, according to John Waters in his article, Mashups to Re-Map the Legal Tech Market?
They're claiming the first commercial legal tech mashup, but that all depends upon your definition of the word. In its most general sense, that is, an application that uses content from more than one source to create a completely new service, WestKM and Lexis TotalSearch fit the bill. However, the word mashup is usually used to refer to web applications that utilize publicly available APIs from Google Maps, Flickr, Yahoo, etc., so in that sense, they may have a claim.
For a directory of mashups, covering a variety of different areas, see The Programmable Web.
Posted by Cindy L. Chick at 02:15 PM | Comments (0)October 29, 2006
Internet Librarian (IL2006) - Mashups
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.
