5 14:30 Mash Ups Mark Lamey
Mashups are an exciting genre of interactive Web applications that draw upon content retrieved from external data sources to create entirely new and innovative services. They are a hallmark of the second generation of Web applications informally known as Web 2.0.
Introduction
A new breed of Web-based data integration applications is sprouting up all across the Internet. Colloquially termed mashups, their popularity stems from the emphasis on interactive user participation and the monster-of-Frankenstein-like manner in which they aggregate and stitch together third-party data. The sprouting metaphor is a reasonable one; a mashup Web site is characterized by the way in which it spreads roots across the Web, drawing upon content and functionality retrieved from data sources that lay outside of its organizational boundaries.
This vague data-integration definition of a mashup certainly isn't a rigorous one. A good insight as to what makes a mashup is to look at the etymology of the term: it was borrowed from the pop music scene, where a mashup is a new song that is mixed from the vocal and instrumental tracks from two different source songs (usually belonging to different genres). Like these "bastard pop" songs, a mashup is an unusual or innovative composition of content (often from unrelated data sources), made for human (rather than computerized) consumption.
So, what might a mashup look like? The ChicagoCrime.org Web site is a great intuitive example of what's called a mapping mashup. One of the first mashups to gain widespread popularity in the press, the Web site mashes crime data from the Chicago Police Department's online database with cartography from Google Maps. Users can interact with the mashup site, such as instructing it to graphically display a map containing pushpins that reveal the details of all recent burglary crimes in South Chicago. The concept and the presentation are simple, and the composition of crime and map data is visually powerful.
In Mashup genres, you'll survey the popular genres of mashups, including mapping mashups. Related technologies overviews the technology landscape that relates to the construction and operation of mashups. Technical challenges and Social challenges present the eminent technical and social challenges, respectively, affecting mashups.
Mashup genres
In this section, I give a brief survey of the prominent mashup genres.
Mapping mashups
In this age of information technology, humans are collecting a prodigious amount of data about things and activities, both of which are wont to be annotated with locations. All of these diverse data sets that contain location data are just screaming to be presented graphically using maps. One of the big catalysts for the advent of mashups was Google's introduction of its Google Maps API. This opened the floodgates, allowing Web developers (plus hobbyists, tinkerers, and others) to mash all sorts of data (everything from nuclear disasters to Boston's CowParade cows) onto maps. Not to be left out, APIs from Microsoft (Virtual Earth), Yahoo (Yahoo Maps), and AOL (MapQuest) shortly followed.
Video and photo mashups
The emergence of photo hosting and social networking sites like Flickr with APIs that expose photo sharing has led to a variety of interesting mashups. Because these content providers have metadata associated with the images they host (such as who took the picture, what it is a picture of, where and when it was taken, and more), mashup designers can mash photos with other information that can be associated with the metadata. For example, a mashup might analyze song or poetry lyrics and create a mosaic or collage of relevant photos, or display social networking graphs based upon common photo metadata (subject, timestamp, and other metadata.). Yet another example might take as input a Web site (such as a news site like CNN) and render the text in photos by matching tagged photos to words from the news.
Search and Shopping mashups
Search and shopping mashups have existed long before the term mashup was coined. Before the days of Web APIs, comparative shopping tools such as BizRate, PriceGrabber, MySimon, and Google's Froogle used combinations of business-to-business (b2b) technologies or screen-scraping to aggregate comparative price data. To facilitate mashups and other interesting Web applications, consumer marketplaces such as eBay and Amazon have released APIs for programmatically accessing their content.
News mashups
News sources (such as the New York Times, the BBC, or Reuters) have used syndication technologies like RSS and Atom (described in the next section) since 2002 to disseminate news feeds related to various topics. Syndication feed mashups can aggregate a user's feeds and present them over the Web, creating a personalized newspaper that caters to the reader's particular interests. An example is Diggdot.us, which combines feeds from the techie-oriented news sources Digg.com, Slashdot.org, and Del.icio.us.
Source:http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-mashups.html
Critical friend review
Good intro Mark! Excellent visual with the string demo. Great enthusiasm. I had only heard of Mash-ups in relation to rap music and videos. Good quick tour of various mash-up applications. I'll elaborate later.
Ok, now it's later. This presentation was a real eye opener for me, as I had not heard of these kinds of applications. I think you did an excellent job of touring the applications and explaining them in a manner that people could understand. Your speaking was excellent and you were enthuiastic about the topic. You also did good job of interacting with the audience, instead of just standing at the front and talking "at them".
The only thing I can think of that may have improved your presentation, would be a more organized activity on the computers, using one of the "mashed-up" sites. Of course, time is a big factor here and you probably would have had to cut something. You conveyed a lot of information in a short time.
Comparing your presentation to mine; you did a much better job of explaining the applications and possible uses than I did, whereas I got a little too hung-up on where people were in the activity.
The applications that most appealed to me were the ones like wedding mapper that mashed up with Google maps. I think that anything that reduces excess driving time and the corresponding consumption of fossil fuels is a valuable tool. I had a class field trip with several stops, early in the school year. Even though the students were car-pooling, we had multiple vehicles. I printed off Google maps and marked the locations in pen. I most likely could have done this electronically, and online, if I had done a little research.
I think that you would do very good job of selling an application to an audience of potential users, such as students or co-workers.
KenM