Mashups!

I've enjoyed using mashups on other sites for a while, but haven't had a chance to explore how to create them or to think about how libraries can incorporate them on their Web sites. So I was happy to see that Darlene Fichter, Head of the Indigneous Studies Portal and Data Library Coordinator at the University of Saskatchewan Library, Canada, was presenting on "What's A Mashup & Why Would I Want One?" at this year's conference. The room for this program was beyond capacity with several attendees standing to hear the talk. The presentation will be available on her blog at http://library2.usask.ca/~fichter/blog_on_the_side/.

"If you can click your mouse, you can make a mashup," Darlene said, which was encouraging since I know most of the libraries in our region wouldn't be able to utilize Mashups if it took too much knowledge of programming.

A mashup is a Web application that uses content from more than one source to create a new service. The word is actually borrowed from the music industry. Before the start of the program, Darlene played "I bought it on eBay" from Al Yankovik, which is an example mashing a tune with lyrics.

Example : frappr– http://www.frappr.com/ - people + Google Maps.

IBM interested in Mashups inside the enterprise. They believe it will free up the ability to innovate rapidly.

"Mashups are like today's playground," Darlene said. Children playing in a sandbox can lead to adults who design or build our future buildings. Athough some applications for mashups may seem frivolous, they can be powerful applications. Just because people have gone for the cool, or the cute or the fun, don't be mistaken that people won't go for the robust, she said.

While Web 2.0 is often referred to as the Read/Write Web, Darlene believes Mashups can be considered to be the Read/Write/Program Web. People can become "do-it-yourself builders of applications."

To create a Mashup, you need:

1. Open Data - Big sites like Amazon, Google Maps, Yahoo, are opening up data to users.
   
2. An open set of services - things that can do things with data so that you don't have to do it yourself.
3. And we need you so that you can create the new way of looking at data.

Some interesting examples of Mashups are:

Newsmap – http://www.marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/ -using Google News, Newsmap maps news items it by topic and creates different displays to see what topics different countries are covering.

Housing Maps – http://www.housingmaps.com/ - A Mashup of Craig's List and Google Maps that shows what's available in real estate.

PlaceOpedia – http://www.placeopedia.com/ - A Mashup of Google Maps and places included in Wikipedia.

What can we do in libraries to show information and make it useful?

The Lewis & Clark Library System in Illinois has created a mashup with a Route Map for Deliveries – http://www.lcls.org/members/routemap.aspx. They basically took library route data and adding it to Google Maps. Maybe SEMLS could do this! However, I'm not sure whether this would be really useful.

Book Carousel – http://www.cambridgelibraries.ca/hot/carousel.cfm - using Book Covers to show newest books at their library. The content comes from Syndetics, but Darlene noted that it could have been from Amazon as well.

McMaster Library - http://library.mcmaster.ca/maps/airphotos/1919.htm - did a Mashup of Google Maps and its collection of 5,000 aerial photos collection. The collection used to be something that patrons browsed in the library. Now patrons can find a location on the map and access the unique identfier for the photo.

Go-go Google Gadget – http://www.blyberg.net/2006/08/18/go-go-google-gadget/ - created gadgets to shows holds, checkouts, new books, what's popular on a patron's Google homepage. This is so cool!

How do we create Mashups?

The easiest place to create a mashup is from Google Maps - http://maps.google.com - where you can access the Mashup by clicking on "My Maps." You can add pushpins and create maps. The problem is you have to link to it. You can't publish it on your own Web site.

Community Walk – http://www.communitywalk.com/ - create a map, share it, repost it on your own site. One suggestion from Darlene is to use works of fiction. (It would be great if we could pull this info from the LCSH headings in our catalogs to help with this.) We could also use this to create a map Mashup of the photos in our local history collection. I checked out the site, and it can import information from a spreadsheet as long as the spreadsheet includes one of the following: an address with street, city, state, zip code or latitude and longitude.

Yahoo Pipes – http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/ - is a new tool that allows you to merge different information sources together and apply logic. Darlene says it essentially uses Boolean logic (yeah! We already know how to do this!) It's not something to start with, but maybe something to progress too after doing a couple of basic Mashups.

There are more powerful tools that allow you to do data crunching, but they require more programming expertise. Many of the mapping mashups require latitude and longiutde. Geocoder.us can make that conversion for you.

Some issues raised by Mashups - "Right to remix" – Intellectual property issues. Provenance. When teaching about evaluating Web sites, we often tell people to find out who is authoring the information. Mashups make it difficult because you can't always tell what the source of the data is.

Finding out more:

Google Maps Mania

Mashup Dashboard