Archive for the ‘Mashups’ Category

Kathryn Greenhill, Associate Lecturer in Information Studies at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia, was recently interviewed as a part of the Libraryhack event about What Libraries Need to Do to Create Mashable Data. In this interesting video Kathryn makes ten recommendations for libraries to ensure their data is useful for mashing up. Here are her top 5 suggestions:

1. Collect enough useful information initially
2. Store it in a standardised format
3. Work toward a permanent URL for each data object – an authoritative “anchor point” for further remix
4. Ensure useful reuse rights
5. Endeavour to complement and complete the collection of data to make it comprehensive

Smashing Magazine has an in-depth article about How To Integrate Facebook With WordPress. In this helpful post, Thiemo Fetzer provides detailed instructions as to how to:

• Integrate A WordPress Blog Into Facebook
• Integrate Facebook In A WordPress Blog

Entertainment Weekly recently reviewed Pride and Prejudice and Zombies – a mashup of the Jane Austen literary classic with additional scenes of zombie mayhem by author Seth Grahame-Smith to be released on April 8, 2009. Be sure and read the review for more details as well as the Amazon record for a look inside preview. Know of any other good book mashups? Please leave them in the comments.

The Library of Congress has issued both a full and a summary report of the pilot project it launched with Flickr in January 2008.

“Two collections of historical photographs were made public on a Library account on the Flickr photosharing site in January 2008. The response from Flickr members and observers of the pilot was overwhelmingly positive and beneficial. The following statistics attest to the popularity and impact of the pilot:

• As of October 23, 2008, there have been 10.4 million views of the photos on Flickr.
• 79% of the 4,615 photos have been made a “favorite” (i.e., are incorporated into personal Flickr collections).
• Over 15,000 Flickr members have chosen to make the Library of Congress a “contact,” creating a photostream of Library images on their own accounts.
• For Bain images placed on Flickr, views/downloads rose approximately 60% for the period January-May 2008, compared to the same time period in 2007. Views/downloads of FSA/OWI image files placed on Flickr rose approximately 13%.
• 7,166 comments were left on 2,873 photos by 2,562 unique Flickr accounts.
• 67,176 tags were added by 2,518 unique Flickr accounts.
• 4,548 of the 4,615 photos have at least one community-provided tag.
• Less than 25 instances of user-generated content were removed as inappropriate.
• More than 500 Prints and Photographs Online Catalog (PPOC) records have been enhanced with new information provided by the Flickr Community.
• Average monthly visits to all PPOC Web pages rose 20% over the five month period of January-May 2008, compared to the same period in 2007.”

via Open Education News

Thinking about creating a library mashup? Roy Tennant at TechEssence.info puts together a list of useful library-related APIs or Application Programming Interfaces that you may find helpful. Here are a few of his recommendations to get you started.

Library of Congress Subject Headings
WorldCat Search Service
Amazon
Google Book Search API

Check out the article for many more, and please leave your own suggestions in the comments!

If you’ve ever wondered what types of mashup applications you can build using Yahoo! Pipes, you’ll want to check out The Ultimate Yahoo! Pipes Creations List from ReadWriteWeb. This best list compiles the top mashups created by mixing RSS feeds from various websites and sources. Some of their picks include:

Bestselling Books – The bestselling books at Amazon.com, updated hourly.

FriendFeed Minus Twitter – Receive updates from your Friendfeed friends without Twitter posts.

Free iTunes Downloads – Songs – This is an RSS feed of new free song downloads avaialbe from the iTunes store.

The arXiv repository from Cornell University Library which provides open access to 479,931 research manuscripts in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology and Statistics, has issued an API. It will be interesting to see what types of mashups are created with this massive amount of quality content.

“The purpose of the arXiv API is to allow programmatic access to the arXiv’s e-print content and metadata. The goal of the interface is to facilitate new use of the the vast body of material on the arXiv.”

via ProgrammableWeb

According to ReadWrite Web, Penguin Books is using new social media tools to distribute six of its titles in a new We Tell Stories campaign. The British publisher is using a LiveJournal blog, Twitter, and Google Maps to post its stories in a serialized format over a weeklong period for each story.

Ever wonder what exactly APIs are all about? Take a look under the hood of Web 2.0 with The Other Librarian who details the who, what, why, and how of Application Program Interfaces. Ryan Deschamps spells out key acronyms and provides a 10 step program for using an API in his APIs: Who? What? Why? How?.

A new mashup has been announced on Programmable Web which involves a non-profit service that enables you to select books in the public domain from websites such as Google Books and the Internet Archive and have them printed via Lulu.com, the print-on demand service. The mashup combines APIs from both LuLu and the Internet Archive and appears to be a straightforward way to get printed editions of over 200,000 public domain books from Internet Archive and 1.5 million from Google Books.

The New York Times has coverage of the recently released Microsoft Popfly, a mashup creator for the non-programmer. Similar to Yahoo! Pipes and Google Mashup Editor tools, Popfly has gained over 100,000 users and 50,000 mashups.

“The Popfly programmers, however, have gone a step further in an effort to design a tool that is intended for a generation of Web users who are familiar with the Internet but are not skilled programmers.

A user might take Popfly and mash up his list of Amazon book recommendations with the Seattle Library book catalog on the Web, he said, and receive a notification when the waiting list for a particular book was down to zero.”

via Social Media

The Google Maps Mania blog has put together a list of 100 Things to do with Google Maps Mashups. Here are few standouts:

• Calculate cab fare in New York City
• Find a WiFi Hotspot in the US
• Google Map your blog or website visitors
• Track a US package
• Explore the new 7 wonders of the world