jump to navigation

Mashups Webcast March 6, 2007

Posted by Rachel in 2.0, Brown Bags & Webcasts, Mashups.
add a comment

I just saw Darlene Fichter’s SirsiDynix Institute presentation: Mashups: A Little Bit of This, A Little Bit of That. It was wonderful! Darlene is the Head of the Indigenous Studies Portal and Coordinator of Data Library Services at the University of Saskatchewan Library and obviously has lots of experience playing with and building some mashups. She also has a cool Blog.

Prior to the presentation, I was walking across campus and between my office and the classroom where the webcast was being shone, I got asked by 2 different people who were also headed to the webcast what a mashup is. This tells me that many of my colleagues aren’t aware of the trends in social networking and the proliferation of new tools being used by, and sometimes even being created by, librarians. Only 8 people in our library system showed up for the webcast, so I hope that this post will help inform those that were unable to attend.

What is a mashup anyway? It’s a web application that uses content from more than one source to create a new service. Mashups can be created by expert programmers as well as people with fewer technology skills. Mashups have a lot of potential for self-service to the end user. Also, mashups can usually be done online and can be integrated into one’s browser, although some require something to be installed client-side.

The Mashup Ecosystem, or things needed in order to create a mashup:

  • open data
  • open set of services
  • small pieces loosely joined
  • you

A little background: The term mashup originally goes back to the musical genre of songs that consist entirely of parts of other songs - you might take the vocals from one song and overlay them on the melody of another.

Today, most mashups are based around maps, and in particular, Google Maps.

Darlene went on to talk about several examples of mashups, some of which I have highlighted here:

Typology of the Mashup (Dion Hinchcliffe)

Where to start? There are some mashups that you can create where all you have to do is “point, click, and publish.” Some, you can “clone” by looking at the source code of a mashup that you like and making adjustments to suite your needs. And some, you will just need to do some heavy programming (or find a friend who is a programmer).

You need to:

  1. Get an idea.
  2. Sign up at the developer’s site (Amazon, Google, Yahoo, etc.) to get a developer token/code.
  3. Read the fine print about any possible usage restrictions.

More examples (many of which would definitely need a programmer):

Want more info? Look at the archive of Darlene’s presentation at the SirsiDynix Institute where you can view the presentation, view additional handouts, listen to her speak, etc. It’s all there.