Do you like the fancy heading? I created it with the flickr logo makr, one of the cool things I have been exploring to help me complete thing no. 6 on mashups, web apps and third party tools.
In a nutshell, a “mashup” is a web application that has taken data from two or more sources and used it to create something new (a hybrid), giving it a value that it didn’t have before. The term originated from the hip-hop music scene, where two or more pieces of music are mixed together to create a new song (Wikipedia, 2008. Helene Blowers is right, there are some good resources on this page to help understand mashups).
It could be said that a mashup is like a value-added application, and libraries/librarians are good at adding value to things; maybe mashups should be the major Web 2.0 area libraries should be exploring, creating content and tools their users want by combining different elements. Have they already been doing this, and it is only now with more tools and technology at our disposal, that it can be fully appreciated?
One of the first mashups created (according to Sherif, 2007) was a website that maps Chicago crime stats (using Google Maps and police crime statistics). Click here. Map mashups appear to be very common. flickr lets you create a map to show where your photos were taken.
I had so much fun with this exercise, I could go on playing forever. Of the things suggested on the 23 things blog, I really liked the Flickr Color Pickr, which lets you choose a colour from the colour wheel and public images from flickr are found that match the colour. And not just any images. You can choose from categories like Flowers and Doors and Windows if you like. I would really like to create one of these myself. Montagr is great too. By typing in and searching for a flickr tag a really cool montage is generated of one of the random images found (by default), using the smaller images. I did try out a lot of FD’s Flickr toys. I created my own trading card (as suggested) and magazine poster. See?
In a nutshell, a “mashup” is a web application that has taken data from two or more sources and used it to create something new (a hybrid), giving it a value that it didn’t have before. The term originated from the hip-hop music scene, where two or more pieces of music are mixed together to create a new song (Wikipedia, 2008. Helene Blowers is right, there are some good resources on this page to help understand mashups).
It could be said that a mashup is like a value-added application, and libraries/librarians are good at adding value to things; maybe mashups should be the major Web 2.0 area libraries should be exploring, creating content and tools their users want by combining different elements. Have they already been doing this, and it is only now with more tools and technology at our disposal, that it can be fully appreciated?
One of the first mashups created (according to Sherif, 2007) was a website that maps Chicago crime stats (using Google Maps and police crime statistics). Click here. Map mashups appear to be very common. flickr lets you create a map to show where your photos were taken.
I had so much fun with this exercise, I could go on playing forever. Of the things suggested on the 23 things blog, I really liked the Flickr Color Pickr, which lets you choose a colour from the colour wheel and public images from flickr are found that match the colour. And not just any images. You can choose from categories like Flowers and Doors and Windows if you like. I would really like to create one of these myself. Montagr is great too. By typing in and searching for a flickr tag a really cool montage is generated of one of the random images found (by default), using the smaller images. I did try out a lot of FD’s Flickr toys. I created my own trading card (as suggested) and magazine poster. See?
I also liked the Warholizer. dumpr is similar to FD’s in fun factor is well. I really liked Make Photos Look Old and Photo to Sketch of these tools.
Note that you don’t have to use flickr images for FD’s or dumpr. You can see the effects just by downloading photos you have on your computer, which is what I did, because I don’t have a big enough flickr library yet.
Of course, there are some applications where you would need to be heavily into flickr to try them, such as creating widgets for your blog, toolbars, screensavers. And then there are those that meet very niche needs, or are very similar to others.
I also tried some games that use data from flickr. There is fastr, which I really enjoyed. You have to guess which tag is shared by ten images that appear on the screen. If you guess right, you get points. You have six minutes to guess as many as you can. TagMan is based on HangMan, except you have to guess the flickr tag before it’s too late. The only thing I didn’t like about this, was that it didn’t show you the answer if you were hung.
So I had lots of fun today and over the weekend with mashups. And I’m sure I will return to this again. There are a couple of ideas I’d like to try…
PS. I had a look at some other photo-managing/sharing sites and Webshots looked really good as an alternative to flickr.
dumpr's Photo to Sketch
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