Look Ma – No Programming

Cool Tips and TricksRobin Hastings – robin.hastings@gmail.com

Information Technology ManagerMissouri River Regional Library

What are we going to do?

• Introduction• Talk about Mashups• Find data sources• Learn about cool mashups "in the

wild"• Find out how to create our own

mashups

Mashups!

Comes from musical background – mashing up bits of different songs to

make a new song

Requires an API (Application Programming Interface),

RSS feed or other data sources

Sometimes requires a “Key” – permission to use their data

Data massaging may be necessary...

Murder Map of London

Types?

• Presentation Layer– Start pages (Netvibes)

• Data Mashup– Combine data sources to present unified

view (housingmaps.com)

• Process Mashup– Customize business processes, invoke

business logic across multiple applications(no examples – yet…)

Data?

• Policy Map– 4,000 points of data about any location

in US

• Yahoo! Geo-Locator– http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/

• Strikeiron (data as a service) $$– http://

www.strikeiron.com/strikeironservices.aspx

What mashups are out there now?

• Google Maps - millions

• Amazon - thousands

• Any website with an API - del.icio.us, twitter, Amazon, Google, etc.

• Any RSS feed!

Where do you find mashups?

• Programmable Web– http://

www.programmableweb.com/mashuplist

– http://

www.gasbuddy.com

– Book Search – search multiple booksearch sites at once

• WebMashup.com– http://

www.webmashup.com/

– Doggdot.us – Digg + Slashdot + del.icio.us

Library Mashups?

• http://www.theshiftedlibrarian.com/archives/2007/01/04/ill_mashup.html– ILL statistics, dumped into the

Community Walk site, create a map of where the ILL books are coming from.

• Bookmobile Routes– http://

www.mrrl.org/services/bookmo/index.asp

– Map data (geocoded) and Google Maps combine to make a visual map of our Bookmobile’s routes.

What is involved?

How do I make my own?

Popflymashup creator, requires login

Popfly Interface

Yahoo! Pipeshttp://www.jumpcut.com/fullscreen?id

=C086AA92568811DCAB02000423CF381C&type=movie

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=ko6COtf93BGFpaLjyp1_DQ

Yahoo! Pipes Interface

Ultimate Pipes Creation List

• Read/Write Web– Social Submission & Aggregation Pipes– Pricing Alert Pipes– Media Pipes– Check comments for more suggestions

Google Mapshttp://maps.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=68480

Google Maps Interface

• Mash Maker – Intel– Desktop client– Less API, more customized data

grabbing– BETA

Upcoming…

• Semantic Web = web as database– Freebase– Microformats

• Anything can be data source for mashups – if semantically marked up in XHTML or XML

Start Pages

PageFlakes

Netvibes

Questions?