Week 10/Play Week 2/Lesson #21: Mashup Editors

Discovery Exercise #1:
Let's study some extended uses of Mashups: Go to Mashable.com and discover the 11 crazy ways to browse Flickr photos.

Through other learning 2.0 Discovery Exercises, I am now familiar with several of the 11 crazy ways to browse Flickr photos. As for the new ones...

Depictr: I love music, so I should love this. Plus, I am a lyrics person, which is probably the fault of the Literature major in me. I tried the opening lines from Snow Patrol's Hands Open. The result was suprisingly tame, considering that Depictr searched the words/tags grave, digging, and tongue.

Flickr Combat was cute...if you used cats or dogs.

Flickr Numbers: I get to see interesting photos, randomly, without having to think...I like!



Exercise #2:1:
Go to Mashup Awards' website and explore the many mashups created by different mashup editors.

The Mashup of the Month Award for September goes to....

LazyLibrary!

Well, that's great. Apparently, LazyLibrary will allow you to "find books on any topic without having to worry about high page counts." According to MashupAwards, LazyLibrary allows you to search for books with 200 or less pages by pulling in book data from Amazon and filtering out any book with more than 200 pages.

Hmm....I want to believe that this is a good thing. So, I said to myself, "Self, can you think of a good, solid educational use for this mashup?" After I chastised myself for talking to myself (again), I thought about a specific assignment, one that we often get questions about at my public service desk. As a class requirement, students in a certain class are required to read several books from several genres. Often, they want "shorter" books because of time contraints. I guess this mashup could help those students find books that fit the genre requirement of the class while also working within time constraints. Of course, they would still need to search for those books in our library...

I also checked out Oakland Crimespotting, an interactive map of crimes in Oakland, California, that also includes the date, time, and type of crime reported. You can also subscribe to an RSS feed for a location to receive alerts about crimes in a chosen area. MashupAwards points out how this mashup takes your local neighborhood watch to a whole new level, but I think that instructors and students in the Criminal Justice program, Police Studies program, and other such programs might find such a mashup interesting.

2. Now it's your turn! Try create your own Mashups by using the Mashup editors.

I'll give it a go, but I don't think I will be blogging about it or linking to it!

Week 10/Play Week 2/Lesson #20: Mashups

Discovery Exercise #1:

On my first visit to Mashup Directory, what do I find on the very first page? SkateSpotter, a mashup that allows users to search, rate, and discuss skate spots, parks, and shops and identify the locations of these spots using Google Maps. You can also upload, view, and rate videos. JN may like ;)!

I know that many of these mashups can be fun, but I wanted to find some library/education type mashups. So, I dug around a bit and found Boulder Library with Amazon Reviews , which should have allowed me to view/access Amazon.com customer reviews and editorials within the online card catalog of the Boulder, Colorado public library, but....it won't load. Sounds interesting...oh, well.

When that didn't work quite as well as I would have liked, I returned to my search and found E41ST. This mashup -- named after New York's East 41st Street, Library Way -- "provides an integrated interface for browsing at Amazon, and looking up at your public library." It is an interesting little mashup. If you would like to try it, you can either sign up for an account or give it a test run by using the guest login.

E41ST allows you to keyword search or browse categories/genres for books in Amazon, and see book covers, customer comments, reviews, etc... If you find a book you are interested in, you can either search Amazon to purchase or to search your library. If you create an account, you can select primary and secondary libraries from a list of available libraries. The mashup will search for books in your primary library's online catalog first; if the book does not appear to be available at your primary library, your secondary library catalog will be searched. As of 09/17/2007, there were no Kentucky libraries on the list of available libraries, but the creator is always accepting new additions. You can request your own favorite/local library be added to the list of supported libraries, but there are some restrictions/requirements.

This mashup also allows you to add items to a bookshelf that you can then make accessible on from web page or blog.

As for the Ten Best Flickr Mashups....

Flickr Retrievr: Fun, but how is it retrieving? Is it really based on my sketch, or is it just random?
http://labs.systemone.at/retrievr/#sketchName=2007-09-17-17-46-28-988361.2

http://labs.systemone.at/retrievr/#sketchName=2007-09-17-17-46-28-988361.4

http://labs.systemone.at/retrievr/#sketchName=2007-09-17-17-46-28-988361.5

Spell with Flickr: Hmm..it does look shockingly similar to a ransom note...




Fastr is fun. It also kind of provides an interesting example of uncontrolled vocabulary/tagging...an answer to one of my 'games' was "throw"...I guessed "toss." Same idea, different words.

Flickrball gave me broken images, but seemed like fun from the description...I'll definitely try it out later.

Not touching Flickr Sudoku.

Discovery Exercise #2:

As for educational value or merit: I am sure there are countless ways that even the "fun" applications could be used in an educational setting...you just have to match the right setting/assignment to the right mashup.

Week Three: More Flickr Fun

i love you (some more)
Originally uploaded by niznoz

For Week Three's second Discovery Exercise, I got to explore some of the Flickr mashups and third party tools. I really liked the Flickr Color Pickr...very pretty and it actually works. I wanted to like the mosaic maker Montagr...and I probably would like it if it would work....grrr! After fighting with Montagr for a bit, I moved on to another interesting sounding application/mashup, which also did not work, but I won't name any names...

*cough...Associatr....cough*

So, this is a picture I found via the Experimental Graffiti Colr Pickr, brought to us by the same individual as the Flickr Color Pickr (Jim Bumgardner). It is pretty, I like it, and I am tired of trying to get anything else to work.