This week’s activities and resources on our LIBR 246 class are on mashups, defined as a web application that combines two or more data source to create a single integrated tool. An example of a mashup is taking data like sales figures, job postings, sales and rental ads and using some sort of geographic tagging and overlaying it over a map. The best example I’ve seen is what David Troy did with twits from Twitter and images from Flickr as seen in the two sites he developed, Twittervision and Flickrvision. Why do people create mashups? In some cases, to showcase their creativity, like when they mix a music track to a totally unrelated video and in some it is to extend the utility of data sources, like a map of house rental ads or the Every Block site of Adrian Holovaty that provides a neighborhood’s crime statistics taken from police blotters. Its popularity is growing, with an estimated three new mashup created per day according to Darlene Fichter in her 2007 presentation, A little bit of this, a little bit of that, sponsored by the SirsiDynix Institute. And the reason for this is because you don’t really need a lot of technical or coding background to create one, especially with tools like Yahoo Pipes or the Google Map API.
So for this assignment I created two simple mashups. The first one gathers RSS feeds of a certain topic and present it in a format that can be embedded in my blog. The second one pulls in images from photo-sharing sites similarly tagged and present them in a slideshow and using their geo-tagged information show where they are on a world map. I posted these mashups a few days ago on this blog. Here’s a brief description of what features of Yahoo Pipes I used, as well as, an image capture of how the pipes look.
1. Living Green tips mashup.
The aim of this mashup is to combine different RSS feeds of sites that provide tips on how to minimize one’s carbon footprint. I used Yahoo Pipes to create the mashup and followed the instruction provided in this week’s activities. First, I did a search on Google of sites that gives useful everyday tips. I settled on Daily Green.com, Green Living tips and Ideal Bites.com. I then signed into Yahoo Pipes to construct my mashup. I used the source module called fetch feed and entered the feed URL of the three sites. Then I dragged the operator module called sort to be able to set up how the feed would display. I choose to display it by publishing date of each feed sorted to display in descending order. Last I connected it to the output pipes and debugged it. The image on the right side shows the pipes I constructed to make the Living Green tips mashup.
2. Images tagged as library on photo sharing sites mashup.
The aim of this mashup is to gather images tagged on Flickr, SmugMug, and Photobucket with the words library building. I again used Yahoo Pipes but the set up is a bit complicated than the first one. Here’s an image of the pipes:
I used as source modules the Flickr module and a fetch feed for SmugMug and Photobucket. On the Flickr module I just defined it as images of library. On the fetch feed module I first did a search using the search term library building and did a RSS feed of the result. I then copied it and pasted on the module. I used an operator module called union to be able to combine multiple sources. This is then funneled into a operator module called filter to block images that does not contain library or library building. I then added a truncate module to limit feeds to 100 so as not to overwhelm the pipes. Then I added a locator extractor module so Yahoo Pipes can overlay the result of the feeds on a world map. The image below shows the pipes for the image tagged as library building on photosharing sites mashup.
