Instant mash

The government wants us to submit ideas for mash-ups, as reported on the BBC Technology website. For educational use, I blogged previously about the idea of seeing learning object origin on a map, so when looking in Jorum, for example, a map could show (user specified) content and where it originated from. This sort of approach might give a more immediate visual representation of where educational content is centred on; a map could display markers for geography learning objects depending on their geographical content, for example.

Let’s go for a drive

A bit of fun really, but this 2D Driving Simulator shows interesting use of the Google Maps API. Of course, it would be nice if the car wasn’t able to drive through buildings but you get the idea. In fact, the concept works better with an aeroplane.

Mapping still seems to be the most popular category for mashups, judging by ProgrammableWeb’s Mashup Dashboard (click ‘All’ rather than ‘Last 14 days’). Interestingly, ‘social’ has been as popular a new mashup in the last two weeks, although only four per cent overall compared to thirty-nine for mapping. With increasing numbers of mashups for sites such as Delicious, Facebook and LinkedIn, does this suggest a new focus for mashing?

ROAR, DOAR and Route 66 (kind of)

Note: Slides available from here.

I attended the RSP Repository Services Day in Nottingham this week. Held at the city’s university, the event was to “showcase key repository and search services,” with several presentations on offer. One of the interesting points came during Peter Millington’s presentation on OpenDOAR with his mention of Repository 66. A mash-up of Google Maps, and ROAR and OpenDOAR data, the site shows a global view of repositories, with the possibility to display each marker according to the number of items within each repository. I found this interesting – a take on a tag cloud displaying more popular tags in increasing font size – as it enhanced a simple snapshot of repository population.

It got me thinking: we could see more of this sort of example in other representations, e.g., when displaying a list of previous SIG meetings, perhaps they could be sized according to the number of references in blog posts? Or could blog post headlines be sized according to the number of linkbacks or comments?

Unfortunately, flight times meant I missed the day’s afternoon discussion: feel free to leave a comment about it if you were there. Of course, I should have known my flight home would be delayed, although at least we were spared the usual “technical problem”: there are not many ways to disguise a hole in the runway!