Revisting Mashups

The above screenshot is of a mashup which won an award for excellence in mashing. This was a competition held by the Australian government last year.

It was created by Eric Auld, David Lewis, Simon Wright.

"Know Where You Live data.australia.gov.au used datasets from
Australian Bureau of Statistics 2006 Census NSW Crime Data Powerhouse Museum Collection (flickr) State Records Office NSW (flickr) State Library of New South Wales Collection (flickr)/

Know Where You Live is the prototype of a data mashup that displays a range of Australian Government data based on your geographic location along with a Google satellite map and relevant photo from the Powerhouse Museum Collection, the State Records NSW or the State Library of New South Wales collection. The initial prototype was created in under 24 hours as part of the inaugural Govhack event in Canberra in October, 2009."

Visit the competition site and see the winners and explore their mashups! Mashup Australia Winners

On an older post blogging about the International Day of People With Disability, I produced a simple mashup using zeemaps which showed a map and events which were held in our area, Lithgow NSW. In the post about the Rydal Daffodil Show, I used my daughter's mashup of her picture of daffodils using Big Huge Labs pop art app. These mashups are simple and are already set up to use compared to actually using APIs (Application Programming Interface) or Web Development Tools. Google, Twitter, Flickr, etc offer these APIs so that people can develop their own mashups.

Reading from Keen View's blog, mashups are a broad term. This blog breaks it down into these 3 areas in describing them!

" Front end mashup tools: these tools help build web front ends like dashboards using widgets/gadgets and little to no programming (iGoogle, PageFlakes)


Back end mashup tools: these tools combine web-accessible data and services into more useful web services that can be called easily using a REST-ful interface (Kapow, Yahoo pipes)

Integrated mashup tools: these tools make it easy to build end-to-end web applications that link web widgets to data and services."
 
 
I have had a go and used a back end mashup tool called Yahoo pipes.
 
My pipe is a clone taken from Brooklyn Public Library's pipes and I have substituted their search term with my own which is Wanglibrary's Twitter. The pipe ran successfully but now I have a encountered a problem, when you you click on the above link.

warning error fetching http://summize.com/search.atom?q=wanglibrary (420 Unknown)

Help!!!!!!!!!

So, take a look at Public libraries and new technologies blog from NSW State Library and learn more about mashups.