February 28th, 2006

Map Mashups as PR

Traditional media’s use of APIs for promotional purposes is picking-up lately. Mike Pegg has been highlighting a few new Google Maps examples over at Google Maps Mania. The two most notable ones, now added to the mashup listings here are the Sopranos Google Maps mashup from HBO and the NBC’s Apprentice Cast Map from Virender Ajmani.

The Apprentice mashup is an example of how you don’t have to be associated with a show or its PR to make a good mashup. Other recent examples include the Geography of Seinfeld and the Jacktracker for the show “24″. (As a side note: the Jacktracker map was built at Wayfaring.com, a good community mapping site that helps simplify and enhance the process of creating a Google Maps mashup.)

The Sopranos map is quite slick with a Flash-based navigation and movie clips integrated into the map itself (again via Flash).

HBO has clearly put some time and money into the Sopranos mashup. How long until ‘Google Maps Mashup’ becomes just another PR campaign line-item in television and film circles?

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Posted by John Musser as Examples, Mapping, Media at 5:49 AM | 2 Comments »

February 27th, 2006

CBS News Covers Mashups

Veteran technology reporter Larry Magid just published this good introductory story on mashups and Mashup Camp over CBS News. Nice to see some more mainstream media coverage. And, as a bonus, you can also listen to Larry’s podcast interviews with myself, Taylor McKnight (creator of Podbop which won the best mashup award at last week’s Mashup Camp), and Adrian Holovaty, creator of mashup ChicagoCrime.org (which won the second-place award last week and earlier won the 2005 Batten Award for Innovations in Journalism).

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Posted by John Musser as Media, News, Press at 12:42 AM | 3 Comments »

February 23rd, 2006

Yahoo! PHP Dev Center

Anyone writing mashups and web services-based applications in PHP should check-out the new PHP Developer Center at Yahoo!. It has some very useful how-to articles, code samples and other resources on using REST and SOAP, parsing XML, caching, geocoding, and more. The examples are Yahoo! based but the techniques and code can clearly be applied elsewhere.

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Posted by John Musser as HowTo, Yahoo at 12:13 AM | 3 Comments »

MashupCamp Contest Photos

Scott McMullan, JotSpot’s director of developer relations, captured this good set of photos of the competitors in this week’s Mashup Camp mashup developer contest.

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Posted by John Musser as Contests, Events at 12:08 AM | 1 Comment »

February 22nd, 2006

And the Winner Is…

Podbop! This is the winning new mashup as voted by attendees at this week’s MashupCamp. Podbop’s creator Taylor McKnight was awarded a powerful Sun Niagra/TI Ultrasparc system by Sun President and COO Jonathan Schwartz.

Part of what makes this mashup a winner is that it’s genuinely useful: enter your city or other location and Podbop will go to the Eventful database to find what bands are coming to town starting today and the simultaneously get a set a mp3 (legal) downloads for those acts so you can check-out the acts in advance. It will also automatically create a podcast feed of this data for you so you can download it to your iPod or other media player. Nice UI as well.

And the voting wasn’t easy, there were about 20 entries and runners-up included ChicagoCrime.org (which gets more impressive every time I see it) and the inspired new application FlySpy (not live yet) which lets you visualize upcoming airfare prices over time so you can see when to get the best deal.

Overall the conference was a big success and had a high-quality signal-to-noise ratio. Which speaks well of the efforts by organizers David Berlind, Doug Gold along with advisers Mary Hodder and Doc Searls. It was about seven or eight weeks from the time they said hey, let’s do this conference to this week’s delivery of successful event! Could be a viable new “lightweight” model for conferences.

If you’re interested in attending MashupCamp 2, with a time and date TBD but not too far off, you can sign-up here (there’s already 235 people on the list).

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Posted by John Musser as BestMashups, Contests, News at 1:27 AM | 2 Comments »

February 21st, 2006

The Mashup Camp Day 2

If you’re interested in goings-on at Mashup Camp Day 2, here are some good links:

• Dan Farber at ZDNet has descriptions and screenshots of some of the mashups in competition today.
• Photos tagged with ‘mashupcamp’ at Flickr.
• And more new podcasts of the event from Podtech.net.

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Posted by John Musser as Events, News at 4:02 PM | No Comments »

Tracking Meme Trackers

There’s a class of interesting new applications known as “memetrackers”. These apps use a variety of algorithms to identify, group and track memes. In this case as threads of conversation online. Examples include Gabe Rivera’s Memeorandum, Kevin Burton’s TailRank (for more on memetrackers see TechCrunch and Mashable).

Adam Green noticed that there’s an ongoing discussion among some of the developers of these applications happening over at Battle of the Memetrackers. There’s lots of interesting ideas and questions to be tackled in this space. Towards that end Adam suggested that a group blog be created as a forum for discussing these ideas and that possibly folks including Adam, myself, Dan Gillmore, and others might help coordinate.

As Adam notes: “Appropriately enough, the discussion of this idea will probably appear on the memetracker sites.”

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Posted by John Musser as News at 2:24 PM | 1 Comment »

Mashup Camp Day 1

It was a very busy day at Mashup Camp. Big crowd, lots of energy, and lots of good discussions. Here’s some of the session notes from the mashupcamp wiki:

• The day got of to a good start with a well-attended discussion on the issues and questions surrounding Business Models in Mashups.
• Later was Indentity Management and Security in Mashups.
• How Mashups Fail.
• API Best Practices and more.

We also had a session with Chris Law and Paul Martino who created the WSFinder API wiki and Dave Nielsen of Strike Iron, the web services marketplace. We wanted to brainstorm ways to make the process of publicizing and discovering APIs more standardized and consistent. Chris has some of the initial thoughts written-up here.

For other Mashup Camp news you can also check the ZDNet blogs and for excellent podcasts check-out Podtech.net.

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Posted by John Musser as Events, News at 12:19 AM | No Comments »

February 20th, 2006

Some Mashup Questions

Peter Rip takes a hard look at Some Problems With Mashups. He cites some very valid concerns: Can you add value? Can you build real applications? Consumer processes are simple (thus where’s value?), and consumer business models are tough on mashups. The last one means that APIs often imply: be successful using this, just not too successful.

There will be plenty of discussion on these sorts of questions at Mashup Camp starting today.

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Posted by John Musser as Issues at 12:24 AM | No Comments »

February 19th, 2006

Making Maps Mashups

Adam Green has nice concise writeup on how he created his first Google Map by hand. Interesting part is how it follows what seasoned programmers do when tackling something they haven’t done before: start with something that works and then keep it working while modifying (aka hacking) and learning. In this case the end product is the RSS Alley map of companies and people working with RSS in the Boston area.

And speaking of maps how-to, Alex Barnett recently pointed-out this new 3-part tutorial on Ajax and Virtual Earth. The tutorial itself is a bit sparse but there is some working code for the .NET folks.

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Posted by John Musser as News at 8:10 AM | No Comments »