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July 31st, 2006

French Court Bars Greenpeace Mashup

A French court has ordered Greenpeace France to remove this Google Maps mashup showing where Monsanto is genetic engineering maize. In retaliation Greenpeace members responded by going into those fields and carving a giant ‘X’ crop circle into the maize. According to this Greenpeace story:

The EU law says that member states are obliged to maintain public registers in order to inform their citizens about the locations of GE fields. But the French Government is dragging its heels in making the EU’s directive into national law, depriving its citizens of vital information to protect against the risk of GE contamination of conventional and organic food.

If you are German, you can find out the locations of GE crops easily by looking on government websites, if you are French however, you are kept in the dark.

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Posted by John Musser as Examples, Gov, Law, News, PopularAllTime at 12:05 AM | No Comments »

July 28th, 2006

Tabulator from Tim Berners-Lee

Father of the web Tim Berners-Lee is working on a new project called Tabulator: “the generic data browser which lets you do useful things with your RDF data the moment it’s on the web.” In his post this week Slicing and dicing web data with Tabulator he includes some screen shots including data browsing and an auto-generated Google Maps mashup. It can essentially get you code-free mashups.

It works by exploring the web of relationship between things, loading more data from the web as you go. Then, if you find a pattern of information you are interested in, it will search for all occurrences of that pattern and display them in tables, maps, calendars, and so on.

Think of all the different mash-ups people have made for putting things like friends houses, photos, or coffee shops on the web. Each a different mash-up for a different data source.

For data in RDF (or any XML with a GRDDL profile), though, then you don’t have to program anything. You can just explore it and map it. And you can map many different data sources at the same time.

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Posted by John Musser as News at 12:05 AM | 3 Comments »

July 27th, 2006

Open Infrastructure

Some interesting thoughts from Tim O’Reilly and Jon Udell on the idea of Open Infrastructure. Tim recently had a conversation with Debra Chrapaty, VP of Operations for Microsoft’s Windows Live, where she noted that “In the future, being a developer on someone’s platform will mean being hosted on their infrastructure.”

Jon has followed-up:

The desktop isn’t the battleground it once was. I float like a butterfly from Windows to OS X to Linux. My home is in the cloud, and that’s the next frontier for the champions of free and open commodity infrastructure…We’ve already seen how open source software projects harness collective effort to produce quality results. We’re now seeing how open content projects such as Wikipedia do the same. Can open infrastructure be far behind?

Jon cites the Coral open content distribution network (CDN) as an interesting early case. Certainly a significant topic in the world of APIs and mashups: how can independent developers not become captive within an ecosystem dominated by the major players like Google, Yahoo!, Amazon and Microsoft.

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Posted by John Musser as News at 12:01 AM | No Comments »

July 25th, 2006

An Amazon and Microsoft Pact

Phil Wainewright over at ZDNet dug a little deeper into some news from Amazon and their just-out-of-beta Simple Queue Service (SQS). What he found was that SQS will be directly supported by Windows Communication Foundation, the web services foundation for Windows Vista (and to be retrofitted to Windows XP).

As he points-out this is interesting news to developers, including those often out of the mashup loop: enterprise developers.

What this means is that a developer can write an application that runs on a Windows desktop or server and use Amazon SQS as the messaging infrastructure to exchange information with systems and applications located anywhere else in the Web.

Anyone wondering what the post-Java EE world might look like has their answer right here. Forget expensive middleware infrastructure. Just pay by the drink for your application-to-application messaging needs, however sporadic they may be. Amazon SQS charges $0.10 per 1000 messages and $0.20 per GB of data, with no minimum fee and no setup cost.

With “simple” but useful and reliable services like Simple Queue Service and the Simple Storage Service Amazon is building genuine foundational components for the internet operating system.

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Posted by John Musser as APIs, Amazon, Microsoft at 9:21 AM | 3 Comments »

July 24th, 2006

More Interesting Mashups, Part 2

Following-up on the last post, another set of the better new mashups:

flicktionary: Test your guessing skills and flickr picture choosing skills in this fun twist on pictionary. Beware — some people tag photos quite liberally.
Overplot: Good mashup that plots fun and entertaining quotes from Overheard in New York on a Google Map.
Dubyabot: A new MSN Messenger robot that will converse with you using quotes from our fearless leader. An entry to the ongoing Invasion of the Robots Contest.

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Posted by John Musser as BestMashups, Examples at 12:20 AM | No Comments »

July 20th, 2006

More Interesting Mashups, Part 1

Besides all of the good mashups from Mashup Camp there has been some interesting, fun and useful mashups added to the directory here. The total is now at 850 mashups. Here’s a rundown of some notables:

The Sheep Market: 10,000 sheep created by online workers. An Amazon Mechanical Turk application. Each worker was paid 2 cents US to draw a sheep facing left. Buy your favorite. Unlike anything before.
Air Travel Emissions Calculator: A Google Maps mashup that allows you to calculate the per-passenger greenhouse gas emissions created by a commercial airline flight between any two airports.
SoundSeeker: Explore the sounds of New York City with this aural map from the New York Society for Acoustic Ecology. Audio is directly integrated into the map marker popups. Nicely done.

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Posted by John Musser as BestMashups, Examples at 12:05 AM | 1 Comment »

July 19th, 2006

eGovernment Mashups

The first API from a state government has now been added to the database here, GovTracker from Rhode Island’s Secretary of State. Found via this series of articles:

Emerging eGovernment mashups from Phil Windley over at ZDNet.
This story from Jon Udell Open government meets IT notes that public data, made available electronically, can empower the citizenry in unique ways.
Over at Public CIO there’s a story on Zillow and the use of public real estate data.

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Posted by John Musser as Gov, News at 12:06 AM | 1 Comment »

July 18th, 2006

Google GData Revisited

A number of smart thinkers recently took another look at Google’s GData API and turned it into an interesting distributed discussion thread:

A Week in the Valley: GData in which O’Reilly’s Nat Torkington discusses his meeting with Chris DiBona and Mark Lukovsky at Google. Mark was the architect of Microsoft’s Hailstorm web services. Key observation: “Atom is quietly becoming the standard for reading and writing to Google.”
GData and Hailstorm from Dare Obasanjo at Microsoft who in looking at how GData builds on the Atom Publishing Protocol and has “begun to question the wisdom of using Atom/RSS as the baseline for information interchange on the Web” given that “when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
Google eats its own dogfood with GData from Richard MacManus follows-up to Nat’s post: “For me, the fact that Google is eating its dogfood and using GData increasingly in its own apps - and getting the thumbs up from developers - says that GData has a promising future.”
Google Calendar and its API in which Jon Udell at InfoWorld kicks the tires of GData.

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Posted by John Musser as APIs, Google, News at 12:05 AM | 3 Comments »

July 17th, 2006

A Tie for Best Mashup

At Mashup Camp last week each attendee was given one wooden nickel with which to vote for their favorite mashup. Then on both days there was a “Speed Geeking” session during which attendees rotated through the Great Hall getting 5 minute demos from each of the 20+ mashup contestants.

And who won? Once all the nickels were counted it was a tie between two great mashups Weather Bonk from David Schorr and HotCaptcha from Jeff Marshall at frozenbear. A final poll of the crowd lead to victory for Weather Bonk and a big congratulations David! (David also created the highly rated Golf Bonk and Ski Bonk mashups). BTW, if you need a custom mashup developed for your business, both David and Jeff are good developers to hire.

For a rundown of all the mashups check one of these three sites:

For more on the very fun and creative HotCaptcha see this story.

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Posted by John Musser as BestMashups, Contests, Events, Examples, Mapping at 12:15 AM | 5 Comments »

July 16th, 2006

Other Mashup Camp Notes

A final roundup of reports on Mashup Camp 2. Check these sites for good, informative posts that both report on what happened at camp but also add a lot to the discussions: