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Bit Literate: The Digital Survival Guide for Adult Learners
What is a "Mashup"?
A "mashup" is the combination of digital content that you create with functionality provided by some Internet application. A classic "mashup" is the use of Google Maps as a way to provide access to digital photos or web pages. A marker is placed on the map (provided by Google Maps), and when you click the marker you see a photo (or photos) taken at that place. This interface makes the location an inherent part of the information that you have about the photo or page. This is very useful when the use of the information is tied to the location, as with web pages about historical events or wildlife photos.
Here's a particularly well done example of a Google Maps with photos mashup.
As mentioned, the map you see is a standard map from Google Maps, and Google provides tools that make it (relatively) easy to create applications like this. In fact, hundreds of different mashups based on Google Maps are available, and not all are used for fun and vacation photos. The MapEcos mashup allows you to see the environmental performance of industrial sites in your area. If you try this mashup for yourself be sure to zoom in close so that you can click on one of the individual locations and see the detailed information. And be patient, the large amount of data associated with the map makes the response a bit sluggish. That's another aspect of using mashups that is worth noting. The information and data that you provide, and the maps themselves, come from different servers on the internet, are joined, and are then sent to you as a single page. Because of this architecture mashups tend to feel sluggish when compared other types of web sites. You have to allow for this.
And mashup are more then just maps. Google Maps is just one example of the kind of online software on which a mashup can be based. The term actually refers to any application where data that you create; photos, web pages, documents, video, statistics, etc, is combined with some Internet application so that the sum is greater than the parts. Here's another example, this one is called InSuggest , and it also uses photos, this time being loaded from the popular online photo website Flickr.
To use this mashup, drag a photo that you like from the display area to the drop boxes at the top of the page (marked "drop here"). The site then selects and displays additional photos similar to the one you selected. But what does it mean to say that a photo is like the one you selected? Well that's the added functionality provided by this mashup. You can read on the site how the selection of similar photos is made, but it is based on a technology called "tagging". Tagging is an increasingly popular technique for organizing large bodies of information.
This mashup is great if you are looking for photos on a very specific topic. For example, I was recently looking for photos of old dutch windmills. I searched for "windmill" and as you might expect this returned photos of windmills of all types. But among the initial selection were a couple of photos of dutch windmills, and by using those images to refine the selection I was able to easily find additional pictures of the type I was looking for. Of course, finding pictures on this site does NOT give you permission to use the photos, for that you have to contact the copyright holder. A prominent link is provided along with each image.
So how would you link your photos with the place the picture was taken as shown on Google Maps? Well this is actually pretty easy. Google maps provides a feature called "MyMaps" and Flickr allows you to get a URL (a web address) for each photo that you upload. Combine the two and your vacation photos can be viewed through a map interface. Pretty snazzy.
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