ThatCamp2008 - Raymond Yee's Wiki

Questions/Issues

How to connect mashups to "humanistics practices"?
Is this about just tools? Can you see an argument in a mashup?
What are existing sources of data for humanistic research?
What are some good mashups that are not just cool demos?
Do they show new connections?
How to get our data so they are mashable?
What lessons to draw from existing mashups?
Where to put the effort: on the exposing of your data to others or creating "finished products"?

Refs:

Note: Session loosely based on a talk I gave on Friday, May 29 at the Library of Congress, part of the (webcasted) Digital Futures and You series

Questions/Issues
My book

Quotes from Intro

Examples
Yahoo! Pipes demo
Photos from Flickr
Flickr API
To Learn More
Other References
Contact Info

My book

My book blog: http://blog.mashupguide.net/ -- you'll find the complete text for my book, licensed under a CC license: http://blog.mashupguide.net/toc/

Quotes from Intro

How many times have you seen a web site and said, “This would be exactly what I wanted—if only ...” If only you could combine the statistics here with data from your company’s earnings projections. If only you could take the addresses for those restaurants and plot them on one map. How often have you entered the date of a concert into your calendar with a single click instead of retyping? How often do you wish that you could make all the different parts of your digital world—your e-mail, your word processor documents, your photos, your search results, your maps, your presentations—work together more seamlessly? After all, it’s all digital and malleable information—shouldn’t it all just fit together?

In fact, below the surface, all the data, web sites, and applications you use could fit together. This book teaches you how to forge those latent connections—to make the Web your own—by remixing information to create your own mashups. A mashup, in the words of the Wikipedia, is a web site or web application “that seamlessly combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience.”1 Learning how to draw content from the Web together into new integrated interfaces and applications, whether for yourself or for other others, is the central concern of this book.

[....]

Will mashups remain cutting-edge forever? Undoubtedly, no, but not because they will prove to be an irrelevant fad but because the functionality we see in mashups will eventually be subsumed into the ordinary “what-we-expect-and-think-has-always-been-there” functionality of our electronic society.

Moreover, mashups reflect deeper trends, even the deepest trends of human desire. As the quality, quantity, and diversity of information grow, users long for tools to access and manage this bewildering array of information. Many users will ultimately be satisfied by nothing less than an information environment that gives them seamless access to any digital content source, handles any content type, and applies any software service to this content. Consider, for example, what a collection of bloggers expressed as their desires for next-generation blogging tools:

Bloggers want tools that are utterly simple and allow them to blog everything that they can think, in any format, from any tool, from anywhere. Text is just the beginning: Bloggers want to branch out to multiple media types including rich and intelligent use of audio, photos, and video. With input, having a dialog box is also seen as just a starting place for some bloggers: everything from a visual tool to easy capture of things a blogger sees, hears, or reads point to desirable future user interfaces for new generations of blogging tools.