Week 3 : Exercise 2 : Thing 1 - Mashups

Rather than sticking to flickr mashups, I thought I'd go through the latest "mashups" that have been interesting/fun for me.

The first is not technically a mashup in the true sense of the word, but still allows the user to "mash" together two previously un-"mashed" things.

Dylan Messaging allows you to send a message to someone else - the point of difference being that the message appears on the 'flash-cards' that Bob Dylan holds in the music video of Subterranean Homesick Blues. A notification is sent to the recipient, and they click a link to see the video-message you've created. Here's a link to one I created.

[UPDATE] I uploaded a video to play directly from this blog.


Another mash-up of a more productive kind, is the site deliGoo. deliGoo mashes the search ability of Google, with the convenience and productiveness of del.icio.us. In order to describe deliGoo, I probably should describe del.icio.us first.

del.icio.us is a website that works exactly like the favourites and bookmarks that we normally use to save websites that we want to come back to. The difference is that the information is stored under your username on a site, instead of at your computer at your desk. Why would you do this? Let's say you saved an important site to your work computer, then needed to pick it up from home to finish some work. If it was saved on the work computer you wouldn't be able to. Instead you can save those sites to a website, then pick it up wherever you are (as long as you have internet access). It's also possible to get extensions for your browser that make the process of saving sites as easy as saving it to your computer.

The other advantage of del.icio.us is that you can add tags to your saved sites. A tag will relate to what the site is about, acting as a kind of access point for you later. For example, if I saved the ACL website, I would tag it with: auckland, library, books, reference, work. Then if I searched my saved sites for "auckland" it would give me every site I tagged with that keyword (eg. Auckland City Libraries, Auckland Museum, Auckland University). This comes in more handy when you start searching for more specific sites where you can remember what it's about, but not the name... believe me, it's very handy!

deliGoo takes this one step further. As the name suggests, deliGoo allows you to search through not only your del.icio.us bookmarks, but also the pages which those bookmarks refer to. This is like doing a selective Google search through only the pages that have been important to you.

The above function is limited to pages you've already seen. You can also use deliGoo to search through all of the pages in a certain tag others have made. In this sense, you are searching through all of the pages that are important to everyone else. This cuts through a lot of the usual junk that Google can throw at you after the first page of results.

For me, with almost 400 bookmarked websites, deliGoo has been able to cut down my search time exponentially.