Thing 40: Mashup the Web

I love these mashups that include searching capabilities. LibWorm is going to be a BIG help to me for current library-related research. Ping.fm will also be a major time saver for posting news to all of my social networks and blog sites. What is good about Ping.fm is that you can customize the connections to your social networks and blog sites by limiting what type of posts you want sent there (status updates, microblogging, and blogging). I will be able to post to Facebook and Twitter at the same time using Ping.fm, thus bringing my Twitter account back to life. :)

I was amused but confused by Visual Headlines. The site advertises that it can retrieve photos that accompanied major news headlines. Instead, it retrieves some pretty useless photos that may share the same keywords as the news headlines--not actual photos of world events or people featured in the news. This site needs a lot of work--Social Studies teachers, beware.

Another site that irritated me was Polyvore. Having no interest in piling a collage of clothes together, I wanted to create something in the field of "Art and Expression", but that function was not available for mere mortals with a free account. Unless you do a lot of online shopping and want to share photos of items with mall buddies, I don't really see much use of this tool in the library; Google Images can achieve the same results if someone is looking for a cardigan sweater or sandals.

I discovered a site called Webmashup.com, where you can search for mashups that people find, post, and review. There are some great mashups here. BreakingNewsMap, for example, allows you to find out where a news story took place on a large Google map. You can search for news articles on any topic, and the mashup will bring you to the city/country on the map, provide a hyperlinked caption to the news article, as well as photos of the event or featured person. Much more useful than "Visual Headlines".