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".
Showing posts with label mashups. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mashups. Show all posts
Friday, June 12, 2009
Friday, March 20, 2009
Thing 32: Google Maps and Mashups
Google Maps Mania is awesome. Bloggers from around the world posted street views from Google Maps of their cities. Who knows what you will see there!
I had no idea that Google Maps had so many features. I could customize a Google Map to locate places of interest, so that is what I did...I wanted to look for the nearest Indian restaurant. Here is a bird's eye view of what, according to Google, Minnesota has to offer in the way of Indian (light blue dots), Japanese (dark blue dots), and Asian (brown dots) restaurants. Before you go up north to eat any Indian food, however, keep in mind that a search engine only recognizes keywords, but cannot necessarily pair a keyword up with the information that you want. All of the light blue dots on the map are either tribal colleges, tribal offices, restaurants with the name "Indian" in them, or mistakes (Panda Buffet is a Chinese restaurant). So Google played with me while I was having a serious samosa craving!
100 Things to Do with Google Maps Mashups is going to give me a lot to play with the next time I plan a trip or expect a package. Calculating taxi fare using TaxiWiz.com is also going to be very useful.
In regard to what Google Maps Mashups would be useful in my library...any one of these, as you never know what type of reference question someone will ask. In response to "Where's the bathroom?" I could direct someone to safe2pee.org...
A cool website that uses Google Map technology is The Kremer Collection site, which allows you to get closeups of paintings in the collection. The site also provides historical information about the paintings. You will be able to count every feather on the ducks of this painting:
I had no idea that Google Maps had so many features. I could customize a Google Map to locate places of interest, so that is what I did...I wanted to look for the nearest Indian restaurant. Here is a bird's eye view of what, according to Google, Minnesota has to offer in the way of Indian (light blue dots), Japanese (dark blue dots), and Asian (brown dots) restaurants. Before you go up north to eat any Indian food, however, keep in mind that a search engine only recognizes keywords, but cannot necessarily pair a keyword up with the information that you want. All of the light blue dots on the map are either tribal colleges, tribal offices, restaurants with the name "Indian" in them, or mistakes (Panda Buffet is a Chinese restaurant). So Google played with me while I was having a serious samosa craving!
100 Things to Do with Google Maps Mashups is going to give me a lot to play with the next time I plan a trip or expect a package. Calculating taxi fare using TaxiWiz.com is also going to be very useful.
In regard to what Google Maps Mashups would be useful in my library...any one of these, as you never know what type of reference question someone will ask. In response to "Where's the bathroom?" I could direct someone to safe2pee.org...
A cool website that uses Google Map technology is The Kremer Collection site, which allows you to get closeups of paintings in the collection. The site also provides historical information about the paintings. You will be able to count every feather on the ducks of this painting:
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