Wow, when I saw we were doing mash-ups this week I was going to get my dancing shoes ready for some serious booty shaking, but then I realised it wasn't music mash-ups that we were going to be looking at... (one of my personal favourites being the infamous Kylie / New Order mix).
But I digress... I guess I've used quite a few different websites with "mash-up" stuff happening on them, but I wasn't really familiar with the use of the term in that context. I guess those online library catalogues which have links to Amazon book reviews are a good example of library related mash-ups.
I found a good website which has a whole bunch of mash-up apps called Programmable Web. One that caught my eye was a blog value calculator. It works out the value of any blog in US$, by using, and I quote, "the Technorati API to compute and display what your blog is worth using the same link to dollar ratio as done in the AOL-Weblogs Inc. deal". I have to confess that I don't fully understand exactly how it all works, but I do think the idea of calculating the dollar value of a blog is pretty cool, and it even provides you with some html code to display the value on your blog for all to see. I tried it out on this blog and it was valued at $0.00... so I guess that means I still have plenty of room for improvement!
It would be good to have something similar which could calculate the dollar value of a library website, as I think most of them would be worth quite a bit, but this particular app only seems to work with blogs.
I've never come across Big Huge Labs before, but boy could I easily waste a few hours here! I had heaps of fun transforming some of my photos into useful things like fake ID cards and movie posters. I ended up doing a "double mash-up" by transforming a picture of my dog into a Warhol print and then transforming that into a jigsaw. I like the look of the trading card maker as well. I think a range of super librarian trading cards would be really cool... could be a good idea for a Library & Information Week display!
Here's an interesting site that uses a mash-up approach... it's basically pretty useless, but it looks cute!
1 comment:
I had not come across the blog value calculator - the learning blog is also only worth $0.00 (perhaps we need to creat our own mashup). You might be interested in the Maine State Library value calculator http://nswpubliclibrarieslearning2.blogspot.com/.
I am glad you had fun with the masshups.
Ellen (PLS)
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