Mix and Mash…

Mix and Mash Tools

An interesting phenomenon is taking place in the web-world. It started when companies like Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, and others started to open up access to their websites at a lower level than simply visiting their web-pages. They started offering web services that made it possible for other web pages to access information automatically from their sites and transparently use the raw information in their own web pages.

A bunch of websites sprang up that used this interconnection mechanism to link two or more such web services providing a unique site that offers something the other two never intended to do. The programmableweb site lists over 1,600 such mashups including the canonical housingMaps, which linked people’s classified ads on craigslist with Google maps to plot their locations dynamically on a map.

As captivating and easy this was in concept, creating mashups required a fairly nuanced level of programming skill. Not anymore. TechCrunch profiled a number of websites scaffolding the process of making mashups so anyone can quickly create sophisticated dynamic web applications. I played with all of them to see how they worked because of a project I’m working on at VCDH, and all are free:

• Yahoo Pipes
  Yahoo has made a graphical tool that lets you drag elements and create a pipeline of actions between them. For example, you could add a text box that asked you to type the name of dog type, and then drag over a Flickr web service to show pictures of five dogs of that type in my town. It’s a simple example, but they have though out the problem well and pipes can be linked to other pipes and publish (the dog example is here). While the mechanics of coding are eased using Yahoo Pipes, it suffers from being too close to the actual structure of web-coding. The app is kind of slow and a little buggy, but shows great promise.
  http://pipes.yahoo.com
  
• Teqlo
  Teqlo takes pipes to the next level in terms of ease of use. It is built on top of OpenLaszlo, a powerful Flash-based Ajax framework and is very application-like in its feel. For example, I made a “teqlet” where I added an eBay search box, and when I clicked on the results, the item’s info was added to a Google spreadsheet and its location mapped onto a Google map. Connections between the three main objects were defined by creating any number of interactions that defined actions and reactions. It currently only runs on Firefox but looks like it will be a great app when it grows up.
  http://www.teqlo.com/www.teqlo.com/files/Intro_To_Teqlo.html (screencast)
  
• Dapper
  Dapper has two complementary tools: one for people who want to share content on their website with others and is a nicely done “mashup maker” that makes it easy to “scrape” existing web pages for the data they contain, rather than relying on whether or not the make of that page has provided a webservice. The scraper tool is amazing: You choose a web page to look at, interactively select areas to scrape up as fields, groups those fields into tables and provides you with a public URL that can generate an XML file, RSS feed, email alert, or Google mapped result.
  http://www.dappit.com/
  www.dappit.com/dapperDemo (screencast)
  
• Openkapow
  Openkapow is more of the same page scraping scenario as dapper, but instead of relying on a web-based, application, it uses a Java-based downloadable program (available in Windows and Linux only). While Dapper has only limited programmability, Openkapow has a more robust graphical language for making sophisticated queries.
  http://openkapow.com
  
• Proto
  Proto tries to blend desktop apps with the web. Like Openkapow, it too is a Windows download as opposed to a webservice and provides access to embedded Flash and a Visual Basic (VB) development environment. It is a very slick application that builds on VB’s promise of making drag and drop programming by using components as opaque building boxes, and drawing connections in a pipeline between them. Each component has published properties and methods, and you can build upon them and then publicly re-publish share. This is a decidedly Windows-centric approach, and is not really web-based because even though the source data may be live, the viewing must be done from a Windows desktop with downloaded software. That said, it seems very powerful and useful in business situations.
  http://www.protosw.com/www.protosw.com/products/intro-movie (screencast)

All of these mashup makers are flawed in some way, but I really like the direction they are taking. The ability to use the myriad of resources on the web as interchangeable building blocks will help move us into the next phase of the promise of the Internet some pundits have called Web 3.0.

Grammar Girl Podcast

An Arizona technical writer, Mignon Fogarty has created a popular podcast that helps make learning grammar a little less dull. The free podcast can be subscribed to via iTunes, RSS, or listened to directly on your computer
http://grammar.qdnow.com

---

Audio of the Week

Steven Pinker on Words and Rules. Harvard psychologist and writer Steven Pinker gives a riveting talk on the structure of language, using irregular verbs as an example. He is a funny and engaging speaker, and even if you aren’t interested in language, the talk is completely absorbing. His books are great too, The Blank Slate, The Language Instinct, Words and Rules, and my favorite, How the Mind Works are must reads.
http://www.tvo.org/podcasts/bi/audio/BIStevePinker030406.mp3

Book of the Week

Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think. Stanford psychology professor B.J. Fogg has written a good look at how computers can be used a persuasion tools and takes a critical look at the elements involved. Fogg calls this field captology, and it is a useful taxonomy to look at how computers are being used to change people’s attitudes and behaviors
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060005696/stagetoolscom

Got News?

If you have any items you think fits this NewsWire, please feel free to email me at bferster - @ - virginia.edu (remove the dashes and spaces).

Thanks!

Bill