Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Mashups & API: Last Week Assignments!

1. Pick a mashup… any mashup
The medical mashups reviewed in Allan Cho's article are good examples. I tried to find some more related to medical or health and ended up getting several dead links. Then I had to pick any mashup. I searched the programmableweb and found Adactio Elsewhere. I like it. The author put together a variety of personal information from across the web in one place via Ajax scripting and the APIs from Upcoming.org, Flickr, Amazon, and Del.icio.us. Under one roof, you can browse author's Flickr pictures, Amazon wish list, the newest links he tagged on Magnolia, his incoming events, and RSS feeds from his friends and colleagues. Cool!

2. What these bloggers said about privacy?
The search yielded 9570 results. On the first search results page (20 results), none of the librarian bloggers talked about "privacy" in their blog posts. Instead, the commercial sites about free credit reports and privacy protection software appeared three times on the page. Do I need to go to the next page? No. It was not worth browsing further more. This made me think why the search was not able to retrieve relevant results? This also motivated me to create a search roll using Rollyo-- I'm My Own Doctor: searching for health information from 20+ trusted Web sites I selected. I tested a few search on my newly created search roll, I'm satisfied with the results. However, I still can't find the answer to the question.

1 comment:

Allan said...

Thanks for taking a look at my mashups article. The world of Web 2.0 has flourished so much, even within just the past year. We've got many more mashups in the health field now. I had a really difficult time finding medical mashups when I was writing that article. It's really grown since then.

-Allan