Shift from Mashups to tools for Mashups
May 30th, 2006
Directions Magazine has a short post on the shift from making mashups to making tools for mashups. The premise is that lots of cutting-edge developers have led the way and developed mashups. However, as with most technology, there is a slow, but subtle and necessary shift from “doing-for-doings sake” to “doing-for-something-useful”, which means the tools have to be simpler and more widely used.
The article mentions GeoRSS, which is a technology standard that enables anyone to easily publish geo-data, which other services can then consume to produce mashups for people. Imagine online development tools like Ning having a drop in module that can consume GeoRSS and then pipe this to a map or SMS users. Then any site that publishes in GeoRSS (real estate, events, restaurant deals, etc.) can be “mashed up” without the user having to do any real programming.
May 30th, 2006 at 1:42 pm
Ning already has alpha support for publishing GeoRSS.
June 5th, 2006 at 8:34 am
‘my local guru’ (www.mylocalguru.com) has been developed as a tool for people wishing to build their own ’spatial’ services and applications. ‘tall buildings guru’ is a proof-of-concept blog that shows how you can publish your own mash-up without writing any code at all.
The example blog uses Atom + the ‘geo’ microformat but ‘my local guru’ is just as at home with GeoRSS (both reading it and generating it) - the biggest problem seems to be whether the blog publishing platform provides support for GeoRSS.