We've finally made it to the last week of the MLA Web 2.0 CE Course. This week, we focused on Mashups and API. This topic was the most unfamiliar to me, so I spent a lot of time exploring different mashups and doing the readings.
I found two mashups that I thought were especially cool. First, is HousingMaps, which combines google maps and CraigsList housing (rentals, for sale, sublets). Here, you can select one of 27 cities/areas, a price range, and then can see housing options for that city. Since I've just started house hunting, I wish Lansing/East Lansing was one of the twenty seven (it's not)! There are other similar mashups - I'll have to check more out to find one that has many cities featured.
Mapdango is also really cool! It combines google maps with Flickr™, WeatherBug ®, Wikipedia™, Eventful ®, and Gruvr™. For example, if you search for Detroit, MI, you will retrieve a google map of the area, as well as weather info, relevant entries from wikipedia, pictures of the area from Flickr, upcoming events and concerts, and more! Mapdango also allows you to print a report for a location that contains all of the information mentioned above. I will definitely use this when I travel places!!
This week we also searched the librarianblog searchroll on Rollyo for privacy. Although I think the ability to search a selected number of sites is a great idea, I wasn't all that impressed with the search results I retrieved. Privacy wasn't mentioned anywhere in the first three blog posts. Search result #4 didn't mention privacy either, but came up because privacy was a term in this blog's tag cloud. I also didn't like the ads that were displayed within my search results. A search for ALA went a little better than the search for privacy...
The 8 weeks have gone by very fast and I've learned a lot! I am really enthused about the various Web2.0 topics that were covered in weeks 1-8 and will definitely incorporate many of them into my professional and personal life. Thanks MLA for offering this free CE course! It was wonderful!
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1 comment:
damn! you know all the good stuff!
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