OF MASHUPS AND MAPS

My final topic blog post relates to Mashups: what are mashups? How do I create a mashup? And finally, how do I embed them into a blog post?

In order to understand what a mashup is, I headed to Wikipedia and sought some answers. I learnt that a mashup is a web application that takes information from one or more sources to create a new interface, layout, webpage etc. An example of this may be where a restaurant embeds a map from Google Maps to its website to provide location details to potential customers. Mashups can also include source items from a variety of web applications such as existing videos, music, podcasts, images etc. and by applying them to a new document source, a different meaning and context is produced.

The mashup task that I set myself was to create my own map through Google Maps, and then to embed the item into this blog post. As I discovered, this was a lot harder than I thought and was quite a challenge. I have only ever accessed Google Maps as more of a casual user, usually if I wanted to look up a specific address, but I had never created my own map, so I was a little apprehensive about undertaking this task. After clicking on the "Create Map" button, I then followed the onscreen instructions, where I managed to search and locate the area I was interested in: RMIT's Swanston Academic Building, the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne Museum and the University of Melbourne. The route as detailed below in my map is a round trip of the various cultural and academic institutions around inner-city Melbourne, which I frequent on a regular basis, so it has some personal significance attached to it. To highlight these institutions I used many of the different tools that Google Maps has to offer: placemarks and descriptions were used to indicate important landmarks, shapes and lines were used to mark areas of importance and show a specific route and distances between them. Once the map had been designed to my specifications, I then used the "link" function to cut and paste the map's HTML code into this blog post. At first I wasn't able to copy the HTML code as there was a problem with the embedding function - I'm not exactly sure what this was, but after a while of messing about with various other menu features and logging off and on again, I had success with copying the code, but then when I went to paste it into my blog this is what happened:         

<iframe width="425" height="350" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" src="https://maps.google.com.au/maps/ms?msa=0&amp;msid=202176608712310290576.0004d9e575575ee757538&amp;hl=en&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;t=m&amp;ll=-37.803358,144.965837&amp;spn=0.014343,0.015964&amp;output=embed"></iframe><br /><small>View <a href="https://maps.google.com.au/maps/ms?msa=0&amp;msid=202176608712310290576.0004d9e575575ee757538&amp;hl=en&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;t=m&amp;ll=-37.803358,144.965837&amp;spn=0.014343,0.015964&amp;source=embed" style="color:#0000FF;text-align:left">Stuart's Round Trip Map</a> in a larger map</small>

For some reason the code didn't translate into the Google Map that I thought it would, but instead remained in HTML code. This was frustrating to say the least! I tried several attempts to correct this, but each time I got the same result. So, after yelling at my computer for a while, I decided to cut the HTML code from Google Maps and then click on the "HTML" button in Blogger, paste the code and then click back on the "Compose" button, and hey presto, it worked. And here is my Google Map the way it was intended to be seen: 



View Stuart's Round Trip Map in a larger map

Some other interesting examples of mashups that I tracked down: 

(1) Book Depository where it is possible to watch other people shop live via a Google Map

(2) LivePlasma a discovery engine that enables the user to search for music, movies and books with related results being displayed in a virtual map that contains links, videos, reviews etc. 

(3) Gumtree a site that allows users to post free ads to sell household goods, collectibles, cars etc. and images and Google Maps can be added to a listing to enhance the selling potential. 

This topic has been very useful by not only giving me insight into what constitutes a mashup, but it has also challenged me to create my own, which was a valuable learning experience. Mashups can be important tools to librarians and information professionals as they allow for a combination of multiple information sources to be aggregated into one document. For example, a library website could use a Google Map to pinpoint their location, as well as providing links to images, video tours, and podcasts.       

** What happens when Mashups go wrong **
image taken from: http://fc06.deviantart.net/fs70/f/2010/231/3/9/Mashed_Potato_Head_by_ColtonBalske.jpg