Mashups are applications that combine data sources from more than one traditional information services to produce a new resource that didn't originally exist. It provides a richness to the information that the original designers may not have thought.
I follow Will Richardson on Twitter.
Recently, he twitted that he noted that Barack Obama was on Twitter as well. In fact, Obama keeps an up to date log of his activities and where he is at any given point in time on the campaign trail. So, I decided to follow Obama for a while and the trips that he was making country-wide was impressive. How does one person manage to do that without exhaustion?
I spent some time reading of his efforts and then decided to look for Hillary Clinton and, sure enough, she was doing the same sort of thing.
I was so impressed with the attempts of these two politicians that I blogged about it and called the post "Following the Candidate". In my post, I happened to mention that I was sure that someone might have done a mashup of Obama's trips with some form of mapping service.
The next day, there was a comment on my original post from a person who identied himself as Tony Hirst and mentioned that he was playing with such a mashup and supplied this link to see Obama's itinery. The process involved some enhancements to the original and bring together Twittervision, Geo Twitter, and Twitter Map.
There's got to be a lesson in there. In fact, there are so many, where do you start?
Well, I guess for the healthy paranoid, there's the fact that a seemingly innocent activity such as making a Tweet reveals so much information.
For the healthy optimist, there has to be a break through moment for the power of information and the connecting of threads previously untied.
For the life long learner though, there's another affirmation of the power of the web and, in particular those tools that spring from the Read/Write web.
From an innocent observation posted on Twitter, to a comment on a blog post, we have someone who provides a workable solution to some unknown person just making a comment.
For the capitalist, what's in it for him?
Sometimes, it's just the job of being able to do something that had never been done before and to exercise some skills to provide that solution.
for the educator, we need to sit back and just say Hmmmm. If we're not teaching students about Read/Write web tools and their power, who is?
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