Mash It Up

"Mashups" are a new development on the web where some of the major sites (e.g. Yahoo, Google, Flickr) have opened up the api (application programming interface) of their own applications, like Google Maps, so that people can create combinations that make something new. Developers get to use the ready-made tool and the api supplier gets to harness a lot of creativity and energy to do new stuff they might never have thought of. Google / Yahoo Maps can be combined with all sorts of things to make information regionalised, so you can combine Google Maps with restaurant reviews and get a site which can recommend a good restaurant wherever you are. This is a site which records what mashups have been built and there are already 1148 that it knows about. You can of course get some strange ideas, like this site that tracks school shootings. I thought it was just the US, but then I saw the title was "Recent World Wide School Shootings" and panned out. The great majority are of course in America. Kind of ghoulish though. This site would be more interesting to go back to; it's a Google Maps mashup blog.