Cook up your own combo site

If you were a chef walking into a Web kitchen

, one of the most fun dishes you could cook is a mash-up. Think of it as going into a walk-in pantry and picking ingredients - any Web content or service- for the dish. In Wikipedia geekspeak, though , a mash-up is a Website or Web application that seamlessly combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience. A good example: www.housingmaps.com. The site mashes ( combines ) Google Maps with rental and sale listings on craigslist, an Internet classifield site. The idea behind mash-up is to mix and remix content or Web applications that are available on the Web to create completely new perspectives. Music aficionados will be familiar with the term mash-up. For them , the term refers to songs that are made completely from parts of other songs. According to ProgrammableWeb , a website devoted to mash-up, there are about 3 mash-up created every day. The rate of growth is steady, not exponential. That is probably because complex mash-up require programming skills. Here are a few mash-up ideas to get you started:-

( 1 ) Celebrity mash-up : Mix book titles from Amazon, listings on eBay, photos from Flickr and bookmarks from de.licio.us, tagged with your favourite celebrity's name.

( 2 ) Travel mash-up : Combine your own travel photos stored on Flickr, with news headlinesfrom dig and blog entries from Technorati, tagged with the name of your travel destinations.

( 3 ) Music mash-up : Grab events from upcoming.org, video from YouTube and news from BBC tagged with the names of your favourite artistes.

Create your own mash-up.

Doing one from scratch is no easy task for non-techies. Websites like www.mapufacture.com come to the rescue.

Let us create a map mashup on mapufacture.com using Google maps and news feeds from Reuters.

( a ) Create an account on www.mapufacture.com

( b ) Click on Create a Map.

( c ) Fill in the Title and Description.

( d ) Click on Create.

( e ) Click on add feed and type in the following feed from Reuters http://ws.geonames.org/rssToGeoRSS? feedUrI=http://today.reuters.com/rss/WorldNews.

( f ) Click on the Title of you map to get out of editing mode.

( g ) Click on full screen to enjoy your map.

You can add as many feeds as you like to your map. The key thing to remember is that feeds must have geographical data ( e.g. longitude and latitude ). Feeds with geo data are also known as GeoRSS feeds.

Cook up your own combo site

By: YOKE FONG

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