Week 8 (Yippee!) - Mashups and APIs

I think this week has been the most interesting by far of all that we've experienced in this class. Mashups hold such promise. I loved the podcast by the Library 2.0 Gang discussing the possibilities - especially for making the library catalog more relevant. Their digression on whether we should be looking at new technology to fix our problems or looking at our problems to see how they need to be fixed was very thought-provoking. The scariest thing about this week is that it feels like creating a Mashup is way beyond my abilities. I can think them up, but my coding skills are pretty limited. Maybe this points to the next class I will have to take.

So I've been exploring these Mashups, and for my assignment, I need to write about one. The one that has caught my attention is World News Map at http://www.tsmaps.com/. I guess I've been helping my kids out quite a bit with their homework over the years, and it seems that current events are a perpetual assignment. What better that to have a world map that allows you to click on a country and see the top news headlines relating to it! Fun for kids. Fun for moms. Fun for librarians! Now I want to see a map with health care statistics for each country! Or a US map with state licensure information popping up.

Rollyo was interesting. While I enjoy blogs, I do find the number of them overwhelming. I love that there is a friendly way to search them. Searching librarian blogs on privacy was fun. We are so passionate about it. The Shifted Librarian, The Annoyed Librarian, and the LibrarianinBlack were all writing about privacy. There were the expected rants about our government, but I particularly appreciated The Shifted Librarian's examinations of young people and their lack of concern about their privacy with respect to what they post on Facebook, Flickr, etc. The Shifted Librarian also had a nice discussion about OpenID (which allows a user to have a single id/login that can be used across much of the internet) and how we librarians can use the trust that the public has instilled in us to help educate them about privacy issues online.