Alexia Blogs

It’s been a very long time since I’ve been inspired by a group of mixed-skill folks, like I have been at MashupCamp. Each and every group contributes to this Mashup stew.

There’s the business-heads focussed on ROI, seeing the fruits of harvesting enterprise and web data. Those that hail from humanities who come with a sociological tilt. The hackers who splice data sources apart, see how they work and think that there is no box. The beginners who are scrambling to digest the syntactical grace of JavaScript and PHP, while trying to stay on top of the big picture. The infrastructure and tool providers helping all in sundry to achieve and excel in their sphere of web apps.

All enthusiasts. All eager to listen, learn and teach. All loving the beauty of recycling our information to make a compelling, situational offering for end users.

The RTE website despite it’s recent facelift still has to work on minimising user clicks around it’s real estate. What I can’t for the life of me understand, that despite working on the Look and Feel of the site, social bookmarking and sharing methods are hidden away in a separate ‘Share This’ popup. Would it not be easier to stick these social sharing tags into a widget and add it to the template that the news pages are using?

Users are inherently lazy about interacting with the UI. One of the primary tenets of UI design and interaction experience is that users should be presented with as few mouse clicks and keyboard hits as possible. Simple is best. After searching about for *that* piece of info, in *that* subject, now you’re going to make me explicitly navigate to a popup? If folks with vanilla Wordpress installations can simply add social bookmarking and sharing tags, what’s so difficult about the IT department of a state broadcaster implementing it across they flagship offering? Laziness, ignorance or a blatant disregard for browsers.. take your pick.

EDIT: Fixing categories.

Day one of MashupCamp 5 was an absolute delight.. So many buzzwords, technologies and points of discussion. Some of my takeaways in short-form with the thought-provoking presenters in brackets. My thoughts/questions in italics.

1. Content is king. Your mashup is nothing with good data (John Herren, Dan Gisolfi & Andreas Krohn). How much more data is out their waiting to be monetized and how can enterprise mashup enablers capitalize on this market? Yes, Kapow has a web harvesting tool, but what about enterprises that still depend on heavy backend systems? What are other providers doing in this space?
2. RSS is a big driver for mashups.. Some of the best mashups depend on it (John Herren& Dan Gisolfi). I like this idea. RSS may billed as ‘Really Simple Syndication’, but it enriches our online streams immeasurably. There’s still?talk of ATOM vs RSS. From today’s presentations, IBM are talking about ATOM as it’s more descriptive. Is this the Betamax wars of mashup feed technologies?
3. Seeing the potential in visualizing data from dispersed sources across spacial, timely or graphical views makes a mashup a winner (John Herren). Are there emerging models for visualizing data in different use case scenarios??For example, human beings like to visualize stats as graphs. What trends are we seeing mashups move in the future to become a more ubiquitous and natural part of our web habitat ? Can our research leaders predict where mashup UIs will be in five years time?
4. Mashup devs are only scratching the surface of social networking mashups. This has two effects. Privacy will become a bigger issue as more of our lifestreams are scraped (John Musser). The fast adoption of social networking could trigger a gold rush of mashup development. Will this be a bubble?
5. No matter what your skill level is - you can make a mashup. (Martha Rotter) Mashups are universal. It’s a democratic way to share the collective knowledge of the web. Even if you have zero experience you can use Popfly- in this case, you are not going to win a prize for creativity, but you can make a Popfly app all of your own and use it on Live spaces or in Facebook .

Any fellow MashupCampers have opinions here?

Post frequency will be all over the place this weekend. I’ll be mashing up, will you?

If you jump over to Ticketmaster.ie now, you may be lucky enough to pick up early bird tickets to next year’s Electric Picnic for E199. Via Conor on Jaiku.

I’ve got a case of the sniffles.. Here’s a few interesting links I fell across.

I love trends, me… Is the rising tide of sushi restaurants over steak restaurants in US, a boon to Democratic party hopes for Election 08?

Excerpt from Craig Unger’s ‘Fall of the House of Bush’ on how George W. found Jesus. Yes and that story of being converted by Billy Graham that was telegraphed during the 2000 election is apparently a lie. Interesting piece. Another tome added to my want list.

More trends.. Top 1000 Bloglines Blogs. Via Jezlyn.

Buffalo Springfield ‘For What It’s Worth’, just the audio for this, but what audio.

1. Facebook: Not having activity in Groups in my news feed. Could the brains behind Facebook make this happen and give folks the ability to tune it to their tastes?

2. Twitter and Jaiku: Re-sorting of contacts every time I refresh the page.. C’mon, be consistent..

3. Twitter: Clunky rendering of web UI in all the browsers I’ve tried - IE, FF and Opera.

4. Jaiku: That gaudy green colour scheme

5. Twitter: Can’t delete favourites [OK- this is working for me now, a blip in the Matrix]

Matt, the t-shirt king, celebrates his TCritic win.

3G doctors - the future of far-flung and out of hours medicine? Via Conor of BlogNation Ireland.

Richard Delevan’s piece on gay marriage for last Sunday’s Trib. Thought provoking. Love the line, “In the Dail debate last week, Dr Martin Mansergh, a guy whose IQ is as distant from many of his party colleagues’ as theirs is to a carrot….”

The Budweiser Clydesdales, because it’s getting colder and I’m wearing my Winter socks

Lucozade fireball.. Impressive, but look at the responsible parents.. Like, c’mon.. Okay, and don’t try it at home…

More evidence that pop music flows in Swedish blood. Sambassadeur ‘New Moon’

I love the way this thread developed. Starbucks - good or bad for coffee producers? So, take your moral standpoint and click through to see on which side of the fence, you sit..

Am I the only one who finds Disney’s latest foray into TVs repulsive? Who wants Mickey ears their HD Ready LCD? You may say the kids - but aren’t kids the fussy ones whose taste changes from day to day by just keeping tabs on what their pals like.? The design of this telly would get old. Very, very fast. Anyway, do you know of many parents that buy HD Ready TVs for their kids?

It’s only available in Japan at the moment, for the price-tag of ?540. I don’t expect to see it over here in the near future.