Yesterday was apparently International Geographic Information Systems Day and, in a ritual that’s likely to be repeated in future years as a part of the celebration, University of Oregon geo student Zak Ham had a crowd of 30 people gathered around his laptop (sounds like speedgeeking, doesn’t it?) to look at the results of his collaboration with Oregon State University student Cullen King; a mashup called ridewithgps.com.

According to the Oregon Daily Emerald’s Trevor Davis and Eric Florip:

Ham and King’s Web site (www.ridewithgps.com) is a mapping service for recreational enthusiasts. The site uses information from Google Maps and provides elevation data from the U.S. Geological Survey. That means bicyclists, for example, would be able to know the exact terrain of their ride, shown in a 3-D graph that includes height change and direction.

“You can basically ask yourself, ‘Where am I going to go on my Saturday ride?’” Ham said. He added the Web site took a couple thousand lines of HTML code to create the site.

Ham said the Web site should be fully operational in January.

It’s awesome to see the college crowd getting into software mashups.  Students that are coming out of school are clearly going to be one of the big drivers of the mashup ecosystem as they enter the workforce.  Hopefully, Ham and King are aware of MapMyRide.com — another mashup that essentially does the same thing (but offers topological ride visuals in 2D rather than 3D).

I logged into ridewithgps.com just to see what it’s like.  I was unable to draw any ride routes as the user interface suggested I do (the developers say the site won’t be ready until January) .  What wasn’t mentioned in the news story about the mashup was the social network aspects of the mashup.  Based on what I saw, the developers are clearly looking to facilitate some connective tissue between users of the mashups — sharing profiles and gear specs as well as some sort of messaging infrastructure between the two. Perhaps they should look into mashing MapMyRide.com with their social networking ideas in the context of an existing social network like FaceBook (or, making it compatible with OpenSocial).

Dublin Mashup Camper is apparently looking for a mashup of a different sort at Mashup Camp. Wrote Conor earlier today:

I’m getting a bit sick of mashups like “find the nearest Twitter users in a Starbucks with free wifi using Google Maps” with the map centred firmly on downtown San Francisco. Guess what? We have one Starbucks in Munster, the wifi ain’t free and Google Maps in rural Ireland is rubbish.

Conor goes on to list some APIs that he’d like to see mashed into something special for Mashup Camp Dublin.

Conor isn’t alone in looking for something just a little bit different.  The search for something special both in the broader mashup category and the business mashup category is why we have two contests running concurrently at Mashup Camp.  The first of these is the Best Mashup Contest and the other is the IBM-sponsored Business Mashup Challenge.  The point of both contests is to encourage developers to come up with something different and special.  IBM of course is looking for something you see very little of: hard-core business mashups.  The company is right in its belief that mashups can play a huge role in the prototyping and deployment of useful behind-the-firewall (or outside-the-firewall) applications by enterprises.  Back at the last Mashup Camp (#4, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA), Third Nature president Mark Madsen wowed us with his very business-oriented Cold Call assistant (see the video here).

I’ll tell you what I’d love to see.  With so many job seekers publishing blogs and having created profiles in FaceBook, Plaxo, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, Jaiku, etc, I’d love to see a mashup that returns a single page with a link to anything in the uber-social network that’s related to a job candidate.  Seems relatively doable and you never know what you as a hiring manager might learn from a job candidate’s MySpace page or blog.

Alexia Golez (blog, Jaiku) was the first Dublin Mashup Camper to answered one of our trivia questions correctly. Via Jaiku, the question was:

Mashup Camp was inspired during a party. Who’s party? At what event? With whom was the discussion?

By way of a Jaiku comment, Alexia wrote:

Here? http://wiki.mashupcamp.com/index.php/AboutMashupCamp
:). I was going to pretend I knew the answers..

Alexia is correct. The About page on the Mashup Camp Web site says the following

As sort of a proof point that the most interesting things happening at any event happen during the coffee breaks and after-hours meetups, Mashup Camp was initially inspired by a discussion that took place between Camp co-founder David Berlind and Yahoo! Developer Network’s Eleanor Kruszewski during Pluck’s after hours event on Dec 12, 2006 at IDG World Expo’s December 2005 edition of its Syndicate Conference. As Eleanor spoke of the many API’s that Yahoo! was making available to mashup developers, it became evidently clear that as important as syndication APIs like RSS and ATOM (the focus of the Syndicate Conference) were, the larger pool of APIs that included RSS, ATOM as well as all the other APIs being published by companies like Yahoo!, Google, A9 (Amazon), eBay, Microsoft, EVDB, and others was the big picture — a big picture that would need an event that was far broader in scope than Syndicate if a member of the press like David were to satisfy his appetite for information regarding all of the Web’s programmable interfaces in one place.

A quick scan of the event landscape turned up nothing in the way of such an event — one that wasn’t vendor specific (as many developer events are) and one that was technical in nature where the root discussions were developer-esque in nature and worked there way up from there.

The rest, as they say, was history. We held our first Mashup Camp in February 2006. By the way Alexia, thanks very much for plugging Mashup Camp Dublin! Not registered for Mashup Camp Dublin yet? Register here.

At the suggestion of Dublin Mashup Camper and ie.blognation.com blogger Conor O’Neill, I’ve started posting a series of brain teasers to the European developer community through Jaiku (which seems to be where many of the European developers — especially those in Ireland — seem to hang out). The first five of these were as follows:

1. Mashup Camp was inspired by during a party. Who’s party? At what event? With whom was the discussion?
2. One of the earliest mashups involves something called ScrapePI? What’s ScrapePI? What mashup? Who wrote it?
3. Mashup Camp is based on Open Space methodology. Who was the Open Space facilitator for the first four camps?
4. What famous mashup DJ has performed at the parties for two of the three Silicon Valley based Mashup Camps?
5. What two developers won first prize at the first Best Mashup Contest at a Mashup Camp and what was the mashup?

My Jaiku home page is here or if you want to tune into the RSS feed for it, go here.  All of the answers can be found on the MashupCamp.com Web site.  Most of them are in the wiki area.

Hello Mashup Artists,

I have written a five part blog series on building mashups with Greasemonkey. Greasemonkey is a Firefox plugin that allows you to write JavaScript based mashups for any web page. It requires no modifications to the original site.

My first two posts start with the basics of Greasemonkey and how it can easily be used to build a mashup. The latter three posts discuss the merits of Greasemonkey within the enterprise, and when it is the right tool for IT projects. I also discuss issues such as security and deployment. I hope you find them useful!

• Blog 1: More Mashups: Using Greasemonkey to Weave New Features into Web Sites
• Blog 2: Building a Greasemonkey Mashup Tutorial
• Blog 3: Greasemonkey in the Enterprise: When is GM the Right Tool for IT?
• Blog 4: Beware of Greasemonkey’s Inverted Security Model
• Blog 5: Solving the Greasemonkey Script Versioning Problem

Peter Laird

BEA Systems

Mashups are not something for tomorrow - they have already arrived. This can be seen by the increasing number of mashup tools that are available.

I have been writing about a number of mashup tools on my blog, and I encourage you to take a look. Here is my list of tutorials so far:

Ajax + JSON + Google Maps = Hello World Mashup

Intended for newbies to mashups starting with minimal web programming skills. This example shows how easy it is to build a Google Maps mashup using the following technologies: HTML, JSON, Javascript, Ajax, and the Google Maps API.

Building a Data Driven Mashup using Microsoft Popfly

This tutorial shows how to build a Microsoft Popfly mashup using a data feed that we build. This mashup uses: Popfly, JSON and Javascript technologies. Note that Popfly requires you to install the Microsoft Silverlight plugin into your browser. You will be prompted to do so before viewing the mashup.

BEA WebLogic + Microsoft Popfly = Enterprise Mashups

This tutorial integrates our previous work with Microsoft Popfly to include an enterprise data service provided by BEA WebLogic Portal. This shows the promise of enterprise mashups within Popfly.

Schmapplets: Google Maps Construction Tool for the Non-Technical User

Schmapplets is a tool that allows a non-techie to build a Google Maps based mashup. If you want to get Mom going on creating mashups, Schmapplets is the tool to use. Mom still won’t have any idea about what you do for your job, but that’s a much bigger problem.

BEA WebLogic Portal + Swivel.com + Excel = Enterprise Data Mashup

In this blog entry I explore an approach that allows spreadsheet data to be managed by IT, and then visually mashed up with other data sets. This solution combines the Content Management capabilities of WebLogic Portal with the data mashup features of Swivel.com.

Enjoy!

To celebrate Sunshine Week (March 11-17th), the Sunlight Foundation is offering a $2,000 prize for the best “Web 2.0 Mashup” that displays information about Congress.

The Sunlight Labs resources page includes links to API, Data sources, and examples.

We hope individuals take the opportunity to create something new, but any mashup developed in the past six months is eligible.

Inspiration:

This contest was inspired by the explosion of simple mashups in the last year, and Sunlight’s commitment to using new tools to make Congress more transparent. Last year, Sunlight Labs mashed up a database of earmarks in the Labor and Health and Human Services Bill with Google Maps, so that people could navigate a map of the United States covered with icons representing earmarks, and learn more about those earmarks - this is the kind of fun project we are hoping to see more of.

Redmonk’s James “we’re not 3rd tier” Governor:

…..Adobe just acquired a Romanian software firm called InterAKT that builds Dreamweaver extensions, but will also and give Adobe a more compelling Javascript story. [This is another easy merger integration through Eclipse case - building to Eclipse makes software company M&A far easier.]….This deal is notable because even if Flex (Adobe’s proprietary AJAX platform) is a success, we’re going to see plenty of Javascript rich apps out there first, so Adobe needs to embrace and extend, not go for full bore replace… So why not acquire a slick Eclipse-based Javascript editor?

Oh, and to your partner Steven “the fugitive” O’Grady.. you coulda called me with that one phone call they allow you. We’re still holding that room you rented in our house (here in MA).

Ryan Campbell (by way of Chad Dickerson):

…..there’s a lot of questions about how to actually go about creating an API for a web application…There are two types of heavily used APIs for web services: SOAP and REST. Google is one of the major players with a SOAP based API while Yahoo (and most of their recent acquisitions) have taken the REST approach. More often than not, a “Web 2.0” service you come across today will probably be using REST. What do these acronyms really mean?…The rest of this tutorial covers building a REST API….

Infoworld:

AOL will open up its Internet telephony service AIM Phoneline to external developers to let them create hardware devices and software applications it …. AOL will give developers access to the AIM Phoneline platform via APIs (application programming interfaces), the company said Thursday….. AOL, a subsidiary of Time Warner, will make the APIs generally available in this year’s fourth quarter, but it will show devices and applications built with the APIs at next week’s Fall 2006 VON Conference in Boston….The program includes a competition for developers called the Open AIM Phoneline Developers’ Challenge. AOL will accept AIM Phoneline applications between Sept. 11 and Nov. 30. The winners will be announced in January 2007. The first-place winner will receive US$3,500, while $1,000 will be awarded for second place.

Coolio. Any of you developers out there gonna enter? Let me know and I’ll blog about it.