Imagine you are at Enclave nightclub on a Friday night and suddenly you hear two songs being played against each other. This is called a mash up. Now you are at home surfing the internet late afternoon looking for a house and you come across housingmaps.com and you wonder what it is. Well that my friend, it a website mash-up!
As college students, we are always trying to hustle by finding the cheapest apartments in the greatest locations. If we just look at a map we know where the good neighborhoods are, but there are no listings. If we look on craigslist.com we find the listings but may not exactly know which neighborhood it is in. Housingmaps.com combines both quikmaps.com (which we’ve used) and craigslist.com (we we ALL definitely know).
Another website that is very similar to housingmaps.com is chicagocrimes.com. It combines a map with the exact location of the crime selected.
As university journalists, all these websites are very useful to us. For all us search engine fanatics, we can safely assume that Google and Yahoo are two of the most popular search engines. What would happen when you combine both? You get www.doubletrust.net which combines top search results from both search engines and also shows results that do not appear on one or the other’s site.
My favorite mash-up website that I have seen after thorough investigation is http://popurls.com. It combines some of the biggest social, political, news, entertainment websites. It features websites we’ve worked on in class such as twitter and delicious. It has the top You Tube videos and the top Flickr photos.
You can find all the news you would ever need on this one website with combinations such as Google news, Newsvine, and the famous NY Times. Want to watch a clip of your favorite Family Guy episode? Well it is on popurls.com.
One of the best things about this mash-up is that it can be personalized! You register with the website and indicate your interests and the website caters to you. The homepage only features what you want it to.
Websites like these are crucial for a journalist because they save us time and in the news world it is all about who can report it first. Instead of having to visit each website and looking for a story the story comes to you. Mash-ups are definitely worth getting to know and definitely worth checking out!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment