Daily Archives: July 14, 2006

Mashup Camp 2 – and THE WINNER IS …. WeatherBonk!

Posted on by
4

The wooden nickels are getting counted and the top number will determine the winner of the 5000 top prize here at Mashup Camp. I voted for WeatherBonk this time which is a very good mashup of NOAA, traffic, and many other feeds over Google maps. David Schorr had a good stack of nickels last time I passed that table. But I have a hunch Frucall may win – it’s a very usable and clever mashup as well.

The format here is such that the “simple to grasp” mashups may have an advantage over the more complex ones. PodBop, the last winner, carried this simplicity advantage.

David Berlind is keeping us in suspense … thanking the great sponsors of this event.

….now final ungiven nickels are getting distributed to the mashup people …

Here are some counts:

LoveCrunch 7+2?
Frucall 8
Jeff’s picture captcha 24 – this could be the winner?
Yobie Goodstorm
Bart with TrainCheck 8+1?
David WeatherBonk 21+1
Jeff with Elephant Drive 20
Cameron Jones, Public Radio Travel Planner – 2
Kurt? music/pix mash…. 2
Foto Tiger 5
Mark with SecretPrices – 13+1
Kung Gao, Frappr – 2
Chad MileGuru – 13
Tom TIKI mash 3?
Mindjet 3
411Synch 2 (surprising – this was GREAT!)
Dave StrikeIron – was not soliciting nickels -1

PubWalk -13
Eric Small Town Guides – ?
RealestateFu – Greg from FrozenBear.com 0 (!) This was a superb mash…what’s going on?

Wait – we may have a TIE! ?? Redistribution is happening….

It’s a tie between WeatherBonk and Mecommerce…(who also had the picture captcha )

The tie has been broken by voting by people moving across the room and it’s David Schorr’s WeatherBonk.

Mashup Camp 2 – Cassie and Drew

Posted on by
Reply

The youngest attendees are getting interviewed by David, who points out that they are the builders of the future….of mashups and the web.

Drew Dara-Abrams is a PhD student at UC Santa Barbara and sister Cassie, at age 16, led some sessions on social networking. She skipped High School (spending a week there) and goes to college now. Drew counsels the next breed of mashups to “think things through” a bit more. Good advice for all of us.

Mashup Camp 2 – Google Gadgets

Posted on by
4

Adam’s talking about Google Gadgets and how powerful they are as a mini content distributor. They are easy to create and are attaining huge usage worldwide. Adam and his team have done a super job of making this fast, easy, and fun. Good google! This is dynamite stuff, and in typical Google fashion they have made it easy, fun, and open.

The Gadget directory is algorithmically generated so the most popular gadgets tend to rise to the top as they are selected by users. Don’t be evil helps define decisions virtuously rather than GoogleOptimizably. Engineering constraints trump marketing ones.

GoogleModules.com and hotmodules.com (these are NOT Google sites) are good sources of inspiration and gadgets.

Translation is easy by having a few lines translated, the upload as a country specific gadget.

Top author? 16 year old Caleb from Arkansas. Countdown gadget is his top and he has several.

Design: Minimize brand unless you are really big where it’s a value adding feature.

Hyperlink at bottom for more info

Hyperlink in title

Promote gadget on your own site (add-to-google button)

Mashup Camp 2 – Day 2 begins

Posted on by
1

… Mashup Thursday begins with MSN sponsored coffee, for which they deserve major caffienated credit.    Part of the interesting buzz here (and I htink at MIX) is how good the LIVE people are and how different LIVE at MS is from the “old” MS culture which has a reputation for slow development and cumbersome approaches.    Maybe it’s the coffee?

HERE  is a list of today’s schedule here at Mashup Camp 2.  Great to see more from Yahoo and Google today.

Why Wikis? We need a blog post to public wiki mashup?

Posted on by
Reply

Am I wrong to be skeptical that Wikis are the right answer to “loose” forms of collaboration such as those found at conferences or within non-corporate interest groups with many different types of folks?

Yet Wikipedia works fanastically?  Is this because it’s a big, long term project?

I’m noticing challenges with the Wiki here at MashupCamp. I cleared spam last night only to find the *same spam* had been returned this morning. Hardins “Tragedy of the Commons” comes to mind in the sense that it’s hard to manage public spaces due to incentive issues.

But more important than spam is the challenge of updating. In a world where so many conference participants have blogs and websites isn’t there a way to collaborate where people update their blogs (high incentive to update, clear spam, etc) and then this content flows into the collective space?

A blicki system? Barriers to participation in Wikis must be reduced and it seems fundamental that successful collaborative systems don’t ask people to do things they won’t naturally “just do”.

Wikis certainly work very well as envisioned by my fellow Oregonian Ward Cunningham who coined the term “Wiki” from, I think, a Hawaiian Bus stop sign. I wonder if his original notion was for more structured and incentified forms of collaboration such as in a company?