now picnic

I first heard the word "Mashup" applied to music. Some guy named DJ Danger Mouse combined the Beatles' White Album and Jay-Z's Black Album into his own Grey Album. It was passed around and downloaded, and he got sued and everything. This combination of two artists into one song was called a mashup.

Now, mashup can apply to combinations of software, too - not just songs. Shortly after Google Maps came out, people starting writing clever applications for it, combining the map information with some other data, like the listing of apartments on Craigslist. It's simple, but it still impresses me - you can click right on the apartments and see the pictures, then click on the link to go directly to the ad. Or, sort by price, by pets... zoom in, look around. I can think of the hours I've spent looking for apartments that could have been saved by such a easy-to-use application.

And there's more: linked with Google Maps, you can find coverage of NPR stations, bars and restaurants in NYC, close to subway stations (make sure to mouse-over the bars listed in the left panel! oooh, pretty!), breweries and brewpubs and bars (go up to main page to get to the listings for cities like Chicago), even the locations of future solar eclipses. (See you in Cleveland in 2024?) (A truly geeky wishlist: NPR stations, good food and beer, astronomical/geographical info...)

These, and more Google Maps Mashups can be found at "Google Maps Mania." Good stuff.

And then, there's Google Earth. It's a fun way to kill a few hours, visiting Niagara Falls, Paris, the pyramids in Egypt, etc. And! This brings me to the point. Nature magazine had a recent article about scientific mashups - using Google Earth and data from a bunch of places to map the recent avian flu outbreaks. People can sort by animal/human cases, by date, and click on links from the data points to get to journal articles, and the source of the data.

You can see the avian flu data yourself if you have Google Earth. Neat!

The staggering amount of available data and the way that we organize it are both changing the way that scientists work -- it's fun to watch.

(P.S. - The blogspot spell check doesn't know the word "geeky" -- irony, anyone?)

// posted by kc @  10:49 PM   1 comments