Week 8: Mashups and API

Mashups are an interesting idea and a new concept to me. Before I took this class, I didn't know what they were. From the Mashups awards web site which you can filter by date and by category, I visited: Site volume, 2itch, and Social Scan.

In Site volume it was very interesting to see how words and phrases are used in five different websites: Digg, You Tube, Myspace, Flickr and Twitter all at once, the graph type display makes it easy to read.

I also liked 2itch, a good guide for finding information on restaurants, stores, gas stations, etc. a good place to visit while planning a trip.

Social Scan was another cool mashup to visit for checking a website link popularity among other popular social sites. I checked my library website against all these and I didn't see it was a very popular site!!

Rollyo Librarian blogs

The concept of privacy while using the Internet is almost non-existent in my opinion. The Shifted Librarian and Librarian.net bring excellent issues on why a user has to be careful while posting information in the Internet and even though you don't post your personal information yourself, records that have your information can be stolen or by mistake made available to other parties.

We read in the newspapers over and over again that certain credit card companies or retailers have "lost" their users personal records by mistake.

Another interesting issue is the way Google handles personal data which again in my opinion this privacy is also non-existent. From one stop website where you can check e-mail, type a document, do a scholarly search, shop, check for maps, read the news, search and personalize your computer information using Desktop, Goggle can store all your information in its server and keep it or sell it to other parties (this nobody knows but we all suspect it happens).

Custom Searchroll

I created a searchroll on Toxic Information.

http://www.rollyo.com/beatrizv/toxic_information

I would like to thank MLA and all the wonderful instructors for giving me the opportunity to take this class. I attended the spring MLA Webcast on Web 2.0 where a lot of applications were mentioned but it wasn't until I had the opportunity to explore these resources that I felt more comfortable using them.

I hope in the future MLA offers an advanced Web 2.0 class and I would like to see other topics offered like Evidence-based Medicine and Public Relations and marketing tools.

Again thank you for offering this class.