Thing 40 – Mashup the Web

I found, when I looked at this list, that I had already played with a few of these sites. Here’s what I did:

I had somehow managed to miss Pandora and last.fm. So now I have signed up for each site and the mashup as well. I have found some new artists that I hadn’t heard of before. It is an easier site to enjoy than one that I had found before, called Live Plasma, which also makes music recommendations, but without the sound. Clearly this is much more fun. I’ve created two different “stations” and look forward to pleasant listening.

I had already begun to try Bkkeepr to keep track of what I read. I read voluminously, but often have only minimal retention of specifics. I am hoping that I can get a sense of what and how much I read this way. So far the biggest problem has been that I have already got a backlog of books I have finished and haven’t put into the list yet.

Wheel of Lunch is a hoot. The next time my family can’t make a decision, I think I will have to pull this one out. Lunchbox was also a nice option.

I had also already found the Walkable site. I found it interesting where they placed my house on the concept—75 out of 100—when I find it much more so. The distance the site considers walkable is under a half a mile, which is clearly shorter than people should be willing to walk. They also excluded sites that I would have included: for example, my local food coop isn’t listed as a grocery store. It is fun, though, if you are going to be visiting someplace else, because you could actually decide whether or not you would need to rent a car based on some of the information.

Thing 33 -- Travel 2.0

Generally, the Internet and its various tools has had an effect of leveling the playing field, taking the expertise to the average person. On the other hand, someone like my mother, who has no computer and vehemently doesn’t want one (she’s 80, she deserves a break…), is at a significant disadvantage. Without help, she would end up overcharged and out of the loop in any travel should she try to plan on her own. But I suspect the group of people she is in is smaller than those who are willing to research things on their own or with a librarian’s help.

I also had an experience with the prevalence of Travel 2.0 after my vacation last summer. I had posted some photos on Flickr to share with friends (thanks to the original 23 Things) and got an unsolicited email from an organization that puts together Travel mashups that wanted use one of our photos as part of their site. Since my son took the picture, I gave him the credit. Here's the photo.

Now on the the specifics for this entry.

ARTICLES -- Grossman’s article on Travel 2.0 makes some good points. Right now, I suspect that companies are becoming even more customer-service friendly in order to try to stay in business.

TRAVEL BLOGS AND PODCASTS -- The Window Seat didn’t do much for me. It didn’t have almost anything on the one location that my constituents might be interested in—Israel. The entries seem bland and not particularly helpful. Travel 2.0 Blog also had no tags relating to Israel.

The Lost Girls was entertaining, and if one wanted to go to those particular spots, the entries could be useful.

So rather than keep whining about what I didn’t find on what you listed, I went and searched for myself. Here are few that I found:


Real Travel -- Israel This general website, Real Travel, has a section on the Middle East generally and Israel in particular. It collects entries from people’s blogs about the place and allows you to sort by most popular and most recent. I found the entries thoughtful and potentially useful; they also included numerous photos. It also had links about hotels, restaurants, travel planning, etc.

Travel Blog -- Jerusalem This site is less well organized and harder to figure out how to use. It focuses on current material and doesn’t allow an easy was to sort it.

REVIEW SITES – I first looked at Trip Advisor and found it pretty good. I like that it includes so much, but it didn’t have an easy way to focus in on a particular area. I chose to look at Chicago, since I lived there during college. But the site had no feature (that I could find, at least) that would allow me to narrow to a particular area within the city. I came closest when I searched on something in that area, such as the U of Chicago, which then let me see specifics in that neighborhood. But it didn’t list neighborhoods by name, which would have been nice.

IgoUgo feels like a cleaner, less distractingly busy site. However, it suffers from the problem above, but even more so. When I tried to get neighborhood specific information, I only got various people’s blog type entries. No map, no sites, nothing else.

So my assessment is that these sites are good if you have a car and are willing to drive all over the place, or if you just want to focus on the downtown areas of a city, but are less useful if you want neighborhood specifics. Still, they are a good place to start.

TRAVEL JOURNAL SITES – I went to Vcarious first, and read someone’s journal about travelling to Scotland and the Isle of Skye, since that is a trip I would like to take. I found the entry enjoyable, although I don’t know how much I would trust something like this to help me plan my journeys.

Mapness looks as if it could be interesting, but the one site that came up when I searched Jerusalem appeared to be tracing the travels of someone from the 1300s. Not surprisingly, there was no video posted… I could see this one being fun to do, if not as much to read. But it didn’t have much there at this point.

TRAVEL MASHUPS – Hotspotr would have been a help to one of my friends in the last week, who ended up paying $7 for an hour of internet at her hotel because she couldn’t find any cafés with free wi-fi.

The Travel Mashup awards site was fun. I liked one that had nothing to do with this Thing, called Portwiture, which finds photos on Flickr based on what you post on Twitter about. A lot of fun. I’ve posted mine in this thing.

Woozor was allowed me to get a ten day forecast for the UK, which could be handy if one were planning that trip to Scotland that I discussed above.

I don't think these sites would be of much professional use for me, since I work at a K through 8 School. However, I might use some of them for my own travels.

Thing 32 -- Google Maps and Mashups

This map traces the walks I did from my childhood home to the schools that I attended. I found photos of each spot on the street level Google maps as well, and put them at each site. It was frustrating because the map kept speeding away from me--reason unknown. It was relatively easy to do the bits and pieces with practice, although I am unclear how effective the map will be in the blog. Each time I tried to paste the html directly into the post, it crashed Internet explorer. (Yes, I know other browsers are friendlier, but I share this computer with my family.) I tried doing it as a gadget, but realized that wouldn't be directly in the post. So I am trying this way (pasted into the post) and we will see what happens. Other frustrations--the descriptions of spots must shift into html, and apostrophes left odd code. So I went back and rewrote to avoid the odd characters popping in. Just in case there are issues with the map, I made the title a hot link to the Google Map site as well.

I think these mashups could be quite useful if you were doing a scavenger hunt, a walking tour or a family gathering. But I really don't see much practical application for me at work. Still, you never know. I'm using other stuff I didn't think I would need either. Isn't that the point of this program? :-)


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Thing 5 -- Flickr Spelling

Well, with perserverance and some help, I managed to spell out a sign and then paste it into paint and then save it as a jpeg, all so that I could upload it into my blog. (see top of screen). I like the sign, but it was a lot more work than I expected. Still, I suspect it would be easier a "next time" if I try again.