Raymond from the iSchool
April 13th, 2007News21
Raymond Yee
April 11, 2007
Minutes
I. Mixing and re-mixing info
A. iSchool course
1. project based course about how you combine and re-combine info
2. he’s a data architect
- he’s writing a book about mash-ups
- he’s putting out a share alike 2.5 license and it would be shared
3. He shows what HTML is
4. XML has led to a lot of different vocabulary when talking about things;
they are made to make things so other people can see what they are talking about.
- the new office 2007 is putting out documents in xml which heralds the way we take in information.
- Flickr has an API which means you can program Flickr
It’s way for program to build tools; they are building a platform ; they are an intermediary
-if you’re a intermediary then that’s a lot of power
- people have built mash-ups on top of Flickr
5. what does XML look like? In XML everytime you start a tag you have to tell it when it ends.
http://www.programmableweb.com/ for mashups
6. top databases: Amazon, google, youtube
Ex:
housingmaps.com, cross between Craigstlist and google maps
chicagocrimes.org
7. web scraping
II. The mashup spirit
-recombining what other people have done. You have to combine big data sets and big bandwidth.
A. what makes a successful mashup
1. we’re doing a bunch of reporting: God, sex and private life
2. will include audio, video and written stories
recommended: The Scholar’s Box
“gather, create, share”
a. mashups are trendy and show the power that is available to individuals.
b. We have the opportunity to put information out for people to reinterpret info in their way
3. He did a wiki for Dan and Bill’s class
Raymond things people should be able to put together their own maps to fact check reporter’s “facts”. Say check census tracks.
www.mapbuilder.net
what kinds of skills and assistance to be able to do this:
• have a vision
o is it worth doing and what does it take to do it?
o Set aside the technology and draw a picture of how you would put this together. To talk concretely about a particular story.
o He’s interested in building this personal computing platform and mine the database.
o Help the reader more deeply understand your story.
o Ex. Marriages: mixed marriages. To find three or four conversations and report on them.
o Raymond is a Presbyterian elder married to someone who is Unitarian and half Jewish.
• How many of these types of marriages are there
• What are other people talking about
• How do people deal with the topic?
4. other functions of mash-ups
a. to be able to combine any data in a digital form that is out there.
b. To try to CONNECT these
c. Think for example calendar and event databases, upcoming.org; the sharing of events. To be able to send calendar/events to a friend who can put it on their calendar.
d. One button publishing on wiki, integration
e. Social bookmarking
f. Library catalogues
i. You can program Melville
ii. Something that crawls through my wishlist and compares it to recent acquisitions from library and then once the book pops up at the library, I’m the first to get it.
5. pitching our ideas to him
a. polygamy
b. highest/lowest church attendence
6. Twitter
a. Learn about your program and what you want to do with it.
b. We can use it for transparency
c. We can put our entries in tweet to drive traffic
Recommends: The New Age of the Book
- It’s not just about sticking hyperlinks in.
- Is Raymond on delicious? Get his delicious address?
- skill set
o programmer
- sketch out what interactivity you want.
- Bob is thinking about stories, not information, technology and data.
- Start with an idea
Ex. http://projects.washingtonpost.com/fallen/
Once news outlets start putting up APIs then they become a platform, they become a real resource that people go to first.
Something innovative is a new angle.
May 21 we will look at stories and what information we need, how we can use that information, what media we use for it.
Look at programmable web and technorati.
Upload all pictures in Flickr. Tag it “God, sex and family”
Web team report back:
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SL
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