Mashup Guide

I'm pleased to announce that my first book interview is now online: Working with Data Sources, part of Jon Udell's Interviews With Innovators. I was excited and a bit nervous talking to Jon over the phone, someone whose work I've admired for years. Undoubtedly, I was pleased with his take on my book:

The book is chock full of good examples. Even if you’re an experienced developer of mashups that involve Flickr, del.icio.us, Eventful, and the various mapping services, you’ll learn helpful strategies for using these services individually and in combination.

It turned out that we didn't end up talking that much about my book. The abstract of the interview captures how we did spend our time: "On this edition of Interviews with Innovators, host Jon Udell asks Yee about teaching students how to work with existing data sources, and on ways to expand the supply of available sources."

Take a listen to the interview -- there's a lot of food for thought, especially because Jon provided tons of insight into the subject. I'll follow up tomorrow with my reflections on the interview, what I said, what Jon said, what I meant to say, and what there is to say with more time to ponder.

My book sighted at the UC Berkeley bookstore

Originally uploaded by Raymond Yee

This is the first time I actually saw my book at a in-real-life brick & mortar bookstore, specifically the UC Berkeley ASUC bookstore. Needless to say, I was pretty psyched!

On Monday, I gave an introductory talk on mashups at Mashup University.  I created a few notes while I talked. Here they are:

Raymond Yee
Lecturer, School of Information, UC Berkeley

Feel free to send me email:

yee@berkeley.edu / raymondyee@mashupguide.net

Book URL:

http://blog.mashupguide.net/toc/

or

http://tinyurl.com/2shmy9
A project that I'm associated with:

http://zotero.org

Some burning questions from the participants:

• How to apply to business and making money?
• How to pick a "winning" API?
• How to make code work better?  less cache?
• security issues for users
• How to handle authentication of various services?
• Legal issues
• cross-platform compatibility
• accessibility
• What are the different tools you can use?

Raymond Yee teachs Intro to Mashups at Mashup University

Originally uploaded by dberlind

Yesterday, I led two sessions at Mashup University (part of Mashup Camp #6), held in Mountain View, CA:

Mashup 101: Getting Oriented to the World of Mashups

This session will help you to understand what will be happening at Mashup University and Mashup Camp. We begin with a non-technical introduction to mashups and their applications and move towards a more technical discussion of how to create mashups and to make your data and services mashable.

and

Mashup 201: Slightly More Advanced Topics in Mashups

This talk surveys some cutting edge issues in the mashup arena, topics that will be (or should be!) discussed at Mashup Camp. The springboard for our conversation will be the question: How do we make mashups easier -- for both developers and enablers?

While I work on converting the book from QuarkXPress into HTML and XML, I've posted the text of book (in the form of pdfs).    For instance, you can now read the Introduction or Chapter 1 on "Learning from Mashups".

One of the fun parts of writing my book was writing the marketing blurb on the back cover of the book.   I often find myself reaching to copy and paste it into emails or other documents when I describe my book.  Here it is:

Pro Web 2.0 Mashups: Remixing Data and Web Services

Dear Reader,

The Web contains thousands of mashups that recombine everything including Google Maps, Flickr, Amazon.com, NASA, the New York Times, and Wikipedia with useful information about travel, finance, real estate, and more. By fusing elements from multiple web sites, mashups are often informative, useful, fun, and even transformative. Mashups also represent the way the Web as a whole
is heading.

By reading this book and working through the examples, you will learn how to create your own mashups; how to exploit such web elements as URLs, tags, and RSS feeds in your mashups; and how to combine APIs and data into mashups. All you need to make full use of this book is basic knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and at least one server-side language (such as PHP, ASP.NET, or Python). By the time you’re finished, you will be able to take almost any source of data on the Web and mash it up with another to create unique and exciting sites of your own.

This book draws from my experiences teaching graduate students and high school students how to create mashups. I describe techniques to analyze and dissect existing mashups so that you can start from first principles, gaining the skills you need to write your own. Believe me, once you start creating mashups and seeing what you can do with them, you won’t want to stop.

Does it make you want to run out to buy a copy of my book?  Let's hope it does!

I'm very excited to announce that the book is available for purchase now. Please go buy a copy for you, each one of your loved ones, your friends, your enemies, the mayor of your city, your minister, rabbi, priest, or guru, your barber or hair dresser -- anyone and everyone:

• Apress (http://www.apress.com/book/view/159059858X)
• Amazon (http://snurl.com/27p7q)
• Barnes and Noble (http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?z=y&EAN=9781590598580)
• your local independent bookseller (which you can locate with BookSense)

The book has been sent off to the printers! Apress has told me that I should be getting my author copies sometime next week, and that the books should hit the bookstores some weeks after that. In the meantime, you can pre-order the book from a number of sources:

• Apress (http://www.apress.com/book/view/159059858X)
• Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/Pro-Web-2-0-Mashups-Remixing/dp/159059858X)
• Barnes and Noble (http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?z=y&EAN=9781590598580)
• your local independent bookseller (which you can locate with BookSense)

In the meantime, I'm working hard on repurposing my book into HTML and XML (probably DocBook) so that the book is in a more web-friendly format.   Apress and I are making the book available under a By-NC-SA-2.5 Creative Commons license -- meaning that you'll be able to circulate copies of the book for non-commercial reuse.  The problem is that my book went from being in Microsoft Word (for which I have some experience extracting content) to QuarkXPress during the copy-editing/proof-reading stages.

I might be able to figure out how to convert my book to DocBook, but I'm afraid that will probably take a while to do since I'm completely new to QuarkXPress (and things like the avenue.quark XTension). Can anyone out there help me to convert my book? I'm certainly willing to pay someone to do the task.

While finishing my book, it wasn't possible for me to keep up with all the changes that were happening with the many web applications I track in the book.  One such change came in Yahoo! Pipes:  Pipes Blog » Blog Archive » New "Fetch Page" module and nice web path enhancement….

I have to try the Pipes Fetch Page Module to do some scraping of HTML pages. Also one can start using nicer URLs for various pipes.   For instance,

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?InputURL=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2Fservices%2Fxml%2Frss%2Fnyt%2FInternational.xml&_id=cInT4D7B3BGMoxPNiXrL0A&_render=kml

can now be substituted with

http://pipes.yahoo.com/raymondyee/locationextractor?InputURL=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2Fservices%2Fxml%2Frss%2Fnyt%2FInternational.xml&_render=kml

Last night, I finished writing the introduction, cover blurb, and acknowledgments for my book.  With any luck, that means that all the remains for me is editing the galley proofs that come back to me.  The current estimate is that my book will be in bookstores in February.

This blog has been very quiet for the past couple of months.  I learned that for me at least, the last stages of writing a book soaked up whatever energy I would have had to put into blogging.   Now, I expect to return to writing here, to highlight parts of my book, to publicize it, to update it as I can, and to interact with you my readers.

Once the book is out, I will then update this site to hold the published edition of the book instead of the current early drafts.