Mashup Guide

With pointers such as Greg Sadetsky's tidbits on how Google Map's Street View works in the browser (e.g., URLs of specific shots, a pointer to a Flare, an Actionscript decompiler), how long will we have to wait until we get mashups that give us a video tour of Berkeley using photos from Street View?

KML has moved beyond its use in Google Earth alone. For instance, you can display KML files and export search results and one of your "my maps" from Google Maps in KML. Other applications are beginning to support KML: For instance, you can get KML coming out of Yahoo! Pipes. There is support for KML in Feed Validator KML is being shepherded through a standards process: Paul Ramsey: KML @ OGC. Google is advising people to use KML so that its geo--search can index KML -- in KML 2.2, there is an attribution element. Google apparently will also index GeoRSS.

I don't think that there is an official API for Google Reader although Niall Kennedy documened an unofficial Google Reader API a while back.

It's very difficult to keep up with the world of public APIs and mashups -- even for someone like me who is writing a book on the topic and teaching a course on the subject! Now that I have a bit more time to work on the topic, I turn now to being more assiduous in my reading of online news sources. My first priority is a consistent read of John Musser's ProgrammableWeb. I already make steady use of its database of APIs and often point others to the Mashup Dashboard when people ask me for concrete examples of mashups. Now I want to keep up with his blog. Today (April 20)'s post concerns Google AJAX Feed API, which is described thus by the Google documentation:

With the AJAX Feed API, you can download any public Atom or RSS feed using only JavaScript, so you can easily mash up feeds with your content and other APIs like the Google Maps API.

Hmmm...I get to a detailed look at Chapter 4 next week on RSS and other feeds. I've written about Yahoo Pipes for remixing RSS. This Google AJAX widget demands a close look too! (Thanks, John, for alerting me to this new development! I also need to subscribe to Google AJAX Search API Blog in my news reader.)

"Machine tags" (see Flickr: Discussing Machine tags in Flickr API) have been introduced into Flickr as generalization of things like geotagging. Machine tags are also known by many as "triple tags". These are tags with a specific syntax aimed primarily for "machine consumption" (that is, by programs) and not directly for display to the typical end-user. You can use machine values to store extra data elements for a given photo. I think that it's fair to say that most important example of such data has so far been the latitude and longitude associated with a photo. So important that Flickr ultimately introduced specialized functionality to handle this data, to take that data out of the realm of having people just shoehorning that info into tags.

I'd really like to know what uptake there has been on machine tags. I was hoping to be able to do searches for namespaces in use -- but as I document below, I don't know how to formulate a query to do so.

Some kinks have been fixed in the Flickr machine tags:

• If you look at http://tinyurl.com/2vyrgv -- you'll see that yws-flickr : Message: bug with searching for machine tags? has been fixed.

Some outstanding issues remain:

• missing negative values and decimals in the machine tag API. See yws-flickr : Message: Re: Machine Tag Bug - missing negative values and decimals?. When I do the a query for my pictures that use the geo: machine tag name space and ask for the machine tags, I get the "-" and "." stripped out. (I confirmed the problem on March 11 but as of April 19, I've no seen any resolution.)
• no response to yws-flickr : Message: Re: Ladies and gentlemen : Machine tags. I'd love to have a whole set of query functionality, including being able to look up all domains in use. I know about "geo" but what others are being used -- and with what frequency? For instance, we can pull up all the geo: machine tags by searching for "geo:" with the API call. See http://tinyurl.com/yt5k2f You will >500,000 photos under that domain. I tried variants on "geo:" to try to pull up all machine tags ("*:", "*", "*:*") but I couldn't find any that would get me all the machine tags....

What are the equivalent of machine tags in other systems? What to look at:

• bobdc.blog: All Your Google Base metadata taxonomy are belong to us and Google Base Help Center - What is an "attribute"? in Google Base.
• I also vaguely remember something about attributes in Amazon S3 that might be related to machine tags. (The connection is probably vague.)

Fodder for Chapter 17 on office suites when I get to writing it in detail:

• Google office destined to be mashed - CBRonline.com:

"We definitely want to build out APIs, especially for the spreadsheets side, as spreadsheets are more data-oriented, but maybe also for he word processor," Google product manager Jonathan Rochelle said. "People will be able to do mashups with our tools for other things, and not be stuck behind our dev cycle for everything they want."

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