Week 8 - Mashups and APIs

OK, so I went to the Mashup Awards site and wanted to find a health mashup (I work in health sciences, but then so do most of us in MLA, eh?). The first thing I came across was this HealthMap thingie. Now I have to admit that many mashups I've seen are fun but not terribly useful - maybe because so many of them involve Google Maps. One of the few ways that could be useful in health sciences, in my thinking, was for something like epidemiology (current or historical). And lo and behold, that's what HealthMap does - it takes a bunch of different health news feeds, adds categories for diseases and for country or more precise location and maps it all on Google Maps. Click on a push pin in an area (like Wisconsin, where I live) and it brings up news stories or other information about health alerts or topics. Very neat, in fact I'm going to recommend, nay, demand that we include it in our Global Health portal page on our website.

I liked Rollyo (other than the large proportion of sponsored links to non-sponsored). Checked out some of the posts about privacy from the librarian blogs - some of which I follow already and some of which I don't. Gives a nice overview of some of the issues and makes me feel better that some people are concerned enough to get involved in what some people call "non-library" issues. Would make more sense for a more precise search, like privacy + a specific issue or organization. Reminds me of the salad days of giving David Burt a hard time back in the COPA era and such. I get the distinct impression that librarians aren't too happy with ALA on this issue, even though I always felt ALA did better with political or touchy issues than, say, MLA did :-) Oops, sorry, mustn't pick on MLA in the MLA CE course. Anyway, am thinking this would, if nothing else, be a nice thing to add to some of our pages (intranet and public) to complement the feeds from library or other health news sites. Basically adding "search" to our existing "browse".

OK, decided to try the Rollyo Search Roll, so here it is: http://rollyo.com/abarclay/librarygeek/. Like in the previous paragraph, was thinking this might be a nice tool to add to our intranet and my browser as a quick and dirty replacement for a links list (which is out of date and unused). Have asked some geekier friends to make suggestions for what to put there so maybe they'll use it too...