mashups

At work this week we let another website escape from the zoo. Ruby Baboon is another take on the user-driven context engine concept: a metasite that pulls together lots of interesting stuff around a topic, all nominated and graded and ranked by users. It uses individual item nominations and RSS feed nominations from users, and pulls in related images and videos from Flickr and YouTube.

Back in the last century when I was at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, we built one of the first online traffic maps. It definitely wasn't the first even in the local market -- a local tech development firm had already built one as a demonstration. We considered using theirs, didn't like their terms, and assigned a programmer to create our own. It took some time, some socket-level Perl programming, some artwork and some creative uses of ImageMagick. MNDOT was happy to provide the data. A few weeks later we had it online.