JISC CETIS Beyond Interoperability, Pt 2

Errm, this is very overdue, but when I got home life was kind of busy… better late than never.

Day two of the CETIS conference, I attended the ‘Mash-Up Market’, which was a bit of an eye-opener. Tony Hirst of Ouseful opened proceedings with a mad dash through mash-up technologies and examples, all things that can be done in half-an-hour (of variable duration). His summary of the event is here and Sheila McNeil’s here. My own notes below. Apologies if this stuff is all old hat to you, but a lot was very new to me.

One of the many things that worked really well here, was Tony’s ‘Feed Presenter’. This simple web app turns a RSS feed into a live slideshow. Tony first set up a list of links on a del.icio.us page here - http://del.icio.us/cetismashup. Then he started his presentation by going opening his feed presenter here - http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/feedshow/, and entered the URL for the cetismashup RSS feed ( http://del.icio.us/rss/cetismashup ). Voila! Instant web-page slide-show in a browser.

He’s added a few additional pages to the feed since the event - inserting some of the sites and tools that were discussed by were not part of the original slide-show.

There were so many really useful and interesting mashup tools and methods discussed, that I’ll only mention highlights here. You can see the extended version of the presentation by following this link.

Highlights:

- Grazr
Allows you to embed an interactive widget on a web-page with links & items drawn from an RSS feed. As shown below. I’d demo it here, but I think WordPress.com won’t run the javascript required - but if you run your blog on your own server or want to insert the widget on a Pageflakes or Facebook page you’ll have better luck. See also this example on Tony’s pages.

- Pageflakes
Talking of Pageflakes… Pageflakes allows you to create your own homepage(s) by adding blocks each populated from a different RSS feed. Multiple tabs allow you to arrange blocks over several pages if necessary.

- Pipes 
Pipes from Yahoo allow you to use a relatively simple drag-and-drop design method to aggregate data from multiple feeds, process it and set rules to govern the resultant output.

Tony also went on to show a range of ways in which it is possible to use ready-made web apps and scripts to do interesting things with any web-content that is in a (re)usable XML format - using the Open University’s OpenLearn project for his source. (I could imagine the potential for using BBC’s Backstage is similarly huge. Indeed, the BBC created Backstage to allow people to experiment and see what is possible.)

From visualizing web-sites to creating pages for communities to rank resources, the range of ways in which XML data can be re-purposed is quite something - the main challenge being, it would seen, in thinking up interesting things to do with your data. The ‘how to do it’ side may be a lot easier than you think, courtesy of the huge range of web-apps already out there - from major internet companies like Yahoo and Google and from the never-ending stream of net startups.

In my eagerness to play around after the workshop, I first tried to do use Pipes - but quickly ran into a problem as the page I wanted to scrape data from was not RSS enabled. I quickly discovered Dapper, which does a very good job of turning a page with a table with embedded links into a RSS feed. Talking to Sheila, I was not the only person there to make the same discovery that day.

Should I ever get the chance, I may yet write a little about the day’s keynote from Mark Stiles. Or just find some links instead, so I can move on with some new stuff…