#21 Mashups

For some reason I've had a real mental block about this lesson, so today I went back and looked at the Mashup Awards page again. This time I found a couple that were really interesting.

Quintura for Kids was a great search engine that let kids select a broad subject and narrow it down using tag clouds. For example, I selected 'around the world' from the main menu. Selections including holidays, Canada, countries, maps, history and others were shown. Clicking on 'holidays' gave me more options including Christmas, Halloween, Boxing Day and more. Selecting 'Boxing Day' gave me seven child appropriate web sites which described the history of Boxing Day and how it was celebrated. The page is bright, colorful and easy to use.

The next interesting mashup I found was Access Denied. This mashup was created by Global Voices Advocacy which is dedicated to protecting freedom of expression and free access to information online. The mashup maps countries where censorship has occurred and web sites have been blocked. When the bubble is clicked details are given about various sites that have been blocked. Yes, you guessed it, many of these are the Web 2.0 sites we have been learning about. The most commonly blocked site is YouTube followed by Flickr, Blogger, Typepad, Google Earth and many others. One very interesting thing about Global Voices is that they are using many of the Web 2.0 technologies on their website, including a blog, a wiki, and a mashup.

Also I finally got the Bookr mashup to work. You can see the results on this post. And now I'm finished with all the Learning 2.0 lessons! Yes!

Thanksgiving Day Basket

For some reason I seem to spend some part of every Thanksgiving break making a basket. The girls are always with their dad and it is so quiet that I feel the need to keep busy so I don't go nuts from the quiet.

This year I decided to do something a little different. For starters I actually made the base for this basket out of some scrap cedar left over from building my house. Since I haven't posted anything else about that building project I'll jump ahead and say that the staircase to the loft and the wall around it are finished in red cedar. I love the smell and the rustic look. But back to the basket. I finally found a router bit that will cut a 1/16" slot in a piece of wood which is exactly what is needed for a basket base. It's called, amazingly enough, a 'slot cutter.'

I started with a small scrap, about 2 1/2 by 4 inches to make a business card basket. An odd number of 1/4" flat oval stakes are woven in a continuous over two, under two pattern giving it a diagonal look. A 3/8" flat oval rim finished it off lashed with fine cane.

Now for the critique.

• The corners of the base should have been rounded. That would have allowed for a stake in each corner and made the weaving more even.


• The dark brown stakes really don't match the reddish purple of the base. So experiment with other stake colors.


• It is way too large because I'm not used to making a basket that small. In fact this is the smallest basket I've ever made. You could stack two lifetimes of business cards and still not fill it.

Any other critiques?

I usually give away most of the baskets I make, and then I never even remember what they look like. As I was reading some knitting blogs where knitters use their blogs to journal their knitting projects I thought that might be a great place to keep up with the baskets I make. I looked for basketry blogs, but couldn't find any.