#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!