I discovered that I had done half of this task before I learned what a mashup might be.
A while back I was playing around with Flickr and clicked on the Map link at the top of the page. I placed some pictures I had snapped around the house on the map and then forgot about it. Then I found out what a mashup is and discovered that I had done one. So to do this assignment, just for forms sake, I added a few more pictures, one of me in California and a pair of others in New York. To see them, go to the map attached to my Flickr account.
On a roll now, I fiddled around a bit with the Flickr Color Pickr mashup. This mashup was both fun, fascinating, worthwhile and (ultimately) kind of depressing.
The fun is pretty obvious. Play with it for a bit and you will know what I mean.
Fascinating and worthwhile are also obvious. Imagine being able to search by color and shape. Not only is this one a new one on me, it does lay some serious portion of the groundwork for combining text, shape and color in online searching. For someone who spent the first two decades or more of his online search career (did I just indicate how old I am?) doing text only searches - since this was all that the computers we had in olden times could do - this is truly revolutionary.
Then there's the depressing aspect of it all. This kicks in because this particular mashup reminds us (me anyway) that, even though we may not glow in the dark, there actually are people out there who are so brilliant that they do. How do they think up of this stuff and who needs to be reminded that the rest of us can't?
Finally, I played a bit with montagr, which made me feel a little better. I didn't have great luck with it but I didn't care much, since I'm not particularly fond of photo montages. After all, there's enough clutter in life as it is. Why take perfectly harmless photos just to make more of it?
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