Blogging Experience

    I am really glad that I got to participate in this blogging experience.  Since I never had my own blog before I really appreciated the blog creation component of this class.  Since this was the first blog I created I kept thinking about am I doing this right? Am I posting comments the way they are suppose to be posted?  Throughout this semester my confidence with blogging has definitely grown.  The constraints of this assignment often held me back from wanting to post ideas about various educational topics.  For instance, there would be an article or resource that I found that made me think of another topic in education, but since it wasn't my blog topic I didn't feel as though I could comment on it.  Also, I feel that in the very beginning of my blog I grouped a couple ideas together in one post, resulting in my running low on ideas for additional blog postings near the end of the semester.

  There are a couple things that I learned from this experience.  For starters, I learned that blogs aren't really that hard to create and manage.  I always thought they would be time consuming to create, but that is not the case.  Also, I like how blogs can be a single location where a person can see an ample amount of resources and opinions on a single topic or various topics.  It makes it very convenient when trying to learn about something new.

  Looking back on my blogging experience there are a couple aspects in which I feel I could improve upon.  One thing would be to relate my blog more to the comments from the people who followed my blog.  I feel that this would help the followers to feel more connected with content being provided as well as me being more connected to them.  I would also provide more links to resources as well as talk more about personal experiences with the topic.  I feel that this would provide with a more rich context for any given topic.  Overall, I really enjoyed this experience and thank you for all of your comments!!

How to create your own mashup

  I thought this week I would try and find information on how to create your own mashup.  I looked through a couple of websites of step by step procedures helping you set up a mashup, but each step I found very confusing.  The language that was used seemed very confusing to me, so confusing that it seemed like you had to have a background in technology in order to set one up.  I'll provide a link below of one of the websites I looked at, and I was wondering if any of you had an opinion on why you thought they might make them difficult to set up.  Or do you think with time this is something that may become easier.

http://www.ehow.com/how_6956418_make-google-maps-mashup.html

A collection of Mashups....

      This week I wasn't sure what I wanted to research about mapping mashups, so I thought I would just do a general search and see what would come up.  When doing so I found this interesting website that groups various mapping mashups and puts them all in one location.  There are mashups from basketball tournaments, fishing spots, unsafe cities etc.  This website also allows you to "follow" the mashups as well.  I'm not entirely sure what they mean by this but I am assuming that the website would update of any changes made to that mashup.  I personally enjoyed looking at the various mashups that are created because I didn't realize the wide variety of them.  I'll post the website below so you all can have look!  Let me know if you come across any that surprise you or are ones that you would like to follow!

The website is: http://www.programmableweb.com/tag/mapping

On a different note...

     This week I decided to talk about something different than security issues.  I decided to talk about the bright side of mapping mashups and how they can be really useful in today's world.  I came across this website that allows you to create your own map mashup.  It allows you to create it by; choosing the exact location (either coordinates, or street address) a caption that can be displayed along with a caption that you can put with your marker (you can also choose a different color for the flag that represents whatever you are talking about).  When I first came across this website a couple ideas came to mind.  I thought it would be really clever for people who travel a lot to plot out different restaurants, museums, scenic views etc throughout their travels and make a blog about it!  This allows you to see what other travels suggest seeing or maybe what specifically they ate a restaurant they really enjoyed and would recommend.
     When I saw the coordinates option I automatically thought of people who are out on the water.  This could be really handy for divers who are looking for new dive spots.  Maybe there is a shipwreck you haven't discovered yet or a coral reef that a lot of fish have migrated to recently.  These are just some ideas I thought of, off of my own interests, does anyone else have any ideas and how they could use this with their interests or hobbies?


The website I found is: http://www.mapbuilder.net/

Mashup Security

* I tried researching about security surrounding mapping mashups and I couldn't find a lot of current information.  The information I found is about 2 years old and concerns the businesses that are using mashups and not the users.  For instance, there is certain security put in place for businesses so third-party users cannot hack into their business and destroy or steal documents.  Security is needed here because mashups integrate information from two different producers.  When reading about business security the articles read more as "this is what we are doing to see if this helps the problem."  It didn't sound as though there was a definite form of security that worked.

* The one piece of information that I found on user security is that mashup sites don't have rules stating how people's personal information can be used.  With this being said I was curious to see if any of you could think of rules that you feel would be appropriate or are needed for mashup sites in order to keep people's information safe?

Some interesting facts about Mapping Mashups

Below is a scenario that really helped me to understand how this application works:

"     As part of a large undergraduate history course he teaches about World War II, Dr. Martinez developed a mapping mashup that he introduces to the 150 stu- dents at the beginning of the semester. The mashup, which works with Google maps, represents major events leading up to and during the war. Fundamen- tally, it’s a map, he explains, showing them on a pro- jection screen that it works very much like the online mapping tools students regularly use. The map covers virtually the entire globe, and users can move around the world, zooming in and out, showing the area of search as a map, satellite images, or satellite images with maps, dates, and events superimposed.

     When students zoom in on Europe, they see flags scattered around the continent and into Asia. Simi- lar maps dot Japan, Southeast Asia, and the South Pacific. When clicked, each flag opens a pop-up box that names the location, explains what happened there and when, and shows a photograph of that site at or close to the date in question. Flags correspond to important battles, political events, treaties that were signed, and cities such as Vichy, the wartime capi- tal of France. The text in the box also includes links to articles that talk in depth about what took place in each location and the significance of that event. Stu- dents can zoom in to particular locations and see sat- ellite images of what the place looks like today. They can also get an idea about the terrain where soldiers fought and died." ( http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7016.pdf. )

Positive of Mapping Mashups:

* explains more thoroughly relationships as opposed to text and numbers

Negatives of Mapping Mashups:

* Commercial mapping systems focus largely on North American and Europe

* Making a application work properly requires strong technical skills and a considerable amount of time

Simple way of thinking about Mapping Mashups

** When you do a google search for instance "Restaurants in Rome, Italy"- the google map that pops up with all the peach colored flags that show you the location of restaurants is an example of Mapping Mashups

Mapping Mashups

     I am starting a new blog topic and it is on "Mapping Mashups."  I personally have never heard of Mapping Mashups before, but after doing some research on it, it is basically a map (like google earth) with data placed on top of it.  An example I saw in an article is a map of the United States and alumni from Syracuse University for instance, could see where their fellow classmates have ended up.  Or colleges could see how their recruitment is holding up across various parts of the Country or World.  I am curious if any of you have heard of Mapping Mashups before and what the context was.