Mashups for the Masses?

The whole topic of mashups and my assertion that this is much more powerful as a conceptual model rather than "just" a technology seems to have struck a nerve.  Thanks to all who sent comments or blogged about my previous posting "Mishmash of Mashups" and my earlier posts about some of the new content management systems such as Joomla and Drupal and Zude. 

** BTW, happy to report that Zude is up and running for he past month after getting off to a rocky start (the site crashed within a few hours due to way underestimated demand)  Let me know your experiences with this if you try it out.

Some of you asked about what else is on my Radar screen for mashups and one that comes to mind is QEDwiki (Quick & Easily Developed) which is a “mashup maker” that IBM is developing for the past year or more.  

Here is a a quick introduction and demo IBM has put up on YouTube (an interesting note in itself).

 

There are several other videos on other features and dimensions of QEDwiki you may want to check out and you can find specs and download the code at http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/qedwiki/ As they like to clarify this is NOT a product which IBM is developing but rather an area they are researching and an abilty to demonstrate what is possible.  This is aimed at those who are developers and programmers and very much worth keeping an eye on IMHO.  For me it is an important just to note that a company such as IBM is focusing on this area and devoting resources to it in such an open fashion.

And speaking of wiki's, if you are finding yourself needing to explain wikis to others and struggling to do so you might find this little video on "Wikis in plain english" to be a great help.  

 

In addition to very much living up to its title, I thought this was a great example of the effective use of video for learning using a combination of mixed media, some fun use of gestures and other clever little techniques that really work well to get the point across and hold your attention throughout. (love the way he flicks thing off the screen and snaps his fingers to make changes)

And if you like that one you can also check out "RSS in plain english" 

which is probably something else (RSS) that you are finding yourself explaining a lot these days.

Getting back to the concept of mashups, note that as it becomes easier for almost anyone to create them we can see yet another example of why design skills are becoming ever more important as we all become designers of our own worlds.  More to come on this theme of design as one of the key skills of the future in an upcoming post.

w
a
yne
=====

Comments

[bad credit loans]

Great job here. I really enjoyed what you had to say. Keep going because you definitely bring a new voice to this subject. Not many people would say what you’ve said and still make it interesting. Well, at least I’m interested.

[remove tax liens]

Thanks for sharing a very good explanation. This will be very helpful.

[jerseys wholesaler china]

Thanks for sharing a very good explanation.

[nfl uniform]

Thanks for sharing a very good explanation.

[Reggie Wayne Jersey]

The article is very good, I like it very much.Here I learned a lot, then I will pay more attention to you

[new business opportunities]

Thank you for this post it has been very informative i hope to see more neat posts from you.

[création offshore]

I really appreciate your idea and creating this articles! Thank you so much!