mashup

Oh dear. Get ready to freak out. Somebody has gone and created a mash-up of Google Maps and Prop 8 Donors. Which you can see right here.

Proposition 8, if you recall, changed the California state constitution to prohibit same-sex marriage. That is to say, Prop 8 allowed discrimination into the state constitution. Eight Maps allows you to see who the people are who donated in order to pass it.

Provide an Embeddable Widget option for Views aside from Page and Block. This will enable the view to be embedded to any website as Javascript, IFrame/FBML (Facebook support and similar), Google Gadget, or even Flash.

This looks like a neat Summer of Code project.

Capitol Words gives you an at-a-glance view into the daily proceedings of the United States Congress through the simplest lens available-a single word. For every day that Congress is in session, Capitol Words displays the most frequently used word in the Congressional Record.

Whether the word matches up to an issue, an action, or the name of a member of Congress, Capitol Words provides a snapshot of the main topic addressed by Congress for any given day, dating back to the second session of the 106th Congress (January 20, 2000).

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could upload as many images as you’d like to your site without worrying about your bandwidth? Or even better, if you could automatically share the images you upload to your site with an image sharing service like Flickr, and then have these photos displayed on your website but hosted on Flickr?

That’s exactly what we did last week for the Stand Up Speak Out campaign. Using Drupal and the Flickr API, I created a small Drupal module called Flickrup that does this – all you have to do is enable it and configure it. It helped us easily display photos from many of the thousands of events that took place around the world on their individual event webpages.

A little bit of foresight and planning went a long way in the creation of the new tour website for rock legends R.E.M. I'd like to take a moment to share with everyone the approach we took in creating the RSS powered social media website that centralizes concert media from various sources across the web.

R.E.M is using Drupal for their new tour website. They are also using Mollom... They show the most recent tweets, Flickr photos, YouTube mashups, concert footage, etc.

Eureka! Science News just launched -- it is a site dedicated to provide the very latest science news, but with a special twist -- it is entirely automated! There is no human editor behind it - it finds relationships between news stories from all major science sites and regroups, categorizes, ranks, tags, finds related press releases and publishes them directly on the site. The result is an efficient overview of everything happening in science, right when it happens. The following details how we built the site.

...

I identified the principal components of an intelligent news aggregator:

• A source of news, such as an RSS aggregator
• A clustering engine, to group news together
• A classification engine, to categorize the news (Is this Biology, Physics, Medicine or Astronomy?)
• A way to assign scores to clusters, to determine in which order the news should be displayed

This is five thousand types of awesome. I can't tell you how annoying it is to read the same story on ten different sites in my RSS reader because it has no way of knowing.

I propose to write two modules for Drupal as part of Google Summer of Code. One called memetracker and the other called machinelearningapi. The memetracker module will use algorithms in the machinelearningapi to intelligently filter and group content from designated content sources both internal and external. The module's purpose is to find and display to a community in real time the most interesting conversations and memes within the community as they emerge.

This is great. I often see the same stories in my RSS feeds from several different sources and it would be great if there was an intelligent aggregator that would recognize this and even relate stories that are similar, but different.

This is the 5-minute "video from the future" demo presented by Dries in his State of Drupal keynote presentation at Drupalcon Boston 2008. The video demonstrates some of the mashup capabilities of an RDF and SPARQL-enabled Drupal as envisioned by Dries for the upcoming Drupal 7.x release. The version of the demo below includes the original narration by Ben Lavender (the audio from Dries's actual presentation is also available - the RDF material starts after the 52m:30s marker).

Also checkout the email at the W3C, really neat, exciting stuff.

Local mirror of the video from the future.

1. Get a friend of yours to download, using Facebook, the ten most popular books at every college (manually -- as not to violate Facebook's ToS). These ten books are indicative of the overall intellectual milieu of that college.
2. Download the average SAT/ACT score for students attending every college.
3. Presto! We have a correlation between books and dumbitude (smartitude too)!