Learning2.0 : Journey to about2findout.com

Today is one of those days I slowly advance in programming my site. For other non-programmers, making or adjusting a web space should become much easier with the next generation of mashup tools. A mashup is basically a site that pulls together bits and pieces from allover the web.

Microsoft's alpha experiment is called PopFly, and they have a cool pink duck as a logo :-). It is both a toolset and a community for sharing Visual Studio code. From the popfly site:

Popfly is the fun, easy way to build and share mashups, gadgets, Web pages, and applications. Popfly consists of two parts: Popfly Creator is a set of online visual tools for building Web pages and mashups. Popfly Space is an online community of creators where you can host, share, rate, comment and even remix creations from other Popfly users.

You can also read this eWeek interview with the makers.

Labels: mashup, popfly

A mashup is one of the cornerstones of 'web 2.0'. It is a combination of different sources and web applications into one page. Your web profile might for example link to your blog posts, your flickr pictures and your current location via Google Maps. That would be a mashup.

Search engines are also experimenting with mashups that provide search results from multiple sources such as the web, pictures, blogs, wikipedia, video and other sources. It enables search engines to move away from 'search silo's' into one integrated search.

- Imagine Live Search from Microsoft just launched. You can read a review on the searchengineland site.

- SearchMash from Google gives you not only web links, but links to relevant blogs, Google Video, Images, Wikipedia.

- Alpha (in beta version :-) ) from Yahoo will give you web results, obiously flickr photo's, sponsored links, YouTube, News results and more on one page.

In case you just came back from an intergallactic holiday: there is a search engine war going on right now, so the different search mashups often will only link in their own sources or 'friendly' companies. But the principle is great.
I'd like so see such initiatives within companies. And I would so much like one of the portlets giving the learning resources relevant to the source; the courses and other learning activities that are available in the catalogue of your learning management system.

Labels: alpha, imagine live search, mashup, search engine, searchmash