Mashups

I added Verona Public Library to the Mapbuilder sandbox. That was pretty cool. Easy to do too.

I liked the idea of mapdango's where you can type in a city and see the weather, see a list of events in the area, music playing, flickr images, and wikipedia info about the different sites to see... all color and number coded on a google map. I did not see any source information except that the site says that it is not affiliated with flickr, Wikipedia, Weatherbug, Eventful, Gruvr, or any other third party. It was a Mashups award winner. I can see its usefulness in a reference interview regarding events or music. All you have to do is type in a city and state to find the info that you are looking for.

Soon I will be putting up my condo up for sale again. To see my competiton, I tried to look up real estate mashups. I also thought it would be cool to look at crime in my area. I tried many real estate search mashups for my zip code and found that they were not very helpful. It is easier to go to realtor.com to find the information I wanted. I tried the mashups to see if I could find one with info on crime rate by neighborhood and see if one was connected to real-estate and did not find one that was useful. I looked for a mashup that stated that there was information on crime included; so far I found one that claimed to. Fizber.com had census data, and other info by city, but nothing was broken down by neighborhood, only city. Other sites did not include the crime info, but were simply property search sites that had less information than a realtor's website.

I learned that for some searches mashups will be useful, and other times a straight website will work better.