oSkope is an interesting search application, relying on eBay, Flickr, Amazon, and YouTube sources. Results are displayed visually, with specifications set by the searcher (i.e. display as list, pile, graph, etc.). You can capture key resources (images, books) by dragging and dropping into your folder. Not necessarily anything earth shattering, but I continue to be surprised at how rapidly the web is becoming visual/image-based.
Posted by gsiemens at September 13, 2007 9:21 AM | TrackBackHi George,
That's a cool little search tool. It's amazing how easy it is to grab information using Open APIs and transform it in different ways. I've been doing a lot of Ruby on Rails programming over the past six months and am now starting to play around with the REST and programmable API side of things. The stuff that can be done in 10-15 lines of code is phenomenal.
My personal favourite is http://www.6pli.com/ . They've used the del.icio.us api and data mined to provide a nice visualization. This is much more than 10-15 lines of code though....
Posted by: Jody Baty at September 13, 2007 9:48 PMHi Jody - hope things are going well...
We're doing some work with Ruby as well for our upcoming journal (using OJS but writing a community journal component). While I'm not a programmer, the individual doing the work seems to be fairly happy with ruby.
...and yes, it's amazing to see opportunities for "mashups" when data is accessible in different formats. I periodically play around with popfly, pipes, dapper, etc, and it's an interesting experience to see some really complex resources coming from the simple opportunity to access data...
Posted by: George Siemenes at September 14, 2007 9:31 AM