API’s, Mashups and Content

Mar 14, 2010

This class was focused on Content generation and focused in on the use of APIs and Mashups. We discussed types of content: professional content, semi-professional content, user generated content (user gen) and machine generated content (APIs were tossed into this last bucket). During the discussion on APIs we spoke about some of the early leaders like Ebay and Amazon and then went into current trends, authentication models (Facebook, Google OpenID, and more). Finally, the class broke out into groups and created their own Mashup / web service using a few APIs.

Additional readings:

Great  New York Times Article that discusses trends in Hyperlocal news and spends some time with Adrian Holovaty, the founder of Everyblock and Chicagocrime.org, which was an early example of a Mashup, looking at crime data by neighborhood in Chicago, you can read more about that here from a 2005 NY Times article.

ProgramableWeb’s directory for APIs – great starting place if you are considering creating your own Mashup.  List is at 1,600+ as of March, 2010.