Mash Ups! Yeah!

I had that grandma moment. You know when your nan or mum looks at you when they want to tape a program and can't operate the VCR? I had that moment looking at the Yahoo Pipes interface. What is this fetch data? Fetch RSS? Fetch site feeds???

My first attempt was at 3am in the morning. I thought 'I can do this, I grew up in the era of Windows 3.1, I can program my HDTV, I'm fond of my PS3, I like shiny stuff, yeah Pipes, that doesn't seem too hard...'

EPIC FAIL. I couldn't do it. I couldn't make sense of it. So my second attempt is just a feeble design news feed, trickling through on the side there. It contains just the basics, because the rest is just beyond me. If I was more tech savvy, I could make it more interactive, give it a search function or something but it really is better understood by a programmer.

For a more easy on the eyes look at my Pipe, check it out here.

Given more time and help I think I could be awesome at it, because it could be really handy. You could custom-make any kind of mash up, mixing tools like Google and Amazon, to tweak a pipe for your subject of interest. You could have a information source solely dedicated to reporting items on Chuck Norris, for example, or have a pipe displaying all books ever written with the word 'ham' in the title and where to buy them, or borrow them.

Google Maps is a great mash up, combining its search results with location. You can get reviews of restaurants even as you search for where they are. Your own map is customisable, and you can search and look at other people's maps.

 Alrighty then, I'm gonna try and be awesome now.

Some Awesome Infographics

Some very nice infographics aired on Hungry Beast, ABC TV on 3 March 2010. Which a friend sent on via his Tweetdeck on Facebook, that I saw while getting my daily fix of the Sartorialist and at the same time giving in to a guilty pleasure of getting a top weekly score on frikkin' Bejewelled - the bane of my existence, that I got hooked on when I played it on my sister's iPhone 3 weeks ago while we were looking for directions via Google maps for a place to eat, which we used to access Wikipedia over dinner to find the name of the man who wrote for the sitcom 'Alf' who was played in a movie by Ben Stiller. His name was Jerry Stahl, and I stuck it in my Facebook status and in reply, someone uploaded a photo of Jerry on my wall, which they found via Google image search. By this point in time I was trying to figure out the theme song to Full House without resorting to Youtube because, you know, that's just cheating.

I thought this video oddly appropriate.