Data Unbound

I'm starting to prepare my notes for the pre-conference seminar Creating and Enabling Web Mashups that I'll be leading on November 3, 2009 at 2009 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference.   I'm looking for good examples to use in the seminar.  One that I'm contemplating is showing how to import the Educause 2009 calendar, which is available as an iCalendar file (linked from the main program page.)  If you import the icalendar file, you can produce a Google calendar:  http://bit.ly/dMzoK (You have to navigate to November 2009 to see any events.)

Because the ZooomrAPI was designed to emulate the Flickr API, it shouldn't be that hard to learn once you know the Flickr API.

‘omg my mom joined facebook!!’ – New York Times captures some of my own experiences on Facebook and might make a good piece for my Building Next Generation Web Applications course:

So last week I joined Facebook, the social network for students that opened its doors last fall to anyone with an e-mail address. The decision not only doubled its active membership to 24 million (more than 50 percent of whom are not students), but it also made it possible for parents like me to peek at our children in their online lair.

I'm glad to hear that the current Youtube API will evolve on top the Google GData API: YouTube API Blog: The Future

I didn't know about the Ruby-based API to Sketchup: SketchUp Ruby – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

I follow EveryBlock with great interest. (See also Knight Foundation grant Holovaty.com — and Poynter Online – E-Media Tidbits, which has more preliminary details about EveryBlock.)

It is important to remember that JavaScript code is case sensitive. I couldn't get an event handler to fire because I wrote alink.onClick and not the correct alink.onclick

I'll have to write more soon about Citizendium, which is

an experimental new wiki project. The project, started by a founder of Wikipedia, aims to improve on that model by adding "gentle expert oversight" and requiring contributors to use their real names.

As a member of the Citizendium Editorial Council, I've not yet had much time at all to contribute to the Citizendium but hope to have more time once I'm over the big push right now on my book. My interests around Citizendium are as as much about the technological framework as the actual content of the system. For instance, I hope to help shape technical standards and APIs at the Citizendium to allow for better reuse of its content. (See the documentation for the API available at the Wikipedia that allows external programs to access the Wikipedia and recombine and reuse content.)