Thing 40 – Mashups

One thing I love about my neighborhood is its walkability, so I had to check its score on the Walk Score site. It earned 72 out of 100; not bad. I was very impressed with how many local businesses, parks, libraries, etc. were listed.

Even though it was after lunchtime, I had to try the wheel of food. There are not many places to eat that you can walk to around where I work. This was confirmed by LunchBox. That is why many of us own cool lunchboxes.

Looking for mashups I discovered that the Dilbert comic strip lets you write your own punchlines. See http://www.dilbert.com/mashups/ . And here is a guy who does it regularly: http://mydilbertmashups.blogspot.com/ . Sort of fits in with our Thing 36.

As someone who likes to travel, I wanted to try travelr. Darn, it requires a download; something I’d prefer not to do and my IT Dept. agrees. So I decided to try Bubblr instead. I thought it would be fun to turn our tour into a comic strip. To my annoyance, I wasn’t able to access the Library’s photostream, either by username or by tags. Very frustrating. Bubblr doesn’t seem to be able to handle more than two words. Rather than giving up, I made this instead.

As much fun as these mashup tools are, my special library doesn’t deal in a very visual subject matter. The profession tends to be rather stuffy, too, so there is not too much call for visuals or flights of fancy in our day-to-day operations.