I’ve never thought much about things like mashups, but they’re really cool! There’s a whole world of stuff, ranging from the really useful to just time-wasting fun ideas. Flickr Sudoku looks pretty cool for those Sudoku players out there; it mashes fun flickr pictures of numbers onto a Sudoku board, instead of using traditional boring text. Bubblr lets users add text bubbles onto flickr pictures. I even used it for an ACCCL Summer Reading project! Thanks to Coworker Danni’s suggestion, my ant poster is both informative and exciting. It draws one’s attention to ant facts using thought bubbles—it’s a really neat way to teach kids what’s going on in the ant farm the poster was created to highlight.
My personal favorite mashup is one created by Google. They blend Google Maps with Panoramio,* enhancing the much-beloved Google Maps feature with photographs of your destination. My husband and I discovered this slightly-scary feature when we were searching for directions to go pick up our new old car (which is now in the shop for a disappearing lock. argh.). It was definitely useful in preparing us to know where to turn!
*Panoramio, incidentally, is similar to flickr in that you can store photographs online. Like flickr, it lets you tag photos as to where they were taken (which city, for instance), and you can "create your own map of the world." As an added bonus, you can track your travel routes and create a map of photos to share with friends and family.
Edit: I found a Google Maps mashup to help my father find the area of a piece of land in Georgia--Google Planimeter, www.acme.com/planimeter
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