The Sunlight Foundation's mashup site Capitol Words relaunched this week and now offers a very handy way to see what keywords are being used in the US Congress in general and by particular congress members. If you pay only passing attention to politics, Capitol Words is a great way to familiarize yourself with politicians in a hurry. It's a mashup of several different ways to search the Congressional Record and it's fun to use.
Ambitious online music magazine Idiomag serves up synchronized songs, photos, videos and articles from and about artists it believes you'll like, based on your past behavior. Today the company is opening up its store-room of dynamically aggregated content to 3rd party developers through a particularly exciting API (application programming interface). Beyond just media content, Idiomag is opening up access to user Attention Data through the APML (attention profile markup language) protocol and will soon offer bundles of topical content coordinated to suit any user's interests.
We're impressed by the offering and excited to see what will come of it.
Taylor McKnight has been called a "serial mashup developer" and he's involved in some of the coolest mashup sites we've seen in recent years. Three years ago he won the grand prize at the first ever MashupCamp for his site PodBop ("We podcast bands coming to your town"). Then he came on board at one of the most popular little music sites on the web, Hype Machine. He's also working in a little startup called Sched.org, a service that started by offering an unofficial calendar for the SXSW festival and now pays the bills building custom social schedules for other events.
Today Taylor McKnight launched a new site that he's been working on since Spring, and he says it's like Hype Machine for standup comedy.
When it comes to storing personal digital data in the cloud and serving it up in interesting ways - we're in the very early days of a brand new paradigm.
Today popular online storage company Mozy announced that it has been merged by the company that acquired it with another acquisition called Pi (Personal Information) - into a new forthcoming service called Decho (your digital echo). Pi was founded by Paul Maritz, who is now the CEO of virtualization powerhouse VMWare. What do you get when you bring these kinds of stars together into one service? Only a few clues are available so far, but we're excited to see what Decho becomes.
Three weeks ago we wrote about the release of the new Application Programming Interface (API) of sophisticated note taking system Evernote. We said we were excited to see what outside developers were going to do with it. Today we saw our first Evernote integration and it is awesome.
Group collaboration startup Pelotonics has turned Evernote into an easy way to load photos, voice messages, notes and other media into your project management system, including from a mobile device.
The much-anticipated first Application Programming Interface (API) from the New York Times went live today, according to a post on the company's blog Open - All the code that's fit to printf(). First up is a campaign finance data API and next is a movie review API. Also available is a database management program initially developed for internal use at the NY Times.
The Times quietly announced in May that it would soon be publishing APIs, which are means by which outside developers can access NY Times data for use in other applications, interfaces and mashups. We believe that steps like this are going to prove key if big media is to thrive in the future.
This fabulous idea still falls short in user experience.
Idiomag is a company we love to tell people about - it's one of the most awesome ideas we've seen in a long time. The personalized music magazine site relaunched today with 4 times more content than ever before and a more traditional, link-intensive page design. Unfortunately, this great idea has serious problems in implementation and today's redesign doesn't appear to have solved those problems.
We usually write about serious things here at ReadWriteWeb but it's Friday night and we've got to make an exception for Javascript Hero. Note: We're hearing reports that the site doesn't work well in IE, just so you know. It's the work of developer rock star John Resig and was brought to our attention by Chris Messina (again).
We'd tell you about it, but we'd rather you just go play it. Particularly if you're a Guitar Hero fan. Then take this opportunity to make a mental reminder to check out what Resig does and what Messina finds, too.
We get excited around here whenever a new application offers an Application Programming Interface (API) for 3rd parties to develop against. Oh, the possibilities! Sometimes, though, it just doesn't pan out and our dreams are dashed against the craggy rocks of reality. Mashups are hard and just because you've got some cool data and good hooks for developers to pull from doesn't mean anyone's going to build anything worth using on your API.
You can do a lot with new software if you tell it a little bit about yourself - but who wants to give the new kid on the block the password to their most important communication tools?
Unfortunately that's what we're asked to do with a lot of new applications these days. It doesn't have to be that way, though.
