Using various open source technologies such as jQuery, the Yahoo! User Interface Library and the Maintainable Framework, Reading Radar lets you scan the New York Times top sellers and read reviews and related book information from Amazon; all without the distractions of other content on both the New York Times and Amazon sites.

Inspired by the release of The New York Times Best Sellers API, Herren decided to try and create a site that could be on "auto-pilot."

"I designed the site to use extensive caching of the NYT and Amazon APIs to minimize remote calls, but update the data often enough so that the information would be fresh."

The Maintainable Framework and the Zend framework provided a means to create the PHP based site, and jQuery, the popular JavaScript library along with YUI were used to present the data and provide the user interaction.

"The NYT API was simple enough to use. The REST API offers three response formats, XML, JSON, or serialized PHP. I did find a bug in the API, and was very pleased how reactive the NYT API team was to resolve the problem. Kudos!" Herren wrote on his blog.

If you're interested in more technical details, take a look at Herren's post announcing the release.

The Nota web site offers up some examples of how their tool can be used, including a study notebook for school which could incorporate Wikipedia articles and photos; an online scrapbook, where you organize your online photos into a collage; or even a greeting card, where you and several friends can all collaboratively sign it, leaving messages for the recipient. They even recommend several ways in which Nota can be used for educational presentations, like class projects. Nota is especially useful for that as notebooks can be worked on by as many as 50 users.

Getting started with the service is simple, too. You just sign up for an account and click the "Create New Notebook" button. You can then give your notebook a title and set it as public or private. Just be careful when selecting that last option because there doesn't appear to be a way to go back and change it later.

When adding web content, it's easy to search by keyword or you can enter an account name in order to grab specific photos from sites like flickr, Facebook, or Picasa. Unfortunately, you don't have the option to do the same with YouTube - you have to search for the videos instead. When you find the content you're looking for, one click lets you add it to the page where it can be dragged around, resized, rotated, etc.

When you're finished with your creation, click the "Share" tab and you can post the page to Facebook, Blogger, or LiveJournal or you can grab the embed code to post it anywhere else on the web.

Over the years, we've seen a lot of tools that promise easy web page creation, but Nota is one that really delivers. It really is as easy to use as they say it is and that makes it fun to goof around with, we have to admit. Although we might be a bit older than the intended demographic for the product, it's easy to imagine how younger kids and teens would really get a kick out of using Nota for customizing their online profiles or for working on school projects.

Nota has been in private beta for several months now, but the veil just lifted yesterday. The service is now a public beta, which means anyone can try it.

One of Netflix's great features is the ability to watch some of the titles it offers instantly - either on your computer, via your Xbox, or by using another external device, like the Roku player. Unfortunately, Netflix's entire catalog isn't available for streaming - only select titles marked "Watch Instantly." For subscribers who make heavy use of this feature, finding movies and TV shows to stream means tiresome browsing through the Netflix web site. But now there's a better way.

The InstantWatcher web site is Netflix mashup that filters for the "Watch Instantly" titles using the relatively new Netflix API which launched in September of last year. On the main page, the titles are grouped into genres like "Drama," "Sci-Fi," "Romance," "Comedy," etc. and within each section they are then further categorized for easy browsing.

Other Ways to Browse

Using the links at the top, you can browse by other methods, too. Options here include browsing "New," "Expiring," "Random," "People," "Best," and "Worst" titles. Who would want to find the worst movies? Well, we suppose it is funny to see how Netflix rounded out their 15,000+ titles in the "Instant Watch" catalog with a huge collection of D-list (and quite frankly, really terrible) films.

Of course, you don't have to just browse through the titles. If you have a particular movie or TV show in mind, you can just do a search for it using the box provided at the top of the screen.

Interacting with Your Queue

When you find a movie or TV show you like, you can click the "Play" button to add it to your Instant Queue. That feature makes InstantWatcher extremely useful, although we would like to see the ability to delete items from the queue as well. Perhaps in a later version they will add that functionality.

Despite that minor drawback, the Netflix InstantWatcher web site is still a great example of the amazing things which can be built when a company offers up an API for use by third-party developers. ProgrammableWeb dubbed it one of their "best new mashups" and we definitely agree. The InstantWatcher is a must for Netflix subscribers everywhere that streaming is offered.

The photos are plotted out using partially transparent yellow circles instead of the standard Google Map pushpin. Click on any circle and a transparent overlay will appear on the map giving you a filmstrip view of the latest photos.

What a fun way to see the what, where, and when surrounding photos uploaded from last night's New Year's Eve celebrations!

Originally designed as a solution for e-commerce sites, the service strangely called Adam is not complicated to use. However, the company does estimate that the time it takes from mashup creation to having it live on your web site could be approximately 20 minutes. That's a little bit longer than just linking to a PDF or even uploading it to a document-hosting service like Scridb or Issuu. Still, the extra time may be worth it because Adam lets you create a truly interactive document by allowing you to add videos, HTML, stylized text, and more to what were previously just plain files.

For those familiar with designing web pages, the process may seem familiar. To add content to a document on Adam, you select various "hotspots" in the document and then add the content you want to mashup. This is where you would paste in any text, images, music, or videos you want to appear when the user mouses over that part of the document. The service currently integrates with other content providers including YouTube, flickr, metacafe, Veoh, vimeo, and imeem.

The best way to understand what Adam can do, though, is to view some sample of it in action. You can check out a mashed up floor plan or you can see all the content providers in use on one document.

Adam doesn't provide anything that a talented web designer can't already do on their own, but like every service that comes out of the Web 2.0 movement, it's about letting everyone have access to the tools that previously only skilled professionals knew how to use. If you want to try Adam for yourself, you can sign up here.

Keyboardr is crazy fast, too, which is somewhat surprising given that it's a mashup of so many different search engines. It even begins searching and displaying results as you type in the search box itself. That's handy because it means that you might not even need to complete your search query before you have the answers you need.

There are a couple of nice touches of this mashup, too, like the favicons next to the search results themselves and the ability to jump straight to the results from Google.com by opening a new tab. (You'll have to allow pop-ups on the Keyboardr site, though, so it can open new tabs).

In a way keyboardr is a lot like the experimental Google Search experiment called Accessible View, which lets you navigate through results with j and k, just like in Reader. However, that experimental search tool doesn't include the other mashed up pieces like keyboardr does. Nor do you have to commit to changing over the default Google engine you use in order to take advantage of it.

If you're not a fan of the new Google Wiki interface, this might be a good time to check out what other alternatives are out there. Give keyboardr a shot...you might just find your new favorite homepage.

keyboardr.com from Julius Eckert on Vimeo.

(Image courtesy of CFariello)

The SkyData application is designed specifically for smartphones, as its target demographic is the traveling business user, not the consumer. At the moment, the app works on Windows Mobile and Blackberry, but an iPhone version will be ready by year-end, they say. At DEMO, the app was shown on Windows Mobile, but they did give a quick peek at both the Blackberry app and iPhone version, too.

The idea with SkyData is that you now have one screen from which you can easily access all the data and info you need. But it's more than just ease-of-access that makes SkyData interesting - it also integrates with your phone, too. For example, you can add your LinkedIn contacts to your phone's contacts from the app's menu.

Social Network Integration

From the SkyData application, you can dive into your contacts, no matter where you have them stored. You can access email contacts like those you have in Outlook, Gmail, or Yahoo Mail, but you can also access social network contacts like those on Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, or Jigsaw.

CRM Integration

At the moment, SkyData integrates with Salesforce.com, but NetSuite and SugarCRM will be coming soon. They will then be followed by Microsoft and Siebel. What's unique about SkyData is, again, the app/phone integration. As you view emails, calls, and text messages, you can access all the info stored in SkyData with only a couple of clicks from within those messages. That adds a new layer of contextual information to the day-to-day communications that you recieve on your mobile device.

Pricing

The SkyData Personal Edition is free to use and combines social networks, Facebook, and related news. The Business Edition offers the CRM integration for $9.95 per month. Both editions are in private beta.

Too Much?

The scenario envisioned for using SkyData involves a traveling business person, such as someone who does sales, preparing for a meeting with a client. From this one app, they can quickly get a refresher on all the relevant information they have access to about that person, the company, and the market in general. They can even find a nearby restaurant where they can wine and dine them later after the meeting has concluded.

However, with the vast number of services and networks supported, it's possible that instead of being a convenient one-stop-shop, it's mashup overload.

Would you want all your networks mashed into one and available on your smartphone? Or would that be too confusing? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Pluribo is a Firefox plugin that displays short summaries of product reviews on Amazon.com. Pluribo scans through reviews customers on Amazon have left and automatically creates a one sentence summary that is somewhat akin to a Zagat review. While Zagat uses human editors to compile its reviews, though, Pluribo is fully automated. Right now, Pluribo only works for the electronics section of Amazon's store, but the developers are planning to expand this to the rest of Amazon's offerings soon.

Besides summarizing the reviews for a given product, Pluribo also compares those reviews to other products in the same category to see where the reviews for this item were different. Pluribo will also give more weight to reviews that were considered 'helpful' by other Amazon customers. Pluribo keeps most of this information in the background. However, when hovering over a keyword in the summary, a small pop-up will display a list of relevant phrases Amazon's customers used to describe the item, as well as some more of the statistical data Pluribo used to compute its summary.

In testing out Pluribo, it consistently displayed accurate summaries of the actual user comments - a testament to how well the developers have tuned their algorithm to at least this limited range of product categories.

Pluribo's overall execution is quite seamless and Pluribo does not slow down the load times on Amazon, as it only gets to work after the page is fully displayed.

However, Pluribo seems quite restricted when it comes to what items it will display reviews for and for which it will just display a 'coming soon' message. Right now, it only works well for MP3 players, GPS navigation systems, and digital cameras. It also seems to work best for products that have been reviewed at least 30 times.

It would be nice to see Pluribo start pulling in reviews from other sources besides Amazon's own customers. The fact that it only works as a Firefox plugin is also going to limit its appeal to technically savvy users for the time being.

Overall, Pluribo is a fun and (when it's working) useful plugin - though for the time being, its a bit too limited to be of real help. It's real potential is only going to be realized once the developers get out a version that works across all of Amazon's offerings and maybe even expands beyond Amazon to include other online stores.

If you see a picture or hear some music you like, you can add it to your "moodboard" and get additional information on purchasing it from Getty's library. That's a smart move that ties some brand and product marketing into an otherwise fun mashup.

Sheila Lennon of the Providence Journal writes that Moodstream might be "even better if you can port it to your big TV." She might not be far off the type of use case that the app's creators had it mind. From Rick Webb, of the Barbarian Group, who created Moodstream for Getty:

What is Moodstream? It's a concepting tool. The modern version of the fireplace. An interactive art piece. TV for the future. It's a website we created for and with Getty Images to showcase all of their offerings - still, video and sound - and inspire interactive creatives. And it's really, really fun to use.

He's certainly right about the last part. I've had Moodstream running in the background all morning as I've been reading blogs and catching up with last night's news, and I keep finding myself switching back to it to check what sort of visual and auditory treats it has for me. It is easy to see how designers could find inspiration while staring at Moodstream's interactive slideshow.