Mashalist

Flickr’s Eyes

I’m a sucker for posts like this one from Flickr’s Stewart Butterfield. If you’re interested in the world and what happens everyday, how can you not be? A flaming car in Paris, riot police in Minsk and kids on a beach somewhere -- “there’s just so much.”

One question: Why are all these great images of the world buried in Flickr’s thumbnail abyss? When are we going to see photos like these woven into the stories we read about protests in France and Belarus?

Filtering and sorting technologies have a long way to go, but consumers are smart. They understand that automated, social beasts like fickr have rude burps. That’s also why consumers love them. They’re the eyes of the world, without the tinted glasses.

36Hrs Map

NYTimes.com launched a new Faneuil Media map in their travel section last night. It plots 36Hrs stories from the past three years. Check it out and let us know what you think.

Gawker Stalker

This is one of the best implementations of mapping on a news site or blog that I've seen. It's well designed, and (most importantly) it fits perfectly with what people are doing on the rest of the site. It's not mapping because we can and it's cool, but mapping because it makes a more robust story. Nice job, guys.

Atlantic Rail Yards Map

This map (via gmapsmania) is a great example of mashup journalism. It's not a tool, it's a story about an issue that's important to a community.

Michael Arrington on Mashup Business Models

Michael Arrington makes a good case here for businesses that act as intermediaries between API providers and mashup makers.

Consumers, Consumers, Consumers

Umair writes:

Web 2.0 cannot live up to its (enormous) potential to create value that's structurally disruptive until and unless technologists understand consumer dynamics.

Same goes for online journalists.

Mashups are going to add a fantastic new dimension to news reports – but only when we figure out how consumers want to use them.

Michael Gartenberg and Barry Parr make a similar point in a recent Jupiter Poscast.  And Adam Green touches on it in this podcast from MashupCamp.

Every few weeks we’re seeing new examples of mashup journalism. This Dutch crime site is a good recent example.

But while sites like this demonstrate the potential for mashup journalism, they don’t fit consumption patterns the way articles, photos, videos – even podcasts – do.

How do we build mashups that are as intuitive and useful as traditional forms of content?

This is one of the questions we’re asking at Faneuil Media. We don’t have an answer yet. I don’t think anybody does.