Week 8: Mashups and API

I went to Mashupawards.com and found a Mashup that I really liked called "QuickAs" , which can be found at http://mashupawards.com/quickas/ . QuickAs is like an RSS Feeds and like del.icio.us in that it has links to different websites such as NY Times, USA Today, and Wall St. Journal; it also has links to social networks such as YouTube, Facebook, and MySpace. It also links to Web 2.0 sites such as Google Reader and Google Docs and to e-mail sites such as gmail, Yahoo mail, and Hotmail. If I had this Mashup on my desktop, it would be very easy for me to link to all these sites. You can also search any topic on QuickAs. I searched "astronomy" and was brought to Google where there were many del.icio.us type links to astronomical websites. All in all, I think that QuickAs should be on the desktop of every library computer (no matter what type of library).

As for Rollyo, I typed "librarianblogs" and then "privacy" into the searchbox, and found a multitude of site links. One of them was "Privacy Matters Info", which had many links; one link was called "credit.privacymatters.com" and you got links to free credit reports, view credit history, and get 3 credit scores. Another link was "myidentitytheftreport.com" which linked to identity theft information. Many of the links on "Privacy Matters Info" had no information, which I found frustrating. However, there were other sites to look at. "Office Privacy" had links that explained Marpac Sound Machines and another that explained what white noise machines actually do. Another site, Bookz2Read had links to wikipedia, among other things, and when I clicked on "Expand to Web", I got an article called "Zoho Opens Up for Google and Yahoo Users".
I also found an article titled "Yahoo, Symantic Offer Security Bundle". One other site that I liked was USNewz which linked to reuters.com, nytimes.com, msnbc.com, foxnews.com, cnn.com, ap.org, and usatoday.com . (I don't know what this site had to do with privacy, but I thought it could be very useful).

A lot of the sites on Rollyo (under "librarianblogs" and "privacy") had nothing very much to do with privacy, and I wondered how they got on the list.

In summation, I think that Rollyo could be useful if you were searching for sites that could provide products to enhance your privacy (such as white noise machines) or other sites that could help you to achieve privacy (such as freecreditreport.com). I didn't find much on the philosophy of privacy or how librarians try to achieve privacy for their patrons.