Post on 18-Aug-2015
They also got bored out of their heads, having to wear suits and think outside the
box in small cubicles.
A mashup is taking two seemingly unconnected pieces of information or
media and connect them in new ways.
That way you can illustrate a point or allow users to
unearth information or find connections hitherto
unknown to them.
You allow clever people you’d otherwise bore with
your operations to improve your product and reach others you’d never have
reached.
You also get a lot of work, testing and inspiration for
free by giving people access to your data and processes.
This is why almost every new product now comes with an Application Programming
Interface or short API.
APIs allow programmatic access to the interface other users consume – get the data
below the pretty façade.
Breaking the structure of traditional summits and
conferences, unconferences and hackdays took down all
the conventions.
Hackdays show that geeks unleashed can release an
amazing proof of concept or even real products in 24
hours.
Companies recognized easy patterns in mashups and put
those into mashup generators to make it as easy as possible for anyone to build their own
mashups.
This effectively killed all creativity and cheapened the
idea of mashups – it is like high street stores selling
punk T-Shirts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Snow_(physician)
HACKER!
John Snow helped the London authorities in 1854 to trace
back the reason of cholera to the drinking water supply.
James Webb Young’s
“A technique for producing ideas”
is a book about coming up with new ideas, presented in 1939 and published in 1965.
Corporate mashup generators and the sheer amount of
what has been done already have taken the sting out of
doing them.
Yet if you can get a geek interested in solving a
problem, he becomes an unstoppable force of nature.
At Accessibility 2.0, an accessibility conference in
London, Antonia Hyde showed research results of
how users with learning disabilities have problems
using YouTube.
http://www.slideshare.net/hi.antonia/rich-media-and-web-apps-for-people-with-learning-
disabilities
This fascinated me, as I worked with people with
learning disabilities before, but never concentrated on removing barriers for them
when it comes to web accessibility.
Screenshot of Easy YouTube
http://icant.co.uk/easy-youtube/?http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkdZmi85gxk
★ Easy controls
★ Option to search for videos
★ Copy and paste video URL to share
★ Select video size
★ Easy Volume Control
★ Option to show a playlist created with del.icio.us
★ Option to search YouTube
★ API to automatically open videos in Easy YouTube
★ Documentation how to host it yourself
★ Open Source
Antonia was over the moon that something she budgeted to be not affordable for their
agency could be built in a day.
Schools emailed me that it is great that small kids now
could watch YouTube videos!(I am not too sure about this one...)
I built a screenreader-compatible interface for the BBC audio archive and asked
the audience if an accessibility hack event
would be of interest.
Easy Flickr screenshot
showing donkeys
http://icant.co.uk/easy-flickr/index.php?s=donkeys
I also used the YouTube API earlier to build easy
captioning interfaces.
http://icant.co.uk/sandbox/youtube-captioning.html
http://www.nihilogic.dk/labs/youtubeannotations/
http://www.tubecaption.com/watch?v=jpCPvHJ6p90&vcId=137
On the 19th of September we’ll have a day of
presentations in London, England showing barriers of
web products...
On the 20th we follow with a hack-day where geeks will take this information and build interfaces that work
around these barriers.
I’ve got a venue, funding by Channel4, The Guardian,
Yahoo, JustGiving.com and the London Metropolitan University and Gamelab.
Charities and companies spend a lot of money on IT systems and web apps that don’t deliver what they are
meant to solve.
Making those two parties talk and build things based on
real problems of real people will make us use computers
for good and drive innovation.
Sarah
Winchester
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Winchester
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dasqfamily/190093246/
Thanks!Chris Heilmann
http://scriptingenabled.org
http://wait-till-i.com