This afternoon at the Walled Garden conference, the Digital Methods Initiative and I made a funky little website.

The concept WALLED GARDEN addresses issues of identity, mobile communities and networks by focussing on the tendency towards online gated and closed communities. How does this affect the (in)accessibility of information and knowledge?

Basically the question we (DMI) asked is “given web2.0 sites as walled gardens, how many of it’s content is accessible from outside that specific walled garden (platform)”. We found this service usernamecheck.com, which checks if a given username is taken on a whole set of sites.

We extended this service, in the light of the Walled Garden conference, by querying usernames for their existence in all these services. For each service where the username is taken or active, we’ll query google for the name in the service and give back a ranked list of web2.0 services ‘leaking’ information about you.

You can try it yourself at leakygarden.net.

It would be really nice to do a followup by getting a representative sample of usernames from each of these services and querying them all in a search engine for ‘leaky content’. This touches questions of which sites feed whom, which sites allow only content to come in but not to get out, etc.

In this respect others of the DMI team started tracing and visualizing data flows of information between these walled garderns - which information goes in, and which information goes out. You will be able to find their results here soon.

Een interessant artikel op denieuwereporter.nl over mashups:

Mashups zijn innovatieve websites die twee of meer bestaande, externe databronnen op het internet combineren, met als resultaat nieuwe informatie, dikwijls gepresenteerd met een verrassende interface.

Voor een lijst van mashups check programmableweb. Interessant zijn zeker:

Related to del.icio.us, flickr and wikipedia:

• bashr.com - A project that bashes together Wikipedia, flickr and del.icio.us
• flickr related tag browser
• reddiggdot.us - reddit, digg, slashdot and del.icio.us combined
• rel8r.com - An experimental discovery tool that searches tags from various social network-type sites including Flickr, Technorati, and Upcoming
• thumlicio.us - Use thumblicious to quickly preview the most popular sites bookmarked on del.icio.us via thumbnail screenshots.
• flickrfling - Innovative prototype for exploring Flickr photos. Point the application at a feed, like CNN, it then renders the news in photos by matching tagged photos to words from the news.
• livemarks - see del.icio.us bookmarks added as a live stream
• digglicious.com - a live stream which combines digg.com and del.icio.us
• flickrgraph is an application that explores the social relationships inside flickr.com
• flitter - Mashup of Amazon (for album/book details), Audioscrobbler (for related artists), Flickr (for tagged photos), del.icio.us (for tagged links), Blogdigger (for media files) and Feedster (for matching weblog posts).

Music:

• upcomingscrobbler - a blend of last.fm and upcoming.org. Get notified of groups you listen and have a concert near you!
• noesbueno.com/musical/ - another blend of last.fm and upcoming.org
• musipedia.org - The Open Music Encyclopedia, uses Amazon Alexa to provide the ability to search the web by melody. Give the engine a keyword or melodic contour, and it returns similar music.

Various:

• urbanhitchhiker - Ridesharing site where users can store and search for rides all on a map. All contact between users is anonymous.
• garbagescout - The New York City streets are full of interesting and potentially useful things that have been thrown out. If you see something good, snap a pic, send to Garbagescout where others can go and get it. They should really make something like this for Amsterdam. I already found so many useful and funky things on the street!

Related to news:

• taglines - Search mashup combining multiple services include news and images. Tag cloud has dynamic Ajax-style pop-up with embedded searching.
• tagcloud.com - TagCloud is an automated Folksonomy tool. Essentially, TagCloud searches any number of RSS feeds you specify, extracts keywords from the content and lists them according to prevalence within the RSS feeds. Clicking on the tag’s link will display a list of all the article abstracts associated with that keyword.
• newzingo.com - current tag cloud of popular articles on newsvine.com

Mashups relating to geomapping blogs and news (yeah, it’s a work deviance ;)): (more…)