I'm at a desk, I'm at a desk, don't you eva forget it

Reflecting on my last blog post, something became apparent. My past self lied to me. I told myself that writing this blog would be the first thing to happen this morning, after waking up. As I write this it is nearing ten to five in the afternoon. Something has become apparent, I have been procrastinating. The question is why? I believe that my attitude has shifted once more; blogging has become a negative thing in my head. This mostly is because I have little to report on, due to the little progress I have made on my assessment. I’m finding it difficult to exactly pin point what I’m trying to do.

Now that those facts are free and no longer wrenching at my subconscious (we’ve inadvertently discovered the true purpose of the personal blog, to vent), I will elaborate on last week’s findings.

Michael opened the lecture with a reminder; we are supposed to seriously apply ourselves to our blogs. Now, it’s not that I haven’t been applying myself, it’s rather that I haven’t been applying myself as seriously as I probably should. For this blog post I have obviously adopted a more serious authorial voice. This is actually what stress does to a person, renders them into a 50 year old company CEO. Now, I’ll begin this meeting with...

Mash ups and APIs.

API, or application programming interface, is something incredibly useful within the realms of website design. This was particular evident upon observing ‘Beyond Reasonable Drought’ and it’s use of the Flickr API. Although I’m not entirely savvy on the topic, I at least understand that APIs are a means of cooperation occurring between information and software. To further educate myself, I pursued some online research on the matter and discovered (correct me if I’m wrong,):

-APIs rely on XML or Javascript to function.
- Web based APIs allow mash ups to occur, which is a combination of web services.
- Allows web based communities to share data between applications.
-Data is easily accessible from multiple locations.

Wikipedia, (although condemned academically), had a wonderful list, that really solidifies the idea of an API put to use as it provides specific examples of websites that the general masses are familiar with.

Directly sourced from: Wikipedia
Use of API’s to share content:
1. Photos can be shared from sites like Flickr and Photobucket to social setwork sites like Facebook and MySpace.
2. Content can be embedded, e.g., embedding a presentation from SlideShare on a Linked-In profile.
3. Content can be dynamically posted. Sharing live comments made on Twitter to a Facebook account, for example, is enabled by Twitter and Facebook's APIs.
4. Video content can be embedded on sites which are served by another host.
5. User information can be shared from web communities to outside applications,
delivering new functionality to the web community that shares its user data via an open API. One of the best examples of this is the Facebook Application platform.

Basically API’s really improve the functionality of the internet. They make a user’s web experience more convenient in terms of gathering or relaying information, and overall enhance the internet experience.

From my understanding mash ups are usually a correlation of API’s. An example that I gained from the lecture was Neave TVor Everyblock. These sites are combining multiple API’s the present a wholistic collection of information. This was particularly evident with everyblock which combines government databases (for statistics) with mainstream news feeds and flickr. The result of these combinations is a rich catalogue of information concerning a location, streamed from several places on the internet. I’m just dissapointed that everyblock is only specific to the US.

One final lesson that I have learnt this week is one about the superficiality of a blog. The more interested the author is in blogging characteristic such as interesting authorial voice, humour (or lack there of) and quirk the more trivial the content will be. Excuse me now, why I go rescue my mad hatter poster from falling off my wall.

No, that was not some kind of innuendo.

Xanthe out.

PS. APIS = DYNAMIC. Courtesy of tutorial.