One of the 'emergent' features I've discovered about StringLE is the ability to do roundtripping - sort of.... By this I mean it's possible to use a tool in the stringle context to create a resource that you can bookmark and immediately gain access to from the StringLE navigation panel.
For example: if I add a feed to one of my delicious bookmark tags to the OPML file that is used to provide navigation via the StringLE embedded Grazr widget, I can create a resource and bookmark it with that tag (often from the resource creation application directly), at which point it becomes available via the navigation widget (err, that's not strictly true - the feed may need updating in the widget).
As well as being personally useful, this approach can be quite powerful in a social or collaborative context, where users can create - and share links to - new resources in real time, and in one place.
Using bookmarks in this way - as some sort of cross between a database and a live, cross-resource navigation menu - is actually quite appealing to me, particularly when resource creation tools are tightly coupled to the bookmarking system via a 'bookmark this creation' link.
So I'm now on the lookout for apps that let you create resources and bookmark them directly into delicious ;-)
I'm also trying to think up a novel way of using Exhibit, "a lightweight structured data publishing framework that lets you create web pages with support for sorting, filtering, and rich visualization".
For example, if you have a data source - such as bibliographic information in Bibtex format - you can use the Exhibition toolkit to produce your own interface to the Bibtex data.
What happens is that "Exhibit essentially removes the need for a database or a server side web application" by taking the source document, treating it's contents as data, and putting a search and filter interface over the top of it.
Now I wonder, can I give it a searchfeedr like back-end and use it to produce a single interface to user selected data sources?
Speaking of data, there's a data mashup tool just appeared on the scene too: Swivel ("YouTube for data" - described prelaunch in TechCrunch here.).
The idea seems to be that users upload their data, then anyone can remix it/plot it against other data sets (as long as the data shares at least one common dimension, such as time, I guess).
However, at the moment at least, it seems you can't directly plot data sets against each other withing the site limits. Unless I'm missing something obvious, it seems you can only create a graph that also includes data you have uploaded (one way of getting data into the system, I guess). The obvious workaround is to download someone else's data set (which you can do) and upload it back, I guess, then use it as the basis of your own graph.
Here's an example of how to create a Swivel chart (I dont have time to build one myself just now:-(
With online spreadsheets making APIs available (like Google Spreadsheets and Zoho sheets), it'll be interesting to see how long it takes for some online spreadsheets'n'Swivel mashups to appear on the scene.
What would be really neat would be to see Live Clipboard functionality appearing on some of these sites, so users could easily cut and paste data between them...
I'd also quite like to see support for geo-data on Swivel, and integration with generic mapping APIs like mapstraction. Then maybe some animation tools like Gapminder;-)
Now I wonder, will Ning get into this area too? It'd be a powerful addition to a prototypical NingLE (which I am really going to have to start thinking about. properly..)?
Posted by ajh59 at December 8, 2006 09:10 PM