'Mash Up' Your Web Site

 

Ricardo Harvin
E-mail Questions for Tech Tools to techtools@uschamber.com.

 

There's a wealth of information available online and increasingly sophisticated ways of putting it to work for you and your customers. One of the more flexible ways is using mashups.

 

Mashup is a term used to describe what happens when you combine data from two or more separate sources into a new application-for example, combining a map of real estate listings with neighborhood crime reports from the local police department and a list of school locations from another source. You can create mashups to enhance your Web site's customer appeal, or you can use them to gather information for your own use.

 

Until recently, combining results from different sources in this way required a programmer or a lot of manual data sorting. Now there are a number of free and user-friendly tools that make it easy to quickly build mashups. (But putting them on your Web site still requires the ability to work with Web pages.)

 

Most of these tools work by giving you a number of prebuilt data "widgets" that you can connect through various point-and-click or drag-and-drop methods. Each widget can have various parameters that you can define or refine. For example, you can limit a map widget to a city or ZIP code. Widgets work by using XML (eXtensible Markup Language) data, a text-based file format used to standardize the exchange of information among different programs.

 

You can take advantage of the work others have done by using mashups that have already been built. Additionally, if you offer RSS feeds (Really Simple Syndication, see "Creative Customer Communications," Tech Tools, December 2006), you can incorporate them into new or existing mashups because RSS files are XML-based.

 

For those with greater technical skills, there are also more robust tools that provide direct access to APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), allowing you to write (or modify) code and create your own widgets that can be used by themselves or with other widgets to build new mashups.

 

Incorporating the data-gathering power of mashups into your operations can make it simple to find specific information and provides your customers with tools that keep them coming back.