mashups for the faint-hearted

Creating mashups used to be a terrifying prospect, strictly for hard-core geeks.

Now those who are only moderately geeky can create mashups using widgets and other cool Web 2.0 tools.

Example 1: blog aggregator

I edit and develop a blog aggregator, MetaPagan. Anyone can contribute to this using del.icio.us, a social bookmarking site.

• Contributors tag the content they want to contribute on del.icio.us, using a preset list of tags, such as metapagan.activism, metapagan.community, metapagan.politics and so on (where metapagan is the name of the blog aggregator).

• del.icio.us creates a collective RSS feed for each of the tags, under the URL http://del.icio.us/tag/metapagan.activism

• I then use Widgetbox to create a blidget (blog widget) of that feed, which appears on an individual page of the blog.

• Then I use Yahoo! Pipes to pull all of the feeds together (including the posts that are manually posted to the blog) into a single aggregated feed.

• This aggregated feed is then passed into another blidget (MetaPagan contributions) which people can install on the sidebar of their blogs if they wish. I have also turned this blidget into a Facebook application, using the instructions at Widgetbox.

Example 2: Multiple blogs imported into Facebook Notes

As I have about five personal blogs, each on a separate topic, I thought it would be easier for Facebook friends who were interested in all the topics if I aggregated all my blogs into one feed and imported it into Facebook Notes.

I used Yahoo! Pipes to pull all my blog feeds into a single aggregated feed, and then imported that feed into Facebook Notes.