Week 6 - Maps, Mashups & More

For this week's exercise, we were to create a Google map of our next holiday destination or our last holiday. As my next holiday is not yet planned nor do I have any idea I would like to go, I decided to stick to my last holiday: Cambodia.
This trip was meaningful to me in many ways in that it combined history and culture, and opened my eyes in many ways to the sides of the world that I had read about but not seen first hand before.
In using Google maps, I mostly used trial and error in trying to make the map fit correctly onto my blog page. I experimented with sizes and shapes, as well as viewing the map in the various formats. Being able to customize the map to show what you wanted in terms of size and foxus was a feature that I liked, however outside of that, I felt that Google Maps can be limited in the amount of detail that you may want to add. Like Shell's comment that she was only able to embed videos of Edinburgh that were from YouTube, I found that the additional features that can be added to the maps such as travel distances, accomodation information and images, could be selected but they could not be manually managed, thus there were images and details on the map that I did not believe were relevant to my map, therefore I decided to leave these other functions out, though I am certain that it will be useful for others with different ideas of what they would like their map to represent.
Along with my map of Cambodia, I have added a short video from YouTube from National Geographic regarding the temples of Angkor, I hope anyone who watches the video enjoys the history and the phenomenal architecture of the temples as much as I did!

In reviewing relevant mashups, I found a site 'Mashups: The New Breed of Web App' which is an interesting site showing the most recent Mashup awards and what the winners were. It is interesting to note and is possibly a sign of the times that the most successful mashups were social networking sites mixed with photo/media sites such as Flickr. I was particularly interested in a mashup which showed 10-day weather forecasts all around the world, however I found that the site was limited in the countries that it reviewed (most notably, Australia wasn't part of the short selection and therefore was not much help).
Failing this, I searched through mashups involving Delicious as discussed in my earlier blogs, I am quite interested in the functions of Delicious and find it to be quite useful for stockpiling information management. Instead, after more browsing, I found Delizzy, a mashup that works with your Delicious site to search through your bookmarks like Delicious, though it has the added features of searching through page content, title and descriptions of the saved articles. I logged into Delizzy and have tried to set it up with my Delicious website.
My tries at searching for standard terms such as 'Networking', 'Icons' and 'Web2.0' which are frequently tagged and bookmarked within my Delicious page however I was not able to successfully search for these terms. I did more research on Delizzy and believe that sometimes there is an error with Google which prevents searching properly.
Despite my problems with searching on Delizzy, I believe that this site can be particularly relevant to information management systems. Just as Delicious is a handy tool for Social Bookmarking, sites and features that Delizzy offers aim to make the process of searching and bookmarking much easier. The aim of Delizzy is to provide users with a tool that can search for sites with relevant keywords within their own bookmarks.