I wanted to talk about some new trends that have been rising in popularity now. Then we'll go over how to use each of these resources to help your web site. Using these new techologies you can really add some amazing things to your sites. Its not always easy to see how these techologies can be used to increase visits - that's what we'll be going over. So lets get started.
Mashup Sites
Mashup Sites are sites that take 2 or more data sources and put them together to form a new site. My favorite example is Housingmaps.com. This site takes Craigs List data from their housing ads and then uses Google's Maps API to display the data. Its geniuis! Mashup sites can be really inspirational. Now more than ever there are amazing resources and APIs out there. Coming up with creative uses is both the hard and fun part.
API's
We'll talk a lot of about API's. API's are Application Programming Interfaces in our above example the owner of housingmaps.com used Google's Maps API to display points on a map. Its a way we can talk directly to a program and use it for what we need it to do. For example anyone could go to Google Maps and search for houses for sale, however using the API we can make our own map and have things displayed exactly how we want them. Lets take a look at just a few of Google's API's (if you can't tell by now - yes I'm very partial to Google).
Google Maps
As described in its most basic form you can have your own map and post points. We'll go into some really cool uses for this in the future.
Google Base
This is another amazing resource. Google Base allows you to upload your own content - anything you want. For now we'll go over the most popular sections. Housing, Personals, Jobs, Recipes - these are all categories of Google's base. The uses for this are so incredibly large. First of all you can post your own items into Google's base. Have you ever searched on Google and it recommend Products to you? What about Google's Real Estate search? We'll go over how to add your own products and services into Google's base for all the world to see. We'll also go over how you can query Google's base and use others peoples items on your own site.
Yahoo Pipes & Microsoft's Popfly
Yahoo Pipes & Microsoft's Popfly allows you to create really quick mashup sites. To take a quick example you can query Yahoo's Traffic API and place the accidents on a map. Both of these utilities are great, free and available on the web - no downloads are required.
We'll go over how to use all of these great resources in the future. More importantly we'll see how to not only use these resources but ways you can use these resources to help increase visits to your site.
I'll also go over how to do some cool stuff using Google Base. For the longest time if you wanted to search for cars, you had to go to the biggest car web site to do so. Which one to go to? cars.com? craigslist? Well now finally Google base allows anyone to add data into their database. Then anyone can pull that data and display it on their web site. Everyone adds into it - and everyone wins. I'll show you how you can query Google base to display some cool stuff on your own web site including:
- Real estate listings
- Products for sale
- Events
- Jobs
- Vehicles
- Personals
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