If knowlege is sourcing power, then a Mashup is the easiest way to supercharge your sourcing. Mashups are an exciting genre of interactive Web applications that retrieve content from external data sources and combine that data to better inform your recruiting practice. They are so Web 2.0  . . .

 

Mapping Mashups

One of the first mashups to become popular is ChicagoCrime.org Web site, which is a mapping mashup. The Web site mashes crime data from the Chicago Police Department's online database with cartography from Google Maps. Any data set that contains location is a candidate for a Mapping Mashup. And thanks to Google Maps API, we have the technology -- from the entry level MyMaps tab to more elegant web development. And Google isn't the only company facilitating the Mapping Mash. APIs from Microsoft (Virtual Earth), Yahoo (Yahoo Maps), and AOL (MapQuest) also are there for our geographical enjoyment.

You can map target companies, target candidates, or plug in where your recent hires have come from to spot trends.

 

Video and Photo Mashups

A picture is worth a thousand mashups.  Photo hosting and social networking sites such Flickr with APIs that expose photo sharing has led to a variety of interesting mashups. According to IBM, "Because these content providers have metadata associated with the images they host (such as who took the picture, what it is a picture of, where and when it was taken, and more), mashup designers can mash photos with other information that can be associated with the metadata. For example, a mashup might analyze song or poetry lyrics and create a mosaic or collage of relevant photos, or display social networking graphs based upon common photo metadata (subject, timestamp, and other metadata.). Yet another example might take as input a Web site (such as a news site like CNN) and render the text in photos by matching tagged photos to words from the news." Of course, you can enter the names of your target companies to see what photos you might pull up.  Often, that allows you to peer into the very offices of your competitors: One very neat photo mashup is tagnautica.

 

Search and Shopping

Search and shopping mashups have existed long before the term mashup became all the rage. BizRate, PriceGrabber, MySimon, and Google's Froogle have long used combinations of business-to-business (b2b) technologies or screen-scraping to aggregate comparative price data. But new APIs from online marketplaces inluding eBay and Amazon now make it possible to  programmatically accessing their content for mashup on a Web 2.0 page.

 

News

iGoogle and other personalizable home pages often help users mashup news sources (such as the New York Times, the BBC, or Reuters) using syndication technologies like RSS and Atom (described in the next section) since 2002 to disseminate news feeds related to various topics. Syndication feed mashups create a personalized newspapers that caters to the reader's particular interests. An example is Diggdot.us, which combines feeds from the techie-oriented news sources Digg.com, Slashdot.org, and Del.icio.us.