The power of mashups; tracking the space station
A “mashup” is when several different technologies are combined to form something new and original. The term was originally coined by music DJs who took music and vocals from different songs and combined them to create a completely new, and often surprising experience.
The same is now being done on the web and most of the really cool examples involve technologies from Google. There are dozens and dozens of really good sites out there that use some aspect of Google Maps but I found one today that really wowed me!
www.n2yo.com is a site that combines data from several different web sites and sources to provide real-time tracking of any orbiting satellite including the International Space Station and Space Shuttle displayed over a google map display. Not only that but it attempts to automatically detect your location (with mixed results) and then provides automatic sighting opportunities in your area. It got my location wrong but that is easily corrected with a couple of mouse clicks and more help from Google.
The really important thing to take away from this isn’t that you can see where the space station is (you could do that before on various NASA sites), but that if you write your web site code in ways that other programmers can make use of it and then grant them the rights to do so, new and wonderful things will be created. I just wish I’d though of it.
