Are we mashed yet?

I thought I'd have a peek at the entries in Talis's Mashing up the Library competition that I blogged about on July 2nd. It closes tomorrow. One thousand pounds is up for grabs.

Now, maybe I'm doing something wrong, but I can't find the entries. They are supposed to be tagged on technorati with MUTL06 but I can only see 21 postings under this and only two are entries.



One finds a string that looks like an ISBN from any web page and shows what can be done with it (eg. search Amazon, show your library's holdings, cite the item in whichever citation style you specify). The other bundles RSS feeds that a library might want to provide to patrons (eg. New books, contents of current issues of specified journals) and presents them using an OPML browser. They are both created by Tony Hirst. I like them very much, particularly the first one.

Some possible explanations other than "that's all the entries there will be this year".

1. Everyone is waiting until the last moment to enter, so no-one else can create a smarter cousin to their idea
2. I'm just not looking in the right place. A search of Flickr shows nothing under that tag, and del.icio.us has just four entries.

I know that there are people with the skills to make wonderful library mashups (Note to Talis: next year don't ask them all to be judges). I also know that lots of people are just stretching their wings in these areas. I think that next year, or the year after there will be floods of entries. Even better, there will be people entering things that they just had hanging around because they made them for work.

I also feel much, much better about where I am with mashups, APIs, OPML, Ajax etc. I know their names and what they do, but we haven't really met yet and certainly haven't tangoed. Seems like I'm not the only wallflower in libraries. Let's get dancing!