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Playing with Intel’s MashMaker

Late last night I can an invite for the pre-alpha release of Intel’s MashMaker.

It’s a very cool idea – basically, it is a tool to create mashups of different web sites. Their defaults are a Google map based on craiglist’s “for rent” page, of the option to blend the story text right into the CNN homepage.

Very cool stuff – and even cooler because the mashups are stored on Intel’s servers and are then automatically pulled from that server once anybody with the plugin installed comes to a site for which mashups have been created. You can then also vote on the usefulness of the mashup.

Sounds a bit complicated, but it works like a charm so far.

To create my own mashups, though, I am going to have to read up on some basic things first (what the hell are XPpaths?).

This is a very early release and I have not found any documentation yet, besides a few videos on Intel’s page.

If you want to try making mashups without messing with stuff like XPaths, check out AlchemyPoint, another mashup platform that was released earlier this week. It offers the ability to visually create mashups via the mouse, without detailed programming, xpath, or other technical knowledge.