One of the beauties of data on the web which people license for re-use is that you can do all sorts of cool stuff with the data. Taking data from somewhere and re-using it somewhere else is often referred to as a mashup. Below are a couple of mashups which you may be interested in.

1. Flickr Montager

This tool uses images from Flickr which we mentioned a couple of days ago (by the way, please continue to add your photos to our Festive 24 Things group as we hope to use them for another “thing” later on). You can specify a search term (I chose “santa claus”) and it will pull relevant images from Flickr and present them in a montage. You can then hover over any of the images and change the montage to your chosen image. I found this tool lots of fun, give it a go! Feel free to share your creations with us either on here or on Twitter 🙂

Santa Montage

2. UK Snow mashup

If you’ve been on Twitter for the last week or so and follow anyone in the UK, you are likely to have come across some tweets tagged with #uksnow which include a postcode and a snow rating. As well as being able to see how much snow your friends have (and in my case, get incredibly jealous if you don’t have much yourself at the time), these tweets are used to create a Twitter mashup showing the level of snow across the UK. I found this really useful recently when trying to plan whether or not to travel. As it’s updated so quickly and by so many different people, I tend to find this crowdsourcing method more reliable than any weather forecast! Next time it snows in the UK, be sure to check out the #uksnow map and accompanying tweets.

UK Snow map screenshot (thanks to @steelrattus)