Mash Up Images from Around the Web
The Yahoo! Image API provides access to thousands of images across the Web, and developers are recombining these images into new applications that let you play along.
In the music world, a mash-up combines two or more existing songs into something entirely new. A mash-up might have a song from the Beatles in the background and vocals from Snoop Dogg in the foreground, while blending in a Sesame Street song at the same time. The Yahoo! Image Search web service offers programmatic access to thousands of images, and some developers are using this service to create their own visual mash-ups—combining disparate images into games, interesting visualizations, or random works of art. Here are a few interactive examples that will give you a taste of what’s being mashed together with the Yahoo! Image Search API.
Yahoo! Buzz Demo
The Yahoo! Buzz Demo is an alternative way to read the news. When you browse to http://buzz.progphp.com, you’ll find an oval-shaped collage made up of over 100 different images, each representing a current top news story. As you move your pointer over each image in the collage, the image pops to the foreground so that you can see it clearly, and a summary of the news story the image represents is displayed in the middle of the page, as shown in Figure 5-18.
Clicking an image takes you directly to that image’s original location on the Web, and clicking the center news story takes you to the full story at Yahoo! News. In addition to ...