We’ve just got back from Mashed 2008, a 2 day conference organised by the BBC, bringing developers together to create applications over a weekend using a number of open APIs all “mashed” together. The event was sponsored by Multimap, The Guardian, Channel 4, O’rielly and BT OpenZone. The plan was to use their new tools to create a new product or concept.

Meeting up with Rob Young and Jez Gomez from the PHP London group we decided to create a MashUp using the new MultiMap API. After a great talk about the Yahoo UI we began the 24 hour coding session (although we did stop for three hours sleep).

The application scrapes the BBC and Guardian RSS feeds and returns a list of current news stories. It then parses these stories, looking for relationships between any two countries, based on country name or demonym. The type of relationship between the two countries is calculated by looking for keywords and phrases within the articles. The relationships are then plotted on to the world map and colour coded. Features include localised searches, filtering and links to the original source.

Take a look at it in action here (http://mashed.idealwebsites.co.uk).