Congratulations to Innes Fisher the Mashup Developer Community Member of the Month

 As some of you might remember, last May we announced our first Mashup Hero, Mike Rollins. We shared Mike’s story (mentioned here) and asked the community to nominate people they believed qualified as a ‘Mashup Hero’. Over the past few months, members have named nominees from all backgrounds, countries and industries. People making a difference doing vastly different things. Which made us realize a ‘Mashup Hero’ can mean many things to many people. A hero can be someone with a great idea, someone who’s built a useful mashup or  someone who is truly changing the way we view application development today.  We realized heroes are contributors and contributors deserve to be rewarded. So in an effort to highlight our members who contribute to the Mashup Developer Community, to their work community or their neighborhood community, we have created the 'Contributor’s Corner' to thank you. We’re honored to help you shine among your peers.

The Mashup Developer Community Member of the Month:

Our first Mashup Developer Community Member of the Month is Innes Fisher. Innes works for a large veterinary practice in New Zealand. There are 10 clinics and 37 vets where they service all animals from your lovable companion to your typical dairy cow. He tells me '12 months ago I had no idea what a mashup was’ but by following a local pundit Dion Hinchcliffe on Twitter he was lead to the OMA where he discovered EMML. Which lead him to the Mashup Developer Community where he download the Presto Developer Edition. Within a few short weeks, “he was able to realize mashups could give him the opportunity to build something useful for his business.” His first mashup he built was an aggregated RSS feed from 3 leading NZ dairy industry websites which had no proper RSS feeds but had “News” pages on their websites.

“I got Presto up and running and with a lot of help from the MDC built our first mashup which webclipped the news pages using Dapper, and turned the output into RSS 2.0 feeds using EMML and combined them into a single RSS feed to present using a custom mashlet I created.”

Other mashups he’s built include:

• Info about our vets published using the Excel Connector
• “Hottest Documents” mashlet that gets the most downloaded documents from our intranet document libraries via SQL
• “Latest Documents” mashlet that displays all new documents added to the intranet in the last 30 days
• A combined RSS style news feed from all our intranet news source

And the coolest part is he has so many more ideas:

• A dashboard showing Client details and stats (he's working on a simple version of this now)
• Maps showing client locations (ie a dairy farm) combined with geo specific data such as facial eczema spore counts (during the summer)
• Exposing business data sources through RESTful webservices via mashups and mashable services
• Using mashup webservices to provide data to web-based apps (which I’m working on now … geocoding based on addresses)
• A business performance dashboard

And for us, you and everyone else, what makes this so special is Innes was able to do this all in a few short months. I can only image what he’ll build by the end of 2010. We share his story so everyone reading this, can share their stories too. I’ll end with what he thinks makes mashups “so cool” because I couldn’t have said it better myself, “The coolest thing about mashups is that you can take data from all manner of sources and then throw them together. For us the more data we can initially expose using base mashable services and mashups the more opportunity there will be to combine them to create “information sources”. That to me is where the most value will come from. What I like is that mashups hide the underlying mechanics of getting at the data once you’ve set them up.”

Tell us what’re doing with mashups and why that idea, application or mission makes you our next ‘Mashup Developer Community Member of the Month’.