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What it Means to be a Mashup
An anonymous reader writes "IBM DevWorks has provided us with an introductory article that helps define what it means to be a mashup. In addition to just defining what a mashup really is the author also delves into what they do for the community at large and where they may take us in the near future. From the article: 'Mashups are an exciting genre of interactive Web applications that draw upon content retrieved from external data sources to create entirely new and innovative services. They are a hallmark of the second generation of Web applications informally known as Web 2.0.'"
Sorry, but this buzzword's taken.
mash up. v. To take elements of two or more pre-existing pieces of music and combine them to make a new song. n. A song comprised of elements of two or more pre-existing pieces of music.
2. I'm in the middle of mashing-up songs by Tom Jones and Michael Jackson. (verb usage)
Push Button, Receive Bacon
This is possibly the most vague article I have ever read.
I didn't manage to learn any more from this article that the Slashdot summary didn't provide.
Although there are sections describing what each tehnology is, and how it would be used, the summaries are vague, and lack any real content. I have written similar non-technical summaries for executive types, and it looked vaguely similar to this.
Reading the README of any AJAX application will tell you 80% of what the IBM article goes into.
The only information I can as being useful is the resource list cited at the end of the article.
Signature v3.0, now with 42% less memory usage.
How did they manage to cram so many buzzwords into one summary?
The remix / combination of several songs.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
Take 2 dot-com like things with no real business model and put them together?
Web 2.0! Bubble 2.0! Crash 2.0! Recession 2.0!
Enough with the 2.0 already.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
You must have had brilliant karma before you started trolling if you're still not down to -1 yet! Well done!
This article is clearly nothing more than an attempt to get us all complaining about how much we hate buzzwords, and the concept of Web 2.0.
ahem! to bloody right the buzzword's taken! i've been saying this for years...
s hup
mashup (mash up) V. 1. to get wrecked on drugs of some description. 2. to have violence visited on one's person.
usage: "we were right in the middle of one hell of a mashup and i fell and broke my arm."
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=ma
The W3b 2.O Kr3w has to keep themselves relevant by inventing unnecessary words so that they seem ahead of the curve.
http://www.programmableweb.com/
has lots of great web 2.0 examples, some silly some useful. most are of the A+B variety (like google maps api + ufo reporting center data = http://www.ufomaps.com/) which are neat but a bit limited. more interesting mashups would be the less direct correlations, i think.
Okay, I award this article 8 out of 10 on the 'Web 2.0 buzzword bingo waste of my precious time scale', which I just invented for that express purpose.
However, there is scope for something interesting here. The 'Web 2.0' thing, and I'm including most of the 'semantic web' in that, is the first example of a groupthink disaster growing and evolving from nothing in the web age. I know there were a few silly ideas (set-top boxes and the like) before, but Web 2.0 has grown in a truly organic grass-roots fashion and could provide valuable insights into why sensible people collectively influence each other to make mistakes.
I'm not volunteering to read through the history of Web 2.0 articles to do that, though, I must admit.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
mash up. v. To take elements of two or more pre-existing pieces of music and combine them to make a new song. n. A song comprised of elements of two or more pre-existing pieces of music.
In engineering that is called a 'lash-up', i.e. hurredly modifying an existing design in an improvised fashion often by using modified parts from another existing design. Windows is a good example and Linux isn't guiltless either.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
... is a cannabis smoking session. Though having met a few web developers in my time perhaps IBM they chose the right name after all!
Having looked carefully at much of the comment about "Web 2.0", I have come to the conclusion that it is in fact 80% marketing smoke and mirrors. (And, of course, a commercial service mark). Behind that, there is an important idea: the emergence of a whole generation of open, data-sharing sites. Very little, if anything, new in the way of technology though.
The Semantic Web is entirely different. It has been going on, quietly but steadily, for at least 7-8 years now, and is beginning to yield some useful results. It is led by W3C, a well-informed and technically competent organization, and has the blessing of TBL. While I feel that it faces some really big challenges, I believe that the Semantic Web initiative will make as much progress as is reasonably possible given the current state of the art.
While Web 2.0 could really use something like the Semantic Web, it has contributed remarkably little in the way of technical innovation so far. It's really more a set of requirements than any kind of a solution. The real joke is that most of the people bragging about what a huge breakthrough Web 2.0 is have yet to understand that they are still well within the envelope of what TBL envisaged back in 1990. He intended the Web to be a medium of exchange for everyone, not just big organizations (that's why his first browser was read/write), and his vision for the Web has not yet been fully realized AFAIK. The Web 2.0 people are working to realize a fairly large slice of it, but the name "Web 2.0" is ridiculous on several counts.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
"You're everywhere. You're omnivorous."
Did I win?
Shameless plug but entirely on-topic, slashgeo.org discuss mashups regularly. You'll find more articles on mashups here.
This includes:
Mashups are fool's gold?, a ZDNet article.
Making money from mashups, a Search Engine Watch article.
The fatal flaw of Mashups, another ZDNet article.
Mapping a Revolution with Mashups, a CNET article.
And so on...
Animoog.org
The article certainly seems to be buzzword compliant.
What!? People depending on other people? How will we ever build a society from that?
i just love when people give names to things that already have names. this is called a portal, not a mashup. jetspeed provides the means to create such a portal with portlets that pull and optionally transform xml and html and has been around for years.
Hi All,
d _In_Key_demo.mp3
.NET) and MixShare http://www.mixshare.com/ (Java) are two examples.
There is another definition of a mash-up, also much more interesting:
"Combination (usually by digital means) of the music from one song with the a cappella from another. Typically, the music and vocals belong to completely different genres. At their best, bastard pop songs strive for musical epiphanies that add up to considerably more than the sum of their parts." (Wikipedia)
Check out this example by DJ Shane 54:
http://www.mixedinkey.com/downloads/Shane_54_Mixe
Danger Mouse's "Gray Album" was another example. Harmonic mixing is required for these mashups. There is software that make this easier. Mixed In Key http://www.mixedinkey.com/ (Cocoa +
Web 2.0 is so 2005! I'm already developing applications for Web 3.0! My company has a roadmap for the application extending all the way into Web 6.0 in 2010! It's all done in PowerPoint and Visio!
Music speeds up when you yawn, but does not change pitch.
Why not focus on metadata synthesis techniques instead of gigantic infrastructures lumbering under their own weight with nothing to plug into them?
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Did we RTSameFA? While the IBM article wasn't a tutorial on how to program the things, it covered a lot of the basic technology options out there. It also answered my fundamental question about them, which is "Is that all a Mash-up is?" ("Yes, that's all" - it's a Web-2.0-Jargonification for handing data from one source to a program that does something with it, and a little bit of techno-wrapper like using XML and maybe getting the user's browser to do most of the data handling. There's nothing fundamentally deep or non-obvious about it, unlike, say, the connections in mashing up "The Wizard of Oz" with "Dark Side Of The Moon", but it can still be really useful sometimes.) It also had some good commentary on issues like whether you can depend on the user running Javascript and ActiveEvilX.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Metadata synthesis:
Rather than you reading a document and extracting keywords or the "topic", the computer does it.
Rather than you looking at a picture and identifying the people depicted, the computer does it.
It's getting the computer to do the things that we are too lazy to do: annotate the artifacts that we want to be able to retrieve later.
We have really shiny infrastructres with Web Services and SOA and brokers and all sorts of fun stuff that is all absolutely useless unless you pay a bunch of people to sit around and methodically go through all your stuff and mark it up.
Nobody wants to do that. Nobody wants to pay for that. It's all ass-backwards.
We should be focusing on how we can get the computer to do that for us. Or, alternatively, pioneer methods where metadata is captured at the time of content creation (or prompting the user at appropriate times to fill in some critical details) and propagated all the way into the final archived form. (Like EXIF tags in JPEGs or ID3 tags in MP3).
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON