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What it Means to be a Mashup 57

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the development-has-to-come-from-somewhere dept.
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.'"
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What it Means to be a Mashup More

What it Means to be a Mashup

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  • maybe another term is appropriate? (Score:3, Funny)

    by macadamia_harold ( 947445 ) on Wednesday August 09, 2006 @03:47AM (#15872021) Homepage
    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)
    • 3. To be `mashup` is to be rendered unworthwhile via the consumption of 'trendy chemical amusement'.
    • 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.
    • Yeah. I'm right with you on that one MH. Maybe they're looking for something like 'confabulation'. A mashup is a piece of music, not some patchwork spaghetti code looking for a home.
      • A mashup is a piece of music

        That's debatable.

        Most mash-ups that I've heard I would much rather listen to the songs serially and in their entireties.
        • Most mash-ups that I've heard I would much rather listen to the songs serially and in their entireties

          1. Your personal taste, however evolved (???) is not the subject
          2. In many cases I might agree with you. But mashup is an emerging art. And it beats Shitney every time.

          I don't like it when corporations try to be "cool" by adopting slang. It's like if your grandma started wearing low-rider jeans with a white sequined belt.
          • 2. In many cases I might agree with you. But mashup is an emerging art. And it beats Shitney every time.

            Every time you say ?! But, but ... what about mashups with "Shitney" songs (using the term 'song' loosely of course) ?
            "Oops I did it again" mashed into "Papa don't preach" might be amusing!
    • I asked my own library of homemade bastard pop [spacemutiny.com] what it means to be a mashup, but it didn't give me any reply beyond the sound of badly-synchronized vocals pasted over dubiously sardonic choices of background music with questionable artistic value.

      </ontopicspam>

  • Mish Mash (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gigne ( 990887 ) on Wednesday August 09, 2006 @03:57AM (#15872035) Homepage Journal
    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.

  • Wow (Score:3, Funny)

    by YowzaTheYuzzum ( 774454 ) on Wednesday August 09, 2006 @04:00AM (#15872044)
    How did they manage to cram so many buzzwords into one summary?

  • Or (Score:3, Informative)

    by Aqua OS X ( 458522 ) on Wednesday August 09, 2006 @04:05AM (#15872055)
    The remix / combination of several songs.

  • Mashup 2.0 (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Duncan3 ( 10537 ) on Wednesday August 09, 2006 @04:22AM (#15872086) Homepage
    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.

  • -1, Troll (Score:4, Insightful)

    by afaik_ianal ( 918433 ) on Wednesday August 09, 2006 @04:28AM (#15872099)
    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...

    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=mas hup [urbandictionary.com]
  • The W3b 2.O Kr3w has to keep themselves relevant by inventing unnecessary words so that they seem ahead of the curve.

  • 8/10 ******** (Score:3, Interesting)

    by kahei ( 466208 ) on Wednesday August 09, 2006 @04:51AM (#15872152) Homepage
    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.

    • 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 res

      • Well, I did say I was only including most of the Semantic Web. RSS is useful, for instance. On the other hand, RSS is not much to show for 7 year's work, especially when the actual 'semantic web' aspects of it tend not to be used -- 'author' as a string name rather than a reference to an author record, etc.

        The W3C may be well-defined but the trouble is that they are a standards-creating group and that's exactly what their activity consists of. If they could restrict themselves to creating _one_ standard
        • Why not focus on metadata synthesis techniques instead of gigantic infrastructures lumbering under their own weight with nothing to plug into them?
          • Why not focus on metadata synthesis techniques instead of gigantic infrastructures lumbering under their own weight with nothing to plug into them?


            What the hell does that mean? Can you give more details and an example?
            • 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 t

  • Where I come from a Mashup ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Viol8 ( 599362 ) on Wednesday August 09, 2006 @05:11AM (#15872197) Homepage
    ... is a cannabis smoking session. Though having met a few web developers in my time perhaps IBM they chose the right name after all!

  • What a clustermashup (Score:3, Insightful)

    by novus ordo ( 843883 ) on Wednesday August 09, 2006 @06:43AM (#15872397) Journal
    "One of the biggest social issues facing mashup developers is the tradeoff between the protection of intellectual property and consumer privacy versus fair-use and the free flow of information. Unwitting content providers (targets of screen scraping), and even content providers who expose APIs to facilitate data retrieval might determine that their content is being used in a manner that they do not approve of."
    The biggest problem I see with these mashups, or any kind of application that relies on a third party(TP), is that once you get enough air, they can just take the rug out from under you and offer you parachutes on your way down. It can be as simple as the TP dying or just dropping the web-service that is an integral part of your application, or as complicated as "we don't want you knowing this" or "we think this is illegal." Also there's a possibility that TP will start charging you bandwidth since you are taking up X% and they will need to upgrade their facilities. Add to this the legal uncertainty whether the TP really owns the data being provided and you got yourself one hell of a mashup.
    • web crawlers are used by certain class of people/websites to aggregate certain kind info this is certainly denying functionality for such users, but when we look at large scale web2.0 ( most people say it as hype, whatever) looks good. infact the idea (when it is in initial stage) looks great. mostly this is driven by trust on the TP API,availabilty of the info (book marks might not work), certain parts of the web page may take ages to load, there are N number of dependencies. this thing is not for serious
  • Did I win?

  • what it means to rename (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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.
    • I'm sure I'll get plenty of eye rolling here (and buzzword bingo points), but they are not quite the same thing. While a portal is indeed an aggregation of content, a mashup is a blending of services. I would say that the main distinction is that current Portal products (with a capital P) typically do their aggregation on the server, and spit out the results client side using static HTML pages. While there may be some exceptions, the big ones all currently work in this way. In contrast, mashups work using c
  • Hi All,

    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_Mixed _In_Key_demo.mp3 [mixedinkey.com]

    Danger Mouse's "Gray
  • 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!

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