02-03-2006, 11:00 AM
Quote:What do you get if you combine, say, the tagging system from one site with the RSS feed of another? A software mashup, one of the hits of Web 2.0...
On the web, mashups are usually created by taking data from two or more sources and combining them to make something interesting and new. ChicagoCrime (www.chicagocrime.org), for example, took police data for crime incidents and plotted them on street maps from Google Maps. Now, if you were visiting an area you didn't know, you could check in advance whether it was the sort of place you might get mugged, and when...
Ben Metcalf, the project leader on Backstage.bbc.co.uk, reckons Google Maps has become popular because of the interface it brings with it. He thinks that rather than simply combining data feeds, the future of mashups is with people providing interfaces that enable you to display data in ways you wouldn't normally see it. What that might be, of course, is anybody's guess. There may be fortunes to be made...
full article: http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/...02,00.html