Have you heard the term "mashup"?
Better learn it because I believe it is the next big thing in the evolution of the web.
In simple terms, a mashup is a web service that blends together technology and services from multiple web services. A simple example would be combining Google maps with a real estate web site, or Google maps with a crime stat web site. You are blending two types of content : houses for sale and mapping technology, or incidents of crime and mapping technology.
Mashups are moving beyond Google maps and into blogging.
For those of us into blogging, we quickly realized that the trajectory of this hobby is toward site feeds. People really don't have the time to click on 50 of their favorite blogs every day to check for new content. They would rather be notified when there is new content, and see at least the title of the blog post to decide if it is worth reading. The answer is, of course, syndicating feeds. (note: please notice the big orange square in the right column of the Dawn Treader; pushing that button is an easy way for you to subscribe to my site feed).
But, for the active blog reader, there are zillions of feeds out there to comb through. Wouldn't it be kewl to subscribe to a bunch of site feeds (a feed of feeds) and then apply filters for keywords that interest you (like "intelligent design" or "faith science"). The next problem with your feed of feeds is that some posts show up on multiple feeds. Mine do. The Dawn Treader participates in about four feed aggregators, so my posts begin to show up in multiple spots. This could prove annoying for someone who was building a master aggregator of site feeds.
So ... why not build a feed of feeds ... add keyword filters ... add a unique sort ... and you would have a fairly kewl personalized service that would deliver interesting content to your doorstep.
What we are doing ... conceptually ... is mashing together multiple web services. Site feed aggregation ... keyword filtering ... and unique sorting. The possibilities go on and on.
You now see why is such an exciting milestone in internet technology. It brings the concept of Unix pipes to the common man on the internet using a drag and drop interface. What kinds of interesting combinations will people dream up? Who knows, but I can't wait to find out.
I am not the only one excited about this development. Read Tim O'Reilly's post on Yahoo! Pipes (yes, the same O'Reilly who writes the tech books for you computer geeks like myself).
I believe the term Mashup in this sense is being borrowed from the electronic music scene where a mashup is when two different dance songs are cut and pasted/remixed together creating a new musical composition with elements of both songs intertwined throughout.
Posted by: Matt | February 20, 2007 at 12:20
"But, for the active blog reader, there are zillions of feeds out there to comb through. Wouldn't it be kewl to subscribe to a bunch of site feeds (a feed of feeds) and then apply filters for keywords that interest you (like "intelligent design" or "faith science")."
You can do this with Google's Blogsearch. Search for whatever term you are interested in, click "Sorted by date" in the upper right hand corner, and then click "RSS" or "Atom" on the left hand side. Then subscribe to that feed. I've been doing this for quite some time and it works very well.
And, yes, I'm pretty sure mashup is borrowed from the musical term. Listen to this Sufjan Stevens/Kanye West mashup, "Zombies Walk." I love it! This one of Kelly Clarkson and the Eagles is surprisingly good, too.
Posted by: macht | February 20, 2007 at 13:56
In addition to my last comment, one could use the "site:" command for google in order to limit your searches to certain people's feeds. That would be closer to the function you were looking for.
Posted by: macht | February 20, 2007 at 14:22