Mashups, MashupCamp

If you haven’t read or heird something about MashupCamp, here it goes:

“an unconference-style event that’s dedicated to bringing together the Internet software mashup community for a face-to-face collaborative meetup[..]”

Don’t get excited because it has happened already, in July 2006. Luckily, talk videos are available. But what are mashups anyway?

“Mashups (be they software or content-oriented) are most often characterized by the way they draw upon functionality and/or content from two or more sources (at least one of which is third-party to the developer) to produce a new creative work.”

Any examples?

“taking something like Yahoo Maps and mashing it together with your Salesforce.com data to come up with some cool new innovative Web-based application? Or, are you thinking of building something unique and interesting on top of the application programming interfaces (APIs) from Amazon.com and Eventful.com?”

A nice example of a mashup is blueOKapi.com that is mainly mashing up Google Maps, Flickr and YouTube all together using Ruby on Rails.

Other mashup examples are linked on their wiki together with interesting resources. Check them out if you’re interested :)

Note: ferodynamics.com has an article about the recent plane crash in Manhattan and how the “social” approach in sites like Digg didn’t quite work well this time:

With the story now at 1088 diggs, the top comment is, “***** you. This is no time to inject conspiracy theorys.” So much for crowd wisdom.