The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Now I'm giving away my age. In the late '80s and the early '90s, I had a friend who was a DJ. I thought this was the coolest job in the world. He worked at dances and special events around Winnipeg. From there, he moved up and worked at radio stations across Winnipeg and Toronto. But what was the most interesting for me was the sound equipment that he owned. In his basement he had a huge mixing board, which he used to mix songs together and create his own music. He would take well-known songs, match the beats together and mash them up into something completely new. I was always in awe of the stuff that he managed to make. Now 'mash-ups' are coming back. Over the last several weeks, the idea of webpages that are mash-ups has grown out of almost nowhere. First heard of around Christmas, mash-ups are webpages that bring information together from several other sites into a single space, using information in new ways or creating something new. Perfect examples of mash-ups are sites like 10 X 10 and Popurls.com. Both of these sites are news sites but they don't do any independent reporting or news collection of their own. What they do is collect news from a lot of other sites and bring them together into one space. 10 X 10 collects 100 photographs that represent the top news stories of the hour. It allows you to click on the pictures to read the story behind them. Popurls also collects the most popular items from places like del.icio.us, Slashdot, flickr, Youtube, digg and newsvine and brings them together in one place. It's like getting all of the news from ten different networks in one place. Mash-ups are also making new things out of the information that can be combined. For example, there are sites that are pulling together Google maps of neighbourhoods with police reports, allowing people to search through maps of their neighbourhoods to find the types of crimes that occur. As well, sites like Craigslist, which posts hundreds of apartment rentals, are combining their information with Google maps, allowing people to search through apartment listings on a map instead of having to read the information on the listing, look at the pictures, and then try to locate the place on a city map you've got jammed into a drawer somewhere. One site that lets you easily make a mash-up of your own is Google. Set as my homepage on my laptop, Google lets you customize a homepage, adding the RSS feeds from different places of your choosing, allowing you to see the headlines you want whenever you head to your homepage. As well, a free site called suprglu does the same type of thing, easily allowing you to pull feeds together and have them constantly, automatically update themselves. It's called screenscraping Ð lifting information from one site and placing it onto another to bring information together or to create something new. This has only been around for very few months and right now, no one is really concerned with ideas of copyright or where the information is coming from. But soon, someone will try to bring in feeds from various sports channels, or they will bring together news feeds from a few of the networks so that you can get your nightly news online. Then the networks will complain, then problems of copyright and information ownership will surface, and the future of mash-ups will quickly be determined. ([email protected])
