Saturday, July 18, 2009

Thing #6

What I liked best about mashups was that I was able to have a great conversation with my son, Chris, about the way web mashups can work. I learned that a combination of Google maps and a restaurant website will produce a map to the restaurant. Map Quest and Yahoo Maps work this way too. It's possible to do this because Google openned the programming so others could use it. Many sites do. So, I thought, is Google making money from this? Turns out they do when they place advertising on different mashups. It was fun to look at another mashup called Big Huge Labs that uses flickr programming. I had been wanting to find the site where I could make a photo of myself look like the Obama Andy Warhol poster. Amazingly, the program is one of the 'toys' on the Big Huge Labs site. As Chris and I talked more, I also learned that the term mash up eminated from the music industy and is still used there. By happenstance, I found an article about a mashup artist named Kutiman who created a terrific music video where multiple musicians mash up to produce a piece called "thru you". Follow this link if you want to hear the result: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tprMEs-zfQA and follow this link if you want to read the article about Kutiman.http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/03/magazine/03wwln-medium-t.html?_r=1&scp=9&sq=The%20Medium&st=cse. ml?ref=dining

The fact that mashups on the Web involve something more than maps made me more interested in them. Something thing that I learned about the word mashup is that it is being used everywhere. The term mashup is being used to talk about combinations of famous literary novels, combinations of media companies (NPR and NY Times), and even in recipes. See if you like the combo of greens and potatoes mentioned in a food blog called bitten, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/11/dining/11mini.html.
I think the term is becoming part of the vernacular. As I tell my students, I am an English teacher because I love words so I am happy to have learned a new one. I loved learning about all the different kinds of mashups.

1 comment:

  1. You sure got into this one. I didn't even really think about where the term "mash up" came from. Way to go and delve deeply into a subject!

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