When I was a kid, a Mashup would involve potato plus one other ingredient. Then came music mashups with two tracks overlaid, such as The Grey Album. Now a mashup can be whatever curious combination of creative output you can think of.

Every time we tag our digital assets and share them online, we are providing the threads of a rich tapestry that can be woven according to individual aesthetics or interests. When I was a kid, a Mashup would involve potato plus one other ingredient. Then came music mashups with two tracks overlaid, such as The Grey Album. Now a mashup can be whatever curious combination of creative output you can think of.

Every time we tag our digital assets and share them online, we are providing the threads of a rich tapestry that can be woven according to individual aesthetics or interests.Images, text, audio and videos can now be easily combined or 'mashed-up' using a new wave of tools that are easy for anyone willing to have a go.

It all starts with a clever little tool called Real Simple Syndication or RSS, which lets you keep up to date with your favourite online content without having to visit any websites to read it. Feeds are viewed using a Feed Reader such as Netvibes and the RSS Compendium has a list of RSS Readers available by platform. If you have a blog, wiki, Flickr or YouTube channel then you will probably already have an xml, atom, or rss feed, and your media can be made into a mashup.

Wikipedia defines a mashup as "a web application that combines data from more than one source into a single integrated tool". It takes the view that mashups are the new portals and I tend to agree, as it's quicker to scan a feed of fresh headlines tagged to your interests than wade through a succession of news sites filled with advertising.

Mashable, the social networking news community, has a bumper list of mashups sites in their directory, and the key areas of development seem to be in mapping, video and photo, search, shopping and news mashups. Combine any number of these elements with your keyword tags and mash away.

If by now you are feeling inspired then it's a great time to be tinkering. The new wave of mashup tools let you mould in minutes simple online interfaces, what would have once taken a technical team weeks to build at the codeface.

The first major digital player to come out with a mashup maker is Yahoo's Pipes for rewiring the web, and you can watch an excellent how to use Yahoo Pipes video tutorial at Garry Conn dot com. A search for Pipes tagged as 'creative' led me to Madlibs, where you enter a noun, verb, adjective, name, and number to be told a Flickr photo story. Musecrafters consists of feeds from poetry bloggers and there are plenty of art, music and film pipes of fresh reference to keep you inspired.

Popfly is Microsoft's answer to Pipes, and our resident technology tester Le Geek currently rates it as his mashup tool of choice. The downside is that it runs on Microsoft's Silverlight system which has to be installed first, unlike Yahoo Pipes which works through any modern web browser. Coming soon is Google Mashup which is still in Beta testing mode. We'll have to wait until the bugs are zapped before we get to properly try it out but early reports sound promising.

Yahoo Pipes vs. Popfly vs. Google Mashup at Bizhack is worth a read, and mentions Dapper the Data Mapper. The Dapp search tag cloud shows the wide range of topics now using Dapper to 'scrape' content. Web scraping can be frowned upon unless the media is for fair use, and may even be illegal if copyright has not been cleared first. It's always best use your own original artwork, audio or content so get creative, and the next place to look is feeds with the right creative commons license.

So become an indie media mogul over the holidays by setting up with your own customised news feeds or mashing up something tasty. We'll be adding an RSS feed to The Big Idea Web next year so you may even be mashing up The MsBehaviour Files in 2008!

6/12/07

As well as being TBI's strategist, Helen Baxter a.k.a. MsBehaviour runs dance-music label TMet Recordings, 3D animation company Mohawk Media and has a fortnightly slot on National Radio called 'Virtual World'.