Wednesday, September 28, 2005

Mashing or Meshing?

ChiefTech has an interesting post about the recent Economist article on "Mash ups."
"If you're interested in social software, then the idea of 'mashing' or 'mash-up' is an important concept to understand. The Economist provides an introduction and discussion of the future direction in social software mashing. They explain mashing as:

'The term mash-up is borrowed from the world of music, where it refers to the unauthorised combination of the vocal from one song with the musical backing of another, usually from a completely different genre. Web mash-ups do the same sort of thing, combining websites to produce useful hybrid sites and illustrating the internet's underlying philosophy: that open standards allow and promote unexpected forms of innovation.'

I've mentioned a number of examples of social software mash-ups on this blog, including:

* The Katrine Information Map
* Foundcity"
It seems to me that this is actually a manifestation of MESHING, of finding bridge points between disparate pieces to make a new "sense" of something.

In fact, this might be a very early community indicator, as mash/meshes point out areas of shared interest.

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2 Comments:

Blogger jonl said...

I find myself using the term "mashup" (or the variant "mashed up") quite a bit in discussions of convergent technologies. Remix culture is seeding our synapses pretty effectively...!

6:52 AM  
Anonymous Chris said...

I think that mashing of music will be the first. Then mashing of other things that can be digitized - isn't this what geneticists are doing when they create hybrid spliced gene organisms

11:54 PM  

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