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For years, imaginative DJs have been taking two or more pop songs and splicing them together to create "mash-ups" - songs that gain fleeting fame for their novelty.
The same concept is now being applied to the internet, although the results are likely to last longer as web mash-ups make it easier to access myriad web services from one place.
You don't have to look hard to find a mash-up that might appeal. Web developers are using flexible and common web tools and languages - RSS feeds, APIs, Javascript and Ajax - to borrow web services for their own creations.
The result is free mash-ups like Bashr, which merges elements of three popular services - Wikipedia, Flickr and Del.icio.us. And 1001 Secret Fishing Holes plots good fishing spots scattered across the US's national parks on a Google map of the country.
SkiBonk draws data from Google Maps, Yahoo Geocode, Flickr and Hostip to show you international skiing conditions.
Netvibes, which I use constantly to access email, news feeds and calendar and contact information, is the ultimate mash-up for those who want all their information to come from one source.
These mash-ups are the ultimate iteration of "Web 2.0". They supply the information you need, culled from different sources. They're fun and easy to use. It makes sense then that they are also becoming big business.
Companies like Programmableweb and StrikeIron are in the business of supplying web tools that allow these mash-ups to be slapped together.
Google, Amazon, Yahoo, eBay and Microsoft are all working with the development community on mash-ups that employ their web services.
So too are the likes of Oracle and IBM; the latter has developed a mash-up maker aimed at businesses called QED Wiki.
David Boloker, chief technology officer of emerging technologies at IBM, said the stable of web services and mash-ups were developed in 2004-2005 when funding started to flow after the internet "ice age" of the previous two years.
"Everyone's view of what the web is floats," says Boloker. "But we're at a point in time where you don't have to reinvent everything any more."
Instead, you take what you want from available sources.
He said the first real mash-up merged Google maps with information from the Chicago Police Department so you could tell what crimes had been committed in the city and where. Then came Housingmaps, which took rental properties listed on the popular US classifieds website Craigslist.org and plotted them on a Google map. Local auction website Trademe has a similar feature which uses the ZoomIn mapping application of Wellington start-up Project X.
Boloker showed QED Wiki to me on a recent visit to Wellington. The mash-up he had on his laptop was for a US hardware chain that wanted a dashboard of indicators to show weather patterns across the country so store managers could decide how to lay out their stores. If the weather patterns for the north-west showed a two-day heat wave, store owners in the region could decide, using their mash-up, which items to shift to the front of the store.
The mash-up also showed Google maps pinpointing each hardware store and a product inventory taken from the company's database.
You can bring new widgets and APIs (application program interface) into QED. From the user's point of view, everything is drag-and-drop into boxes that make up the dashboard.
It's behind the scenes that the real magic happens. In real time, the various data feeds are updated from numerous sources across the internet. It's seamless - no more traipsing around the web looking for information. On the Web 2.0, the information comes to you.
Boloker says the potential of such mash-ups is endless and he has helped form the Open Ajax Alliance, which promotes the adoption of the Ajax standard and interoperability across the numerous toolkits based on it, to aid the development of mash-ups.
There are issues to be ironed out as the mash-up-making frenzy accelerates - information can be taken from sources without permission, which will increasingly prove problematic when it comes to protecting copyright. There's also security to think about. Code can be added to web tools that could lead to private information being compromised. But mash-ups are no one-hit wonder. They're here to stay and are going to change how we use the internet.
www.skibonk.com
www.1001seafoods.com
www.netvibes.com
www.housingmaps.com
www.programmableweb.com
www.strikeiron.com
