MASHUP Data Integration and More.

Where have I been? I learned a new word today but the word has been around for a long time. CBC Online Radio menu introduced me to the word this morning as it promoted an audio show that airs tonight at 7:30 pm on Radio One. The promo says “Canada is a country of mashups. People from different cultures find themselves living and working together here — bumping into different values, assumptions and different ways of doing things.” Did you notice how I gave credit for this quotation?

This is the universal symbol for mashup.

So much of what I write and what I paint is mashup. How I think is mashup, come to think of it. When I write a blog post for GPS, I typically have an idea, develop it and add expressions and images I have accessed from internet sources. Invariably the product is mashup. If I use artists' images I source them with credit. I even do that with some photographic images. I have even asked permission for use of some of these. Where I quote verbatim I source the writer. In the mashup universe, giving credit is a lost courtesy, even though some will say it is a legal requirement. This is under constant debate.

So I pulled up the Wikipedia definition for Mashup and learned about four mashup genres.
1. Mashup (digital), a digital media file containing any or all of text, graphics, audio, video, and animation, which recombines and modifies existing digital works to create a derivative work.
2. Mashup (music), the musical genre encompassing songs which consist entirely of parts of other songs. The basic idea of a mashup is that you take samples of existing content (audio, video, text), and put them together into something new.
3. Mashup (video), a video that is edited from more than one source to appear as one
4. Mashup (web application hybrid), a web application that combines data and/or functionality from more than one source.

More mashup tomorrow and the next day, and maybe as long as I do this, because apparently I don’t have an original thought in my head.
Sorry for the long delay between posts. I was trying too hard to be original.