Mash it up

The technology buzz word for 2006 was Web 2.0, and it seems like the buzz word for 2007 will surely be Mashups. Based solely on the name, Mashups don’t sound extremely appealing, but they can be appealing. Mashups are custom products that consist of an amalgamation of various seemingly unrelated formats or origins. A good analogy is an LA based business name Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles. Here is a restaurant that sells dishes that aren’t commonly considered as complimentary, but they do compliment one another. The term mashup is derived from reggae music where original songs were sometimes blended with elements from other genres, and the producers mashed all of the elements up together to create a new or remixed song.
Mashups first made their mark in the music sector of technology. DJ’s offered downloadable remixed mashups to listeners. It wasn’t long before audio editing software such as eJay, Cakewalk, and Audacity allowed listeners to create their own musical mashups by overlaying the acapella version of one song over the instrumentals of another. Mashuptown.com, mash-ups.co.uk, and smashups.com can provide examples of musical mashups.
Where music leads, video is likely to follow. Video mashups were the natural evolution to the musical hybrids. Video hybrids follow the same script as their musical counterparts. The oldest and quite possibly most famous video mashup is playing Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon while watching The Wizard of Oz. This is more like a precursor to video mashups, but the concept is the same and equally as creepy. For those of you that are unfamiliar with the Pink Floyd/Oz phenomenon, Dark Side of the Moon and The Wizard of Oz can be played simultaneously and the verse and songs provide a strange soundtrack for the film. The reigning king of video mashups websites is Youtube.com, followed closely by Google video.
Generally, music and video are where the cross pollination of adaptations would end, but in the digital age cross pollination adaptations cast a wider net that also includes software applications. The same people who make mashups of music and video are also the ones who have created mashups for applications and websites. Technically speaking, web mashups have been around for some while. Presenting content from various formats on one webpage/website has been around so long that it has become the norm. The difference is that now the unskilled webpage novice can now create sites like this from the source of their choosing. Web browsers have even began to include mashups as add-on features for their browsers. Mozilla Firefox offers a mashup add-on called greasemonkey. This downloadable program will allow users to extensively, customized not only the browser but also the websites that they visit. You can change some of the webpage features that you find annoying. Since these changes are unique to your computers browser, this means that you will truly be able to personalize your browsing experience to a greater degree.