I wrote a little while ago about mashups, and defined them as “two or more sources of information on the web ‘mashed’ together to make a new, useful tool.” As it turns out, mashups are actually much more encompassing than that. The two or more sources of “information” do not necessarily have to create a “tool”; indeed, the sources don’t have to be “information” in the traditional sense at all.
For example, there are music mashups — entirely new creations that consist of clips and samples of tracks already in existence. Remember The Grey Album, which spliced together Jay-Z and the Beatles? Mashup. There are also video mashups, which combine video and audio from different sources to make something completely new. There are countless examples of these, but one hilarious illustration that I’ve just happened upon called There Will Be Vader mixes audio from There Will Be Blood with clips from Star Wars.
So just as “utility” mashups are useful remixes of several sources of information, “creative” mashups are expressive remixes of several sources of inspiration. The tricky difference between the two is this: utility mashups generally make use of what are called APIs, or application programming interfaces, to obtain and manipulate data. The easiest way to think of it as a sort of Rosetta Stone that a company provides to developers to allow them to access and interpret the information in their products. For example, Google Maps and Twitter each have an API that, when correctly manipulated and designed by a developer, can become something like Twittervision.
Music and video, though, are not really the same.
