Living in a mashed up world
I wake up and decide to put on some music that will throw me into my wide awake state, something that will work like a aural jolt of caffeine. Bio-medical engineer by day Gregg Gillis slips into his alter-ego, Girl Talk, and creates the quintessential mash up album of the year, Night ripper.My next challenge is find myself a new running circuit around the unfamiliar downtown, I pull up the mapmyrun.com site and figure out a route that some much more geographically informed jogger has already explored. A friend asks me to help her find a place to live in the US and with the public facing stigma of searching directly within craigslist (sitting in Starbucks looking at a site that sells both used kitchen appliances and teenage sex services seems to make me feel embarrassed) I call up a google map/craigslist housing site and bookmark it to review on my way to my client meeting. Within 20 minutes of my day starting I have already leveraged the first hybrid trend across all experiential platforms, the principle of the mash up. With the idea of Web 2.0 being overtaken in the foreseeable future by Web 3.0 and beyond, a strange Web 2.5 is emerging. The idea that a semantic web will form (where the data pulled from one site talks with other databases using one single language) has captured the imagination of all those making our living from technological fortune-telling. The concept is simple, best explained by describing its original use. With the ability to create new forms of music-making by the application of digital technologies, it was not long before DJs and producers identified that infinite musical compositions are actually made from finite components. Tempo, key, chord structures and the like make nearly every song related to a sub-family of other compositions and it wasn’t long before musical types were able to see the similarities between 10cc and Independent Woman (Too Many DJs mash up classic, Dreadlock Child) or that Presley and Marley may have shared more than a love of illegal substances.The hybrid creation of newer and greater works has also been ripped by hackers and coders. Open architecture data frameworks has led to the ability of many to see how certain applications, when combined, create for hyper-experiences that make for a much more powerful application platform. With hindsight it seems obvious now that a geographically dependent site experience such as Craigslist would be greatly enriched by contextualising its postings by use of mapping software. The term mash up may seem a little transitional, but its value to the future of application experience is already seeming to be indispensable.