Mash up!
by Ragnar Schierholz
Recently, many new services and products have been made available which all follow the same kind of logic. Content and services already available somewhere on the net are being woven together to create a new service or product. If I'm not mistaken, this is often referred to as mesh up mashup [thanks, Jeff, for the correction].
Example: All the photos I publish on FlickR are available under the "Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs"-license from the CreativeCommons license set. That means that anyone may take my pictures as they are and reuse them in non-commercial products as long as he references me as the source. A company called Schmap has recently asked me for permission to include some of my pictures in their free, digital travel guide for Hawaii which they released today. I don't think that I'm an extraordinary phtotographer, but I'm lucky sometimes with my shots. And even more: I look through my lense as a genuine tourist.
Yesterday, an editor from John Wiley & Sons contacted me an asked for permission to include another picture in one of their books and offered me a free copy of the book, besides being referenced as the source, of course.
Services like the travel guide benefit from the genuity of the content, companies like John Wiley & Sons benefit from an extremely large content base, quite a bit of high quality, which they might be able to use with very low costs.
I as a user benefit from my participation in less materialistic ways: I personally like the thought that someone was that interested in my photos that they wanted them to be included in their product. I also like the thought of travellers perparing their trip to where I was by looking at my pictures. I guess this is another way of getting the "fifteen minutes of fame" that Andy Warhol predicted :-).
I seriously believe that this is going to be big.
Comments
The generally accepted term actually is "mashup". And here's a really cool matrix where you can find tools which mashup any two particular services. I wonder how many people out there are interpreting gaps in the matrix as personal challenges and business opportunities.
Ragnar, this is a nice observation. Though I wouldn't consider it a "mashup", since there are not two (or more) services merged to one new service. There is only one service which used the other as a source of content in a singular case.
Cem, you are right. Implicitly I extended the common definition of mashup a little and in this interpretation it includes the reuse of available content from multiple sources (not only the reuse of multiple services) into one product. In my interpretation, Schmap is mashing up multiple FlickR sources and other sources (e.g. for the text descriptions in the guide) to compile a more focused product.
Now this is nice: in older times, people got paid if someone used their stuff. Today people cheer if someone wants to use their stuff for free, or, say, a wet handshake, or a free copy of something. Tomsawyerization(TM)!
Haiko, I don't think this is exactly true. I would have never ever been paid for my pictures. They are personal pictures I took during my vacations. Some of them are personal in nature and not published for open access. Some of them are just nice views or other sights which are equally interesting to others. Now, again, before the availability of FlickR and the alike, such content would have been locked away for general access.
As I said, I made it available for non-commercial purposes. Things like the Schmap travel guide wouldn't have been possible without free contributions like the FlickR photos. And I do get "paid" indirectly: I can use travel guides for other locations for free, which are based on other people's vacation photos. It's a give and take.
I guess it is John Wiley & Sons, not John Weily & Sons.
Andreas, of course it is. Fixed that.
