Mashup (digital)

A digital mashup usually is in reference to:

1. Digital media content containing any or all of text, graphics, audio, video and animation drawn from pre-existing sources, to create a new derivative work. Digital text mashups like the comedic mashup, The Art of War Against Fat, appear by the thousands every day as users of blogs and online forums copy and paste digital text in juxtaposition to comment on topics of interest. Digital mashups represent a new phase in the re-use of existing works not so much conceptually as in ease of use. The creation of digital media formats such as ASCII text, Redbook audio, JPEG images and MPEG video has made it far easier for potential mashup creators to create derivative works than was the case in the past, when significant technical equipment and knowledge was required to manipulate analog content.^[1] A major contributing factor to the spread of digital mashups is of course the World Wide Web, which provides channels both for acquiring source material and for distributing derivative works, both often at negligible cost^[2]. Current widespread practices of creating digital mashups have raised significant questions of intellectual property and copyright, which have been addressed by Lawrence Lessig, among others^[3]. While questioning the law, mashups are also questioning the very act of creation. Are the artists creating when they use other individuals' work? How will artists prove their creative input?

2. Web or cloud computing based applications are a combination of separate parts brought together with the use of the open architecture of public Application Programming Interfaces API. For example, a mashup between Google Maps and Weather.com could be made available as an iphone application, where the content and context of that content are drawn from outside sources through the published API.

Notes

1. ^ Thill, 2008: DJ Spooky comments on the shift from analog to digital mashup
2. ^ Berman et al.: Internet technologies and digital mashup
3. ^ Lessig 2001

References

• "Do the Mixed-Up Movie Mash, by Michael Hill and Jennifer Dudley". The Courier Mail (Australia), March 9, 2006, FEATURES, p. 17. 
• "DJ Spooky: How a Tiny Caribbean Island Birthed the Mashup, interview with Scott Thill". Wired magazine 7/12/2007. http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/news/2007/07/spooky_QA. Retrieved 2008-01-21. 
• "Navigating the media divide: Innovating and enabling new business models". Saul J. Berman, Steven Abraham, Bill Battino, Louisa Shipnuck and Andreas Neus, 2007: IBM Institute for Business Value study. http://www-03.ibm.com/industries/media/doc/content/resource/thought/354180111.html. Retrieved 2008-01-21. 
• "The Future of Ideas", Lawrence Lessig, 2001, On-line version (PDF, free, under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial licence)