I would not have anticipated ever writing anything with this thesis: Fidel Castro was right.
A couple of years ago, he made it known that the global subsidy of biofuels would lead to an increase in the price of food because of the diversion of grain stocks (such as corn) into fuel production.
It seemed basic economics at the time and he's been proven correct. We saw it in the developed world first in the form of an increase in the price of milk (made from corn, essentially) and subsequently all dairy products.
Now we see it in the form of other grains, like rice and wheat, and there is no obvious end in sight. The craze to invest in biofuel technologies was nothing other than a stall tactic, to prevent investment in real alternative energy sources. While it's nice to re-use things like old fry oil to run your Mercedes or semi, there just isn't enough used restaurant oil to make a dent in our demand for energy.
Instead we've taken the final step in linking our food supply to the energy market: we've decided to invest heavily (and irrationally) in converting our food directly into energy with ethanol and soy biofuel subsidies.
It's not as though there had not previously been a link; oil companies have been powering agribusiness for the last 75 years at least. Petroleum waste products have been productively combined with chlorine and other chemicals to produce a huge number of chemicals that have proved useful as pesticides (and as PCBs, PVCs, and other plastics) and have led to the current abundance of food.
Ostensibly, this is a good thing; however as this has occurred, farming has become big business, and the same corporations that control the chemistry of the food supply (like Monsanto and Exxon/Mobil) now control the food supply itself. There's no monopoly like two monopolies.
If this theses are correct, one of the best things we can do to lower food prices and to promote investment in sustainable alternative energies is to loudly protest the investment in biofuels.
By removing subsidies for biofuels, we 1) direct food back to the food supply, thereby easing prices, 2) promote investment in sustainable alternative energy solutions, 3) agitate the monopoly link between corporate farms and the petroleum products they use, 4) put additional pressure on automakers to seriously consider the development of non-petroleum powered and, certainly, of non-biofuel powered vehicles.
So, I exhort you: help stop the subsidy of biofuel production. If there is a natural market for it, it will stand on its own.
Otherwise all we're doing is making food less affordable, creating agony for countries that can't afford these price increases, and extending the life of the petroleum monopolies.
Certainly new technologies like slow discharge capacitors hold real promise. Let's develop these ideas and show the oil companies that their stranded costs are their responsibility, not ours.
Saturday, April 26, 2008
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Building Tech Startups on the East Coast @ SocialDevCamp East
As we gear up for SocialDevCamp East in Baltimore on May 10, one of the things that we'd like to highlight is the diversity of Web 2.0 talent available here on the east coast.
The conventional wisdom today says that to make it as a social startup, you should a) move to San Francisco (preferably East Bay or SOMA), b) meet a bunch of cool people (natch), c) get funded (cake!), d) get featured in TechCrunch, e) build your startup to 500,000 users, f) get snapped up in an early acquisition by Google for $90M, g) repeat.
For lots of reasons, the odds of this working are low and getting lower. Why? For one, this is the conventional wisdom; everybody's doing it, why shouldn't you? Loads of ditto-heads are creating a glut of ideas. They all can't win.
Second, VC investments are often a trailing indicator of successful business sectors. VCs follow what has worked previously, which leads to persistent failures at the end of a business cycle. Why else do you think they need to rely on outrageous 100x returns? To make up for their last round of losses.
Why do you live where you do? Family, a partner, school, friends, or do you simply love where you live? There are countless talented people who have made the same choice as you, and they've made this choice not as a runner-up to a life of glory in the Bay area. They've made the choice as a matter of personal identity and conviction.
As I meet members of the tech business community along the east coast, I hear two things consistently. One, that the Bay area is getting weird these days, and that they are "all smoking the same air." Second, that the "VC community doesn't get it here," and that it's hard to get funding and launch a web-based startup on the east coast.
Sorry, but we can't have it both ways. We must choose: do you want to live in the Bay Area and sustain the vagaries of that echo-chamber culture, or do you want to grow where you're planted and build viable businesses here?
The fact is that we can't expect to improve the tech startup climate on the east coast if we don't come together and make it what we want it to be. And that means we need to stop looking over our shoulder at the west coast and start building businesses here and now, using telework, co-work, or traditional workspaces.
The 37signals blog covered this topic today, and reflected many of my opinions on the subject.
This is part of what we want to address at SocialDevCamp East. If we want to have a thriving startup culture here, we need to build it -- one relationship at a time.
The conventional wisdom today says that to make it as a social startup, you should a) move to San Francisco (preferably East Bay or SOMA), b) meet a bunch of cool people (natch), c) get funded (cake!), d) get featured in TechCrunch, e) build your startup to 500,000 users, f) get snapped up in an early acquisition by Google for $90M, g) repeat.
For lots of reasons, the odds of this working are low and getting lower. Why? For one, this is the conventional wisdom; everybody's doing it, why shouldn't you? Loads of ditto-heads are creating a glut of ideas. They all can't win.
Second, VC investments are often a trailing indicator of successful business sectors. VCs follow what has worked previously, which leads to persistent failures at the end of a business cycle. Why else do you think they need to rely on outrageous 100x returns? To make up for their last round of losses.
Why do you live where you do? Family, a partner, school, friends, or do you simply love where you live? There are countless talented people who have made the same choice as you, and they've made this choice not as a runner-up to a life of glory in the Bay area. They've made the choice as a matter of personal identity and conviction.
As I meet members of the tech business community along the east coast, I hear two things consistently. One, that the Bay area is getting weird these days, and that they are "all smoking the same air." Second, that the "VC community doesn't get it here," and that it's hard to get funding and launch a web-based startup on the east coast.
Sorry, but we can't have it both ways. We must choose: do you want to live in the Bay Area and sustain the vagaries of that echo-chamber culture, or do you want to grow where you're planted and build viable businesses here?
The fact is that we can't expect to improve the tech startup climate on the east coast if we don't come together and make it what we want it to be. And that means we need to stop looking over our shoulder at the west coast and start building businesses here and now, using telework, co-work, or traditional workspaces.
The 37signals blog covered this topic today, and reflected many of my opinions on the subject.
This is part of what we want to address at SocialDevCamp East. If we want to have a thriving startup culture here, we need to build it -- one relationship at a time.
Monday, April 14, 2008
Being an iPhone Developer Has Its Privileges
It means you get to pay $99 (plus sales tax). Hopefully in a few minutes I'll have a certificate to test apps on my iPhone!
See you at iPhoneDevCamp in New York this weekend?
We'll be sure to have iPhone topics at SocialDevCamp East on May 10!
SocialDevCamp East, May 10 in Baltimore
The last few weeks have been really busy. So much has been going on I haven't had time to blog.
Since last time, I've launched a new company called Roundhouse Technologies and helped to organize an unconference here in Baltimore called SocialDevCamp East.
I'll be talking about Roundhouse Technologies in more detail in the coming weeks. In the meantime, it's important to get the word out about SocialDevCamp, as it's coming up fast -- on May 10.
SocialDevCamp will be held in Baltimore and is an unconference focused on the future of the social web. We're looking for developers and thought leaders who are interested in imagining the future of the web, not just where it is today.
While "monetizing Facebook applications" might have been a good topic for six months ago, we're after a little deeper reflection than that. What are the long term implications of platforms like Facebook? What effect will Google's Application Engine have on creativity? What direction is the ideation, funding, and liquidity process going in? Do we need to create new paths to liquidity, as some have suggested?
SocialDevCamp is an unconference, so the agenda is not cast in stone; we'll form the agenda based on the interests of the attendees. It's also free to participants. Our costs will be covered by some sponsors; we need sponsors. My new company is one, but we could use more. Please email me at dave at roundhousetech dot com.
Why is SocialDevCamp East in Baltimore? It's central to DC, Philly and pretty accessible to NY and Boston. Our hope is to draw deep thinkers from each of these markets. This kind of conversation is happening much more frequently on the west coast, but as a friend of mine recently said with tongue firmly in cheek, "the people in San Francisco are all smoking the same air." There's something to that. We have an opportunity to have a thoughtful, realistic conversation that's influenced by reflection and not so much by what might be happening on Sand Hill Road.
We expect to have about 100 people. Please spread the word. We're planning to have four separate break out session periods, plus lunch and an after party. We hope you can make it to what should be a great event!
Sign up to attend with the event page on Facebook and the Barcamp PBWiki event page.
And if you know someone who would be a great fit for the event, please pass on the word. We're really looking forward to meeting all of the fantastic thinkers in our midst here on the east coast.
And yes, the venue has not yet been confirmed, but we're working that now. We'll update as soon as we have more specific details.
Friday, February 29, 2008
The Connections Episode: Pulver TV, The Tech Tax, Berlin!
This was another action-packed week for me which I'm just recovering from now.
On Tuesday, I headed up to New York to be a part of another of Jeff Pulver's social media breakfasts. This one was at Friend of a Farmer (Gramercy Park area) and featured about 100 of New York's most active social networkers. I had a great time and met a ton of people, some of whom could become potential collaborators.
Jeff's onto something with these breakfasts. It's not rocket science -- it's getting people together who are preselected via a common medium -- but his belief in turning online connections into real human connections is powerful, and it will be the basis of much of how we all do business in the future. The world is re-sorting itself. More on that in a minute.
After the breakfast I headed over to Jeff's offices in Melville, NY to be on Jeff's online TV program, Pulver.TV. I was a featured guest, as was Ann Bernard from whygosolo.com, a new social networking service (and Facebook app) that "makes spontaneous connections happen". More on that in a minute too.
On Wednesday, I made an important appearance in Annapolis, Maryland at Save Maryland IT Day. For those of you reading this from outside Maryland (I dare say most of you), our state legislature, in its infinite wisdom, has passed a law that imposes a 6% sales tax on all "computer services" -- whatever that means. Anyway, it applies to me and what I do and I have been part of a team of technology business leaders fighting this law. There are several bills pending that would repeal this tax, but it won't be easy to do. We need to get the word out about this to everybody in Maryland. This tax is bad, bad, bad! Learn more at the website for the Maryland Computer Services Association.
I developed a tool to help fight this tax: Call your legislator for free and express your opposition to the tax.
The World is Re-Sorting Itself
I'm active in my local technology business community. I think that's all part of good citizenship, and it's good business and common sense to connect with people who are close-by and like-minded.
But things are changing. The two local technology councils, and the economic development agencies who help to fund them, are primarily geared towards old-school, big-iron economic development. Convince a big company to put a corporate headquarters in your state (or county) and you've got a lot of jobs, tax base, and capital investment for years to come. This is not a criticism; this is naturally what they would want to encourage and it's great as far as it goes.
But that world is slipping away. Today, geography is no longer a primary concern for companies. Small, focused companies can be virtual, or distributed, and this is more functional than it's ever been. I am struck that Maryland wants to push its technology activities outside its borders.
Meanwhile, I am meeting my most valuable collaborators in places like New York, London, or Berlin, and finding that they live all over the world. I am more likely to start a company with people from six states and three countries than I am to start one entirely headquartered in Maryland.
Collaboration of subject-matter experts is what drives excellence in business and we are no longer likely to be able to convince these experts to co-locate near each other for years at a time. People choose where to live for a host of reasons that, ideally, should and can be disconnected from their professions.
Social networking tools now make it possible for us to locate and stay connected to our peers wherever they may be.
Likewise, Ann Bernard's brilliant WhyGoSolo concept helps connect people in an orderly way to share experiences. It's not a dating site; I described it as kind of like couchsurfing.com, only standing up. Meet new people, experience new things, grow your network, push your mind. A lot of people gravitate towards the more libidinous aspects of ideas like this, and hey, what happens between consenting adults is their business.
But again, that's not the point. We've only got about 80 years on the ship here, and life's too short not to use every last minute to its fullest. To the extent that social networking can help us make new connections -- both business and personal -- shouldn't we milk it for everything it's worth?
All these concepts -- Jeff's breakfasts, WhyGoSolo, couchsurfing.com -- help us make connections and maximize our life ROI.
Noel Hidalgo's Trip Around the World: CoWorking
As an experiment, I spent summer 2007 living in Berlin with my family. I got to know several ex-pats who were living there, or just passing through.
Coincidentally, I met up with Noel Hidalgo, whose "Luck of Seven" project was taking him on a trip around the world. Here's video I just found on blip.tv of my interview with Noel in Berlin in July 2007.
Noel did a beautiful job editing this video. The kid with the accordion, the windmills, the street scenes -- he captured the zeitgeist of Berlin, summer 2007 perfectly.
Also with us that day was my friend Travis Todd, who coincidentally (and completely unbeknownst to me before meeting him there that day) is from Annapolis, Maryland and was a customer of mine years ago when I owned an ISP. And his little brother went to pre-school with my son.
See, Maryland? We don't need you. Tax us and we'll move to Berlin.
On Tuesday, I headed up to New York to be a part of another of Jeff Pulver's social media breakfasts. This one was at Friend of a Farmer (Gramercy Park area) and featured about 100 of New York's most active social networkers. I had a great time and met a ton of people, some of whom could become potential collaborators.
Jeff's onto something with these breakfasts. It's not rocket science -- it's getting people together who are preselected via a common medium -- but his belief in turning online connections into real human connections is powerful, and it will be the basis of much of how we all do business in the future. The world is re-sorting itself. More on that in a minute.
After the breakfast I headed over to Jeff's offices in Melville, NY to be on Jeff's online TV program, Pulver.TV. I was a featured guest, as was Ann Bernard from whygosolo.com, a new social networking service (and Facebook app) that "makes spontaneous connections happen". More on that in a minute too.
Interview with Dave Troy:
Interview with Ann Bernard:
On Wednesday, I made an important appearance in Annapolis, Maryland at Save Maryland IT Day. For those of you reading this from outside Maryland (I dare say most of you), our state legislature, in its infinite wisdom, has passed a law that imposes a 6% sales tax on all "computer services" -- whatever that means. Anyway, it applies to me and what I do and I have been part of a team of technology business leaders fighting this law. There are several bills pending that would repeal this tax, but it won't be easy to do. We need to get the word out about this to everybody in Maryland. This tax is bad, bad, bad! Learn more at the website for the Maryland Computer Services Association.
I developed a tool to help fight this tax: Call your legislator for free and express your opposition to the tax.
The World is Re-Sorting Itself
I'm active in my local technology business community. I think that's all part of good citizenship, and it's good business and common sense to connect with people who are close-by and like-minded.
But things are changing. The two local technology councils, and the economic development agencies who help to fund them, are primarily geared towards old-school, big-iron economic development. Convince a big company to put a corporate headquarters in your state (or county) and you've got a lot of jobs, tax base, and capital investment for years to come. This is not a criticism; this is naturally what they would want to encourage and it's great as far as it goes.
But that world is slipping away. Today, geography is no longer a primary concern for companies. Small, focused companies can be virtual, or distributed, and this is more functional than it's ever been. I am struck that Maryland wants to push its technology activities outside its borders.
Meanwhile, I am meeting my most valuable collaborators in places like New York, London, or Berlin, and finding that they live all over the world. I am more likely to start a company with people from six states and three countries than I am to start one entirely headquartered in Maryland.
Collaboration of subject-matter experts is what drives excellence in business and we are no longer likely to be able to convince these experts to co-locate near each other for years at a time. People choose where to live for a host of reasons that, ideally, should and can be disconnected from their professions.
Social networking tools now make it possible for us to locate and stay connected to our peers wherever they may be.
Likewise, Ann Bernard's brilliant WhyGoSolo concept helps connect people in an orderly way to share experiences. It's not a dating site; I described it as kind of like couchsurfing.com, only standing up. Meet new people, experience new things, grow your network, push your mind. A lot of people gravitate towards the more libidinous aspects of ideas like this, and hey, what happens between consenting adults is their business.
But again, that's not the point. We've only got about 80 years on the ship here, and life's too short not to use every last minute to its fullest. To the extent that social networking can help us make new connections -- both business and personal -- shouldn't we milk it for everything it's worth?
All these concepts -- Jeff's breakfasts, WhyGoSolo, couchsurfing.com -- help us make connections and maximize our life ROI.
Noel Hidalgo's Trip Around the World: CoWorking
As an experiment, I spent summer 2007 living in Berlin with my family. I got to know several ex-pats who were living there, or just passing through.
Coincidentally, I met up with Noel Hidalgo, whose "Luck of Seven" project was taking him on a trip around the world. Here's video I just found on blip.tv of my interview with Noel in Berlin in July 2007.
Noel did a beautiful job editing this video. The kid with the accordion, the windmills, the street scenes -- he captured the zeitgeist of Berlin, summer 2007 perfectly.
Also with us that day was my friend Travis Todd, who coincidentally (and completely unbeknownst to me before meeting him there that day) is from Annapolis, Maryland and was a customer of mine years ago when I owned an ISP. And his little brother went to pre-school with my son.
See, Maryland? We don't need you. Tax us and we'll move to Berlin.
Friday, February 22, 2008
Design and the Elastic Mind: Opening Night
On Tuesday, I attended the press preview and opening night events for Design and the Elastic Mind at the MoMA in NYC. It opens to the public Sunday, February 24th and includes works from designers, scientists, digital artists and thinkers from across a wide range of disciplines; my projects Twittervision and Flickrvision are featured.
I strongly recommend that you check out this exhibition, especially if you're interested in the intersection between science, design, and art. There are some stunningly beautiful and provocative pieces. While the core ideas behind many of the pieces are technical -- computation, informatics, bioscience -- good design is required to make the information presentable and understandable to a broader audience. Paola Antonelli, curator for Architecture and Design at the MoMA, has done a remarkable job of assembling these pieces.
Here are some photos from the party Tuesday night.
Large scale, open-source Graffiti Projection System from Graffiti Research Lab. I need to build one of these. The graffiti is "painted" where the green laser hits. Note that the paint drips "up" in this photo. You can do that with digital paint!
This still seems improbable.
Sofia Lagerkvist (right) w/partner from Front Design. Creators of the remarkable "Sketch Furniture", which can be drawn freehand in 3-space, then rendered in plastic using a laser-based process. Insane. Create your own furniture that looks like it's straight out of a cartoon!
This is an example of an object created with the Sketch Furniture process.
The Painstation video game; where the punishment for losing is actual pain, inflicted by a table-mounted wristband!
Adam Putter and Janis Mussat. Their project Beerfinder.ca helps beer drinkers in Toronto coordinate beer runs, navigating complex store-closing hours!
No contemporary design exhibit is complete without the OLPC!
Me and Paola Antonelli, MoMA Curator of Design & Architecture.
She curated Design and the Elastic Mind.
My favorite installation in the show, Shadow Monsters by Philip Worthington. Transforms people into amazing sights and sounds. You need to see this.
Me and Ian Spiro of fastfoodmaps.com, a Google maps project that shows the fast-food restaurants in the United States. He wishes he had more time to devote to this. He thinks Arby's is retreating, but he wants to prove it!
"I Want You to Want Me" is a project by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, of wefeelfine.org fame. This project scrapes data from online dating sites and attempts to make sense of it. It uses a giant touch screen and is visually quite impressive.
A giant, pulsating 15' tall "tree" made from what appear to be clear-coated fiberoptic strands. Really, really impressive piece of work. It is the "Sonumbra" by Rachel Wingfield and Mathias Gmachl.
Me and Noelle Steber of the Google Moon project. Noelle was responsible for assembling the Apollo data and is a student at MIT.
My wife Jennifer, showing off the digitally projected "Lightweeds" by Simon Heijdens.
My other project, Flickrvision
All in all, a successful evening. Design and the Elastic Mind will run through May 12, 2008! I hope you get a chance to see this exhibit in person!
I strongly recommend that you check out this exhibition, especially if you're interested in the intersection between science, design, and art. There are some stunningly beautiful and provocative pieces. While the core ideas behind many of the pieces are technical -- computation, informatics, bioscience -- good design is required to make the information presentable and understandable to a broader audience. Paola Antonelli, curator for Architecture and Design at the MoMA, has done a remarkable job of assembling these pieces.
Here are some photos from the party Tuesday night.
Large scale, open-source Graffiti Projection System from Graffiti Research Lab. I need to build one of these. The graffiti is "painted" where the green laser hits. Note that the paint drips "up" in this photo. You can do that with digital paint!
This still seems improbable.
Sofia Lagerkvist (right) w/partner from Front Design. Creators of the remarkable "Sketch Furniture", which can be drawn freehand in 3-space, then rendered in plastic using a laser-based process. Insane. Create your own furniture that looks like it's straight out of a cartoon!
This is an example of an object created with the Sketch Furniture process.
The Painstation video game; where the punishment for losing is actual pain, inflicted by a table-mounted wristband!
Adam Putter and Janis Mussat. Their project Beerfinder.ca helps beer drinkers in Toronto coordinate beer runs, navigating complex store-closing hours!
No contemporary design exhibit is complete without the OLPC!
Me and Paola Antonelli, MoMA Curator of Design & Architecture.
She curated Design and the Elastic Mind.
My favorite installation in the show, Shadow Monsters by Philip Worthington. Transforms people into amazing sights and sounds. You need to see this.
Me and Ian Spiro of fastfoodmaps.com, a Google maps project that shows the fast-food restaurants in the United States. He wishes he had more time to devote to this. He thinks Arby's is retreating, but he wants to prove it!
"I Want You to Want Me" is a project by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, of wefeelfine.org fame. This project scrapes data from online dating sites and attempts to make sense of it. It uses a giant touch screen and is visually quite impressive.
A giant, pulsating 15' tall "tree" made from what appear to be clear-coated fiberoptic strands. Really, really impressive piece of work. It is the "Sonumbra" by Rachel Wingfield and Mathias Gmachl.
Me and Noelle Steber of the Google Moon project. Noelle was responsible for assembling the Apollo data and is a student at MIT.
My wife Jennifer, showing off the digitally projected "Lightweeds" by Simon Heijdens.
My other project, Flickrvision
All in all, a successful evening. Design and the Elastic Mind will run through May 12, 2008! I hope you get a chance to see this exhibit in person!
Monday, February 18, 2008
The Mashup Is Dead
Today I want to rant about a few things I hate. They include:
I know it's heresy. Mashups and Web 2.0 are what's hot, right? I myself am considered to be a "mashup creator" working with Web 2.0 concepts.
But that era is behind us. The term "Mashup" made sense when coders were actually lifting data from places it was hard to lift from and putting it into contexts that were hard to access. This, my friends, is no longer the state of affairs on the Internet.
Today, we are working with a world of data that wants to be free and is published via countless, well documented API's. In the cases where API's are still not available (or whorishly published in hopes of becoming universally adopted), advanced tools and protocols are available to automate what used to be hard.
We must remember that the word "mashup" hails back to music, originally; a talented music editor might string together pieces of previously recorded music to create something new. This was an artform in itself, and implied a kind of subversion. A repurposing of content, often done without the permission or knowledge of the original creator.
Well, the days of this kind of thing on the Internet are, thanks to everybody's efforts to open things up, largely over. In a world where open source software is widely accepted, where it makes sense for companies like Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Twitter, Amazon (and gee, every other damn company out there) to publish API's that encourage their data to be woven into the fabric of the net, there is no need for the coy sense of subversion that comes from the word "Mashup."
What we've got now, folks, is DATA! Great flowing rivers of it! Software that helps us use it! Ruby on Rails, Asterisk, MySQL, PGSQL, Apache, Freeswitch, Flex! Where it's not open source, it's at least free! Everything has an API and the things that don't are falling away.
The next person that says to me with a straight face that they "make mashups" is going to get sucker-punched. The word has lost its meaning, so let's move on.
That said, explaining to a layperson what it is we "creative coders" do, sometimes you, well, have to resort to saying, "I make mashups." But do us all a favor, try to explain what that really means today. Let's move to a world where we can think about data, about tools (which is really just code-as-data), and imagining what we can do with it all.
Mashup was a good word for perhaps 2003-2007, but it implies limitations and barriers that simply no longer exist. We can do better.
What would YOU call the innovations that are possible with all the data and tools we have today?
- The Word "Mashup"
- Proclamations of the form: "A Thing is Dead; Long Live that Thing"
- People Who Insist on Continuing to Use the Word Mashup
- The Term "Web 2.0"
I know it's heresy. Mashups and Web 2.0 are what's hot, right? I myself am considered to be a "mashup creator" working with Web 2.0 concepts.
But that era is behind us. The term "Mashup" made sense when coders were actually lifting data from places it was hard to lift from and putting it into contexts that were hard to access. This, my friends, is no longer the state of affairs on the Internet.
Today, we are working with a world of data that wants to be free and is published via countless, well documented API's. In the cases where API's are still not available (or whorishly published in hopes of becoming universally adopted), advanced tools and protocols are available to automate what used to be hard.
We must remember that the word "mashup" hails back to music, originally; a talented music editor might string together pieces of previously recorded music to create something new. This was an artform in itself, and implied a kind of subversion. A repurposing of content, often done without the permission or knowledge of the original creator.
Well, the days of this kind of thing on the Internet are, thanks to everybody's efforts to open things up, largely over. In a world where open source software is widely accepted, where it makes sense for companies like Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Twitter, Amazon (and gee, every other damn company out there) to publish API's that encourage their data to be woven into the fabric of the net, there is no need for the coy sense of subversion that comes from the word "Mashup."
What we've got now, folks, is DATA! Great flowing rivers of it! Software that helps us use it! Ruby on Rails, Asterisk, MySQL, PGSQL, Apache, Freeswitch, Flex! Where it's not open source, it's at least free! Everything has an API and the things that don't are falling away.
The next person that says to me with a straight face that they "make mashups" is going to get sucker-punched. The word has lost its meaning, so let's move on.
That said, explaining to a layperson what it is we "creative coders" do, sometimes you, well, have to resort to saying, "I make mashups." But do us all a favor, try to explain what that really means today. Let's move to a world where we can think about data, about tools (which is really just code-as-data), and imagining what we can do with it all.
Mashup was a good word for perhaps 2003-2007, but it implies limitations and barriers that simply no longer exist. We can do better.
What would YOU call the innovations that are possible with all the data and tools we have today?
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