ZendCon Session Notes - Keynote - The MashUp Economy: What are you waiting for?
Presented by David Berlind (ZDNet)

David's Law of Economics
"Those who handle the most amount of heavy lifting, but do the least amount of it win big*"

*If you're in bettween, perhaps it's time to rethink life.

Ecosystems
Ecosystems are a cycle, starting with artists, who create a user experience, which attracts consumers, which generate additional artists.

A healthy ecosystem also generates an arms race of technologies and companies using it; media interest; research; venture funding; and conferences and events.

Mashup Defined
Two or more disparate sources of content* or functionality are blended** to form a unique user experience*** that's usually substantially different from any of the original sources

*Dave's opinion: data qualifies as content. (I share this opinion; it seems almost obvious.)
** sometimes refered to as remixing
*** audio, visual, or a combination thereof qualifies

"Mashups" are just a trendy term; we've been doing similar things for years: newspaper articles that quote other press; productions like Forest Gump (where Gump is shown shaking hands with the president); consumer video and animation; music (which is where the term originated); software.

Key Enabler
The better the tools are, the easier it is for anyone to do it. (This reminds me of the quote "Make easy things easy; make hard things possible.")

David talked about "ecosystems" - the various different software platforms (Mac, Linux, Windows, PHP, Perl, etc), and how they all can be replaced with "The Internet". With the Internet, anyone can add an API (new web service, etc) and have it available to everyone; whereas, all the other platforms are relatively closed - they're only controlled by a few people. For example, while anyone can start a new Linux distribution, that doesn't mean that new APIs you might add to that distribution will be picked up and distribtued in other kernels.

Programmableweb.com is a website for creating and sharing mashups. It apparently makes it easy enough to create mashups that 5-year-olds can do so.

David also mentioned that there are potential legal issues. It's a giant grey area; the legality of mashups isn't yet worked out. But, if you make available interesting data without an API to access it, the chances are very high that someone else will. This is something that potential mashup authors need to keep in mind. During the Q&A session, David gave an example of a mashup that got shutdown: it was mapping 911 calls and response times, and apparently, the city whose data was being used was unhappy about this because potential terrorists could use that information to know when to attack emergency responders.

podbop.org provides list of artists playing concerts in a geographical area. From there, you can listen to MP3s to decide whether or not you want to actually attend those concerts. This is, of course, breaking the stranglehold of the media companies who like to be able to explicitly present a particular image for a given band or concert.

Google Maps make up 50% of mashups on programmableweb. Flickr is next (11%), followed by Amazon (9%) and YahooMaps (5%).

Mashups in the media: David set up a Google Alert for the term Mashups; in one year, he went from getting seven alerts per week, to seven alerts per day.

David also mentioned that mashups is starting to show up in fiction: Mashup Corporations.