Growing up you may have been told that ideas are simply copied from one entity to another, piggy-backed and emulated. Well, someone at some point had to concoct the original idea — an idea that was then blended with other notions floating around. If you’re familiar with some of the buzzwords being used on the internets, a popular one is “mashup.”
Mashups are, as the name suggests, a compilation of several services. One example is mixing the “for rent” section in Craig’s List with Google Maps, to see the exact location of the domicile. Another is correlating the Chicago criminal record reports with Google Maps to see where the worst crime rates are neighborhood to neighborhood. And the list of such creative mashups grows each day.
Fortunately for humanity, our API for developing new habits, customs, routines and most importantly, language is relatively robust. In fact, the English language is itself a mashup of foreign ideas, norms, customs and the like.
In today’s edition of the NY Times Magazine, author Kevin Kelly discusses the brave new world of digitizing libraries: Scan This Book. Among the thought provoking numbers he throws around is one passage detailing the breadth of information that humanity has created over the millenia (note: last year Eric Schmidt suggested that at current rates, it would take hundreds of years to catalog and index the following):
From the days of Sumerian clay tablets till now, humans have “published” at least 32 million books, 750 million articles and essays, 25 million songs, 500 million images, 500,000 movies, 3 million videos, TV shows and short films and 100 billion public Web pages. All this material is currently contained in all the libraries and archives of the world. When fully digitized, the whole lot could be compressed (at current technological rates) onto 50 petabyte hard disks.
While that certainly is quite a mouthful to chew, one Chinese-based firm called Superstar is leading the blitzkrieg with business acumen:
Superstar sells copies of books it scans back to the same university libraries it scans from. A university can expand a typical 60,000-volume library into a 1.3 million-volume one overnight. At about 50 cents per digital book acquired, it’s a cheap way for a library to increase its collection.
Innovative. Be sure to read the whole article, which is chalked full of interesting stories like that.
Addendum: ProgrammableWeb.com keeps track of the latest and greatest Mashups and APIs under development.