Gawker: valleywag, mashups

Where Did the Web Touch You?

Ryan Tate — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 16:18:08 EST

Online artist Casetteboy created this funny/brilliant mashup of experts explaining "the Web." In short, the global computer network is an anti-social creep that "nailed some feces to the door," according actor Stephen Fry, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and other digerati.

Our favorite fake answer is tech investor Peter Thiel's theory that the interent is a harmless network of FAX machines. Always running PR for our future robot overlords, that one.

Remix of Google's Chrome comic

Paul Boutin — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 18:00:00 EDT

Those crazy Olds at Condé Nast's Portfolio have stripped down and remixed Scott McCloud's comic-book introduction to Google's Chrome browser. Best part is where they mock the developers-only techspeak that bogged down the original.

Why does Intel think it's a Web 2.0 startup?

Owen Thomas — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 20:40:00 EDT

In an age when software rules, it's got to be tough to be stuck making hardware. Intel's Mash Maker is yet another "mashup" tool for connecting data from one website with tools on another, such as funneling addresses to Google Maps. Microsoft and Yahoo have similar products. Why is Intel, which makes chips, getting into such a profitless business? The "Intel Inside" advertising campaign convinced people to start asking what chip a PC runs on, but never persuaded them to care. A News.com reporter wangled this explanation from an Intel marketer:

It doesn't necessarily sell more hardware but it does provide end users with a richer browser experience, said Jeff Klaus, marketing director for Intel Mash Maker, who admitted that the product is a bit of a departure for the company.

Translation: Intel is doing this to impress Web developers. (No one seriously thinks "end users" are going to spend any amount of time playing with mashup tools.) These side projects amount to a perk for Intel's masses of bored engineers. Technically adept, but stuck endlessly optimizing code that runs deep in the innards of computers, they can be bribed to stay at their jobs with this kind of entertainment. Marketers like Klaus run with it because they know that industry trade reporters will predictably pick up the story. Thus we get an Intel recruiting ad dressed up as a news item. That is a mashup, but not the sort Intel claims it meant to foster.

Mash Pit: Hybrid apps aren't the new black

Nick Douglas — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 22:18:34 EDT

Co-written by Beth Gottfried

With elections around the corner, Google CEO Eric Schmidt might be guilty of contracting a bit of the political jargon bug. Today in Forbes, Schmidt refers to the Internet as an "an ecosystem" where "we are critically dependent upon the creation of a developer community" and subsequently "where everybody makes money." As an "architect" of the ecosystem, Schmidt is advocating for the spread of mashups, which use code from one site to develop another site (for instance, Craigslist + Google Maps = HousingMaps).

Mashups are myriad, but they come with major issues. For instance, an API (a service that helps developers make mashups) often allows a limited number of requests to the original application creator's database. An app can ask Google Maps for information, but only so many times before Google sees it as a resource drain. That puts a cap on the popularity of a mashup — if it goes huge, it breaks, a bit like a site that buckles under too much traffic.

Still, Forbes says that these web candies, and the amount of money going into them, are helping to spawn a "new economy." Recycling the old to make way for more sustainable practices seems like a logical approach, but most of the innovators mentioned ("Pamela Fox, a 22-year-old computer science grad student who builds Amazon mashups for fun") are hobbyists with little money-making potential. Learning how to mash is educational, but then again, so is playing World of Warcraft. Useful, yes. "New economy," no.

Why Google Loves The Little Guys [Forbes]

Remainders: Give me land, lots of land

ndouglas — Wed, 19 Apr 2006 21:51:50 EDT

Apple buys land for more offices in Cupertino (having outgrown the ones pictured). I really really hope there's a giant cube involved. [Reuters]
President Bush comes to the Valley this weekend, just in time to see his hydrogen dream dropped for ethanol. [CNET]
Porn once again makes technological headway. But a new burnable porn CD service has DRM — get ready for a gangbang of posts from all four Boing Boing bloggers. [LAT]
If it's called User-Generated when you let your customers do the marketing, what's it called when you let your engineers do it? [Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day]
That's right, VCs — the money you spent on someone's mash-up went down the big non-patentable drain. [CNET]
Google breaks down and partners with all the unsexy enterprise companies. [Google OneBox]
AOL's Jason Calacanis and Jupiter Media CEO Alan Meckler debate: Can bloggers make money? Sure, if you believe writers can make money. (In other words: No.) [WSJ]