omg! this is what the mashup world has been missing

I stumbled across this excellent article by Eduardo Navas. It was originally published in Vague Terrain Journal in Summer 2007, when I was doing a lot of thinking about mashups as appropriation.

http://remixtheory.net/?p=235

Some bits that caught my eye:

The complexity with web applications mashups lies in how intricate the connections become. The most rough of mashups are called “scrapings” because they sample material from the front pages of different online resources and websites, and the more complex mashups actually include material directly taken from databases, that is if the online entity decides to open an Application Programming Interface (API) to make their information available to web developers.

Ironically, what is characterized above as the “roughest” kind of mashup, can be the most brittle, and hardest to get working; while those which are characterized as “more complex”, can actually be much easier to build.

CSCW 2008 Workshop (W12): Tinkering, Tailoring, & Mashing: The Social and Collaborative Practices of the Read-Write Web

Call for Participation

CSCW 2008 Workshop (W12): Tinkering, Tailoring, & Mashing: The Social and Collaborative Practices of the Read-Write Web

November 9, 2008 – San Diego, California, USA

Workshop Website: http://mashworks.net/

Overview:
The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers in CSCW interested in discussing the human-centered, collaborative and creative aspects of web 2.0 and the current internet-based experience of creative social coding – mashups, the programmable web, remix culture, game modding, copy-paste, and social programming. We invite researchers to ask: how are people sharing programming, tailoring, and modding knowledge on the internet and what are useful models of collaborative and social creativity?

Some relevant topics and themes include:

• sharing, reusing, remixing, and recycling of electronic materials;
• web mashups, mashup creation, and mashup use;
• end-user customization and tailoring;
• collaborative debugging and problem-solving;
• loose collaboration;
• hackers, hacking culture, and the bazaar;
• notions of sharability and learnability;

Additionally, we also wish to revisit many theories and theoretical constructs which have long served CSCW, and evaluate them in light of contemporary and emerging practices on the web, including: “community” as both an interpretive lens and a unit of analysis; distributed cognition; activity theory; and social network analysis. How these theories relate to the daily practices of creative life online is not clear, especially what they may (or may not) tell us about issues of personal and group expression, passion, motivation, intention, and deep engagement.

Important dates:
Friday, September 19, 2008 Workshop submissions due
Friday, September 26, 2008 Notification to authors
Tuesday, September 30, 2008 Early registration deadline
Friday, October 3, 2008 Conference rate hotel reservation
Sunday, November 9, 2008 Workshop

Organizers:
M. Cameron Jones, Yahoo! Research

Elizabeth F. Churchill, Yahoo! Research

Michael B. Twidale, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Submission Details:
Participants should submit research reports or researcher position statements, up to four pages in length, by email to mcjones@yahoo-inc.com no later than, September 19, 2008. Submissions should be formatted in standard ACM SIG-CHI long paper format and submitted in either Adobe PDF (.pdf) or Microsoft Word document format (.doc, or .docx).