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.
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.
