Doing the Monster Mashup

摘要

Mashups are springing up like mushrooms all over the Internet. The term mashup originated in the world of pop music to describe remixing two or more tracks to create a new song. Mashups for the Web combine two or more independent, possibly competing, data sources to make something new. Paul Rademacher, a software engineer, is credited with sparking the mashup explosion, when he combined real estate listings from Craigslist with Google maps to make HousingMaps.com. On the HousingMaps.com site, you can browse for rental suites or properties for sale by city, price range, and other features. Properties that match your criteria are displayed as push pins on a Google map. Clicking on a push pin will overlay a small callout window with more information about a particular property. The bright-yellow push pins indicate there are photos of the property (see Figure 1).