David Wiley writes:

I think we may know how to mashup “even unpopular tools,” depending on
what one means by mashup. By mashup, I mean utilizing a wide range of
individual tools (like flickr, delicious, technorati, etc.) and
aggregating the results of those uses into a collection of data that I
can do new things with. If this is what we mean by mashup, I think that
RSS and our imaginations give us most of the answers we need.

I agree with David, though with two rather large caveats: ease-of-use and federated data sharing.

RSS does give us the base to remix using different tools, but the ease-of-use and integration can stand a lot of improvement. This is also a matter of conception and terminology: simple aggregation is relatively easy, even for the non-technically inclined, but real remixing still has a long way to go, particularly if students are going to be able to synthesize, remix, and share. I still find myself having to go through contortions (custom programming) just to achieve relatively simple integration from different sources.

Finding a way to federate data is also going to become more and more important. It’s an interesting feature of many social tools that they thrive as they scale… the more users, the better the experience will be for each. As early pioneers  like flickr and del.icio.us are joined by dozens of competitors, the fractured store of data impacts the whole system.

Ultimately, for example, it shouldn’t matter if a user chooses del.icio.us, furl, spurl, or others as their front-end to manage their bookmark data, the core of that data should be federated across systems. Rather than compete in the zero-sum game of locking users in, these services should compete in terms of interface, features, and data mining techniques to the pool of aggregated data.

If there is no sharing, then all the remixing tools in the world become weakened (if not irrelevant) because people will be operating solely within their own, limited ecosystem and an artificially stunted folksonomy.

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