Thursday, September 13, 2007

Mashups and American Politics

From Wired Magazine:

"Yahoo's Presidential 'Mashup Debate' Won't Support Mashups
By Sarah Lai Stirland 09.12.07 | 2:00 AM
Yahoo's Democratic debate later this week has been billed as "the first-ever online-only presidential mashup." But on the eve of the debate, Yahoo has decided not to support citizen remixing of the footage -- reducing the once-bold experiment to little more than a fancy online version of an on-demand cable television offering.
Mashups typically involve the combination of two disparate elements -- for example, metropolitan crime data and Google maps, or rapper Jay Z's The Black Album and the Beatles' The White Album -- to make new creations such as chicagocrime.org or Danger Mouse's The Grey Album.
To that end, Yahoo said as recently as Friday that it would upload the raw footage from the online debate to its own web-based video editing service Jumpcut, to make it easy for the footage to be spliced and diced as citizen editors saw fit. "Users will be able to create their own mashups and post the footage onto their websites afterwards -- that's for the hardcore fans who want to engage with this video," spokesman Brian Nelson told Wired News.
But on Monday, Nelson called back to say the company had changed its mind. Instead the "mashup page" will only lets citizens pick and choose which candidates they want to hear from on particular issues, by pointing and clicking on a web interface."

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This is a mashup (what's wrong with this image?):

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