David and I are in San Jose at the NetSquared conference, where we’re sharing OpenCongress and some ideas for its future with a great group of people interested in using the Web for social change. In the past couple of days we’ve seen a lot of amazing new projects that are harnessing the Web and its democratizing potential to create positive changes and have a beneficial impact on peoples lives around the world. It’s been inspiring...Read more: http://www.opencongress.org/articles/view/512-20-New-Web-Projects-to-Cha...

This is Richard Landry, reporting live from the NetSquared Conference. I am covering the session entitled “Mashups, Copyright, and Commons” led by Mike Linksvayer from Creative Commons.

Live blogging is a practice of careful listening, and I have a long way to go in that area! So if you see something that I misunderstood or misreported, please post a comment/correction.

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There were a lot of legal issues and terms raised in Mike’s presentation, but he preceded them by this disclaimer: “I am not a lawyer.”

A moment of mashup scepticism from the old skool activist side of my brain: The Unbearable Lightness of Mashups.
But I haven't read through the N2Y3 Mashup Challenge entries yet and I know i'm going to be knocked out by their inventiveness and impact. Keep it real.
Dan

Hello, world!

I just learned about the Mashup Challenge a couple days ago but already have a dozen ideas that I have to narrow down to one, well-presented execution. Keep your eye out for me, folks, because The Idea will be posted soon.

I blogged about Milieucontact International experimenting with a mashup of google earth and wikis: Riny Heijdendael explained during a meeting what he is working on right now: One of the major problems I encountered was that more and more the network faced the problem of finding the relevant information, both on a geographic as a thematic scale.

Questions arose like these:

How do I know what other themes are being addressed in my region or
country?

Who is working on the same theme as I am?

How can i quickly connect to the part the network that can enhance my strategy for my own region or theme?

How do I present my local knowledge to a broader audience without having to set up a "website", including all the hassle?

I came away from last year's netsquared conference with the mashup bug; I wanted to see mashups for human rights. But one of the practical lessons i learned was that you need to expose structured data to seed a mashup, and that wasn't going to be easy at my work.

Just recently I've been mulling over the contrast between the neat way sites like Edgeio and Eventful pull together event listings, and the pretty random way that info about cyberdissidents gets scattered across the blogosphere. As I understand it, the event sites use microformats so I'm proposing the development of a Prisoner of Conscience Microformat.

I'd be interested in any feedback, especially on the geek aspect (will it work?). But, as the original post says, "The whole point of this somewhat geeky exercise is something very non-technical; to make it easier to construct online communities around prisoners of conscience, and to have ways of visualising and connecting that stir peoples' affinity and will to act".

Now that I've had a taste of a meta feed for nonprofit technology, I feel compelled to create a meta feed of my own.

So of course it has to be a Technobabe meta feed.  You can now go to Feed Jumbler to satisfy your craving for blog articles written by women in the field of nonprofit technology.  The official address of the RSS feed is

I'm definitely interested in learning more about the ability of mashups to forward the social change agenda. Our organization provides technical assistance to social change community-based organizations, especially those working in environmental justice. There is a ton of data available, for example through Scorecard.org, the EPA, and the Right-to-know network. It would be interesting to see the different ways to reconfigure this data. Scorecard.org does this already in one way, but mashups, i think, could offer another way to go about doing it.

Taylor McKnight is the co-founder of Podbop, a mash-up of the online events calendar Eventful.com, publicly shared MP3 files from musicians and the mapping program DIY Map.  Podbop asks you what city you live it then shows you what bands will be in that city soon and delivers a song recorded by each scheduled band that has put music online. In addition to visiting the site and searching for any city in the world, you can also subscribe by RSS to receive schedules and sample songs from any bands coming to your town that are listed on Eventful.com.

Mashups, or the combination of data and functionality from more than one site on the web, are a hot new class of tools best known for the ways that people are mapping different sorts of data online. (See, for example, the map we've created to display the geographic locations of the Net Squared in Action case studies, using Community Walk - a Google Maps mashup.)

There is far more to mashups than just maps, and the phenomenon is expected to become far more widespread in both the consumer and enterprise spaces in the future. In the following interview, Taylor and I talked about the creation of Podbop, the issues that developers face in the emerging mashup scene and the future of hybrid web services like Podbop.

Good visualizations of data probably light up entirely different synapses in the brain than almost anything else.  I have long wondered just how truly useful they are, though.  Over the past few weeks, I've been convinced that online maps in particular are a very important development.

GoogleMaps is a powerful new tool that people all around the world are utilizing for a wide variety of projects.  The system is highly functional, integrates data and imagery beautifully and is very nice to look at at the same time.  It is also very welcoming for people who want to manipulate maps to visualize their data.