Amidst the Mashup Mix: an interview with Taylor McKnight of Podbop

marshallkirkpatrick — Fri, 12 May 2006 20:05:05 -0400

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.

NetSquared, an initiative of TechSoup.org - developers

Amidst the Mashup Mix: an interview with Taylor McKnight of Podbop