Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Mash-up has been a buzzword for a couple of years. Now it’s time to do something real with the term.

At the Web 3.0 Conference next week in New York, a suite of panelists will explore how to get strategic when it comes to creating applications that draw data from multiple sources.

“They’re evolving into the next stage,” says Jon Aizen, co-founder and COO of Dapper, one of the vendor companies participating in the upcoming panel. Dapper Dynamic Ads is its flagship product, which uses a semantic engine to beam on-the-fly products, offers, and content into ads as instant live assets, and also to assess user intent so that ads are targeted broadly but messaged narrowly. The notion of mash-ups permeates everything from web applications to Internet ads to desktop apps, and in the Web 3.0 phase it’s time to more maturely apply the principles behind them for conducting business on the web, he says.

Other experts in the semantic space agree the technology is moving up the maturity ladder. “I think that we have kind of gone through phase one, where everyone was understanding what mash-ups were and what you can do with them,” says AdaptiveBlue CEO Alex Iskold. “We’re nowhere near being done. We’re just entering the next phase.”

Iskold sees the benefits in opening up data and enabling others to build new applications using your information. “But the critical missing component is how to protect or monetize the data. In terms of being strategic, if you are just letting all the data out, then how do you make money? That’s a broad question,” he says. He favors APIs over marking up pages from the point of view that you can at least control who accesses your data and maybe leverage future opportunities to charge for the access and monetize the information. But he views the evolution of strategic mash-ups as progressing on a case-by- case basis: “You need to figure out does it make sense to open up, what are you opening and why.”

Economic incentives, such as Dapper has found by giving advertisers the ability to mash up their content with publications’ data and users’ intent, will help mature mash-ups, Aizen adds. It was a mistake earlier on for developers to think specifically about whether mash-ups themselves will make money. “I’m not sure that was the right way to look at it,” Aizen says. Instead of thinking about creating the killer mash-up application, the idea should be to see them as “an interesting first step in the progression of the web in terms of content reuse, aggregation, and manipulation.” There will always be the fun mash-ups people create for entertaining or practical purposes, such as mashing up Craigslist housing results with Google maps. “But that’s probably not a monetization strategy,” he says.

Some of the challenges around mashing up information in a way that serves both clients and end users will revolve around things such as content ownership and privacy. The latter is very important, though he thinks the web experience becomes more valuable the more personal information these systems have access too. “I can see a punch-the-monkey ad or one that’s relevant to what I’ve been doing on the web. We need to get over this paranoia; we must understand our personally identifiable information is being looked at by computer systems, not people, and stop flattering ourselves that people care what I am dong on the Internet.”

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