Hey DJ – Web 2.0 and remix culture

clipped from www.jonathanboutelle.com Web 2.0 is not blogs and blogging. But mass quantities of user generated content (both on commercial sites like amazon and blogs alike) set the stage for Web 2.0 by providing a moral pretext for remixing. If the value of the content is created by we the people, then we the people should be able to take that content back and build new things with it. The heart of Web 2.0 is about being able to remix and integrate without a negotiation, without permission even. It’s about being able to take an rss feed or an open API or data scraped from an XHTML website and grab that data, jam it together with another data source of the same kind, and build something new. Web 2.0 is about sampling, about mixing, about mash-ups. The web 2.0 hacker takes APIs and uses them the way a DJ uses albums, recombining disparate (already valuable) material into something fresh and new.