Jack Schofield writes about the mashup in today’s Guardian newspaper.

“’What makes mashups really different is that you don’t need to be a rocket scientist,’ says [US-based journalist, David] Berlind. Relatively few people had the programming skills needed to turn their ideas into PC applications, but with mashups, ‘the barrier for turning your creativity into an innovation is very much lower. Your grandmother could do it,’ says Berlind. Well, maybe not yet, he adds, but that’s the way things are heading.

‘The other great thing about this system is that you don’t have to get anyone’s permission to add an API to it, and then anybody can use it. Where there’s one person or a group in control, that by itself can slow down innovation,’ says Berlind.”

This is an area in which Talis continues to work, and much of our Library 2.0 [PDF] activity is relevant here as we seek to unbundle library systems into a set of discrete functions suitable for incorporating into other applications, whether ours or belonging to someone else.

The Whisper demonstrator is, essentially, a mashup, although we prefer to think about it as an orchestration of a number of services in order to build something greater than the sum of the parts. As the Platform becomes increasingly visible, the whole point is that third parties outside Talis should be able to do things with the data and services, too.

Technorati Tags: Participation, Syndication, Talis Whisper, Web 2.0