I find mashups on the web are like plotting a story. You could take different dynamic webpages, cut and rearrange them into a brand new master web page that refreshes continuosly as its components change and update.
Similarly, I could take the daily newspaper, cut out all the juicy news items (man robs bank, woman jumps off bridge, flooding in the Prairies, forest fires in Northern Ontario etc.) and rearrange them into a sequence that gives me the mashup of a plot. I could then follow each plot thread dynamically until they lead to some form of conclusion (or not • stories don’t have to be conclusive these days as they seek to mirror reality as far as possible • a sign of current reading tastes).
So all to say that the concept of mashups is not new; it has existed since old Homer started writing novels. Now, was he the first novelist? Ah, but that is the topic of another discussion…
