The first Mashup Camp is winding down right now in Mountain View, CA. The "uncomputer unconference" is the first major meeting of the minds of mashups. Mashups, which use data from one site — culled using a public API — to power a service on another site, mostly provide nothing more than a bit of fun. But there are some mashups which provide truly revolutionary web services.
Mashup Camp attendees each got a wooden nickel when they checked in at the registration desk. Then, attendees voted for their favorite of the 28 mashups on the demo floor by handing over their wooden nickel to the presenter of their favorite mashup.
Taking first prize at Mashup Camp is Podbop, the creation of Taylor McKnight and Daniel Westermann-Clark. The creators claim that "We love music," and it certainly shows.
Podbop asks you to input the name of your city, then it returns a list of bands playing in your city this week, along with links to download samples of their music as MP3. They pull the live music listings from the open database at Eventful using their API. The MP3s that show up in Podbop's results are gathered from the bands' websites or the websites of their record labels, so they are freely available already. No funny stuff here.
Podbop provides exactly the type of information that the frequent concert-goer wants. Who are these bands listed in the newspaper and what do they sound like? If you ask us, the Podbop guys deserve every one of the wooden nickels they got at Mashup Camp.
