If you’ve done any web developing in the past two years, you’ve heard of mashups. If you’re interested in copyright law at all, you’ve also heard of mashups (most notably Google getting sued by various news sources for aggregating their content). If you haven’t heard of mashups, you’ve probably experienced them in the likes of Facebook or MySpace. So what’s the big deal?

A mashup is a big deal because it blurs the lines between content ownership and use (if you think this is all fairly normal and there are no issues here, check out the linking policy that BoingBoing created in response to previous ideas of web ownership. Can you imagine the fits these people must be having over mashups? And how that would even work in the attention economy is beyond me…). For example, if I view something shared on Facebook that is hosted by YouTube, then I’m never visiting YouTube while still experiencing their content. That means that I never see any of the advertising on the YouTube page, while still using up bandwidth and getting the same experience. So how is YouTube going to make money if I never visit? Their sponsors will never get any clicks, and the whole advertising revenue model goes down the drain…

I realized I should use this blog while its is still up and running (actually, I guess it will always be up and running...i should rephrase and say while its still "frequently checked") to see if anyone knows the answer to a question I have regarding privacy and facebook. You see, I submitted a term paper on Wednesday for a journalism class at CMC that was a bit unusual (and fun). Since it's a journalism class, we had the option of writing a standard research paper, or we could write a query letter and article for any magazine. I chose the magazine option. Our professor is going to edit and give us feedback, then we will actually submit the article to the magazine and hope they accept!

In class, we briefly discussed the problems involved with labeling oneself. While I believe the subject came up during our debate about skin, the concepts seem very relevant to a discussion of facebook and its brethren. Facebook makes an interesting case study of the limitations of self-description. It's funny that we can describe so much of ourselves in a profile, yet come up with an end result that is oddly generic. I once saw a facebook profile that filled in all of the fields with descriptions of categories that tend to make up a typical facebook profile. For instance, under music, it included entries like "something so obscure that I will be the only one on facebook to have heard of it" and "a cheesey 90's song that will serve as an inside joke with the rest of the facebook community." It was pretty amusing.