Doing 'the mash' as cool as Kylie

location based services

Mash-ups' of data on the web are starting to appear on Australian sites and could

provide a new means of online advertising, writes Nick Miller.
Australian singer Kylie Minogue

Australian singer Kylie Minogue
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In 2002, Kylie Minogue fronted the Brit Music Awards and sang Can't Get You Out of My Head. The cool thing was, she sang it to the tune of New Order's Blue Monday.

It was a signpost moment in pop: "mash-ups have gone commercial". Musical mash-ups - one song's music with the lyrics of another - had been around for years in the musical underground. But that was the moment they started making money.

Fast forward to today: Madonna is raking in the cash singing her own words to an Abba tune. And US internet company Zillow.com fronts up to venture capitalists and gets $US32 million ($A41.69 million) for a new real estate listing site - even though they've designed the whole site around someone else's map.

In the online business world, a "mash-up" is a website that mixes different types of data. It usually overlays geographic data on an interactive map.

The breakthrough has come from advances in the way data moves around the internet. Technology such as Ajax and Really Simple Syndication (used to distribute podcasts, for instance) make it easy to separate information from its original context, and mix and match it in unexpected ways.

Mash-ups are a new way to explore the internet's vast and disparate pools of data. First-generation search usually returns a one-dimensional, text-based list, but a map-based search organises the results in two dimensions and allows surfers to focus on a suburb, state or country. And there is no real limit to the amount or variety of data that can be presented at once.

Over the past year, the word has spread. About 2.6 new mash-ups are created each day as users find new ways to sluice data from repositories using technologies such as eXtensible Markup Language. There are crime mash-ups (chicagocrime.com), dating mash-ups (datemashup.com), photoblog mash-ups (geobloggers.com), encyclopedia mash-ups (placeopedia.com) and even celebrity stalking mash-ups (gawker.com/stalker).

It's all great fun. But many believe this is the year the idea will start making money.

An obvious industry for map-based searches is real estate. "Real estate" was the most popular search on sensis.com.au last year, beating "accommodation", "restaurants", "shopping" and "hotels".

All major players in Australia's online real estate industry plan to add Zillow-like geographical functions to their sites this year.

"We are looking at more detailed maps, the ability to zoom in - property boundaries plotted on top," says Simon Baker, chief executive of realestate.com.au. He says "maps drive greater usability and allow you