4IP Idea: Mismash

One in my series of 4IP ideas. (This idea is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution licence)

Elevator Pitch

Mismash: mashups that are plain wrong.

There have been a number of high profile information leaks in the press this last year, where data that is privately held suddenly becomes public.

One of the biggest stories was the British National Party’s entire membership list being made available to download.

Quite quickly mashups appeared online that let you ‘find your nearest racist’, or joke sites that pretended to find your name in the list.

The public is largely unaware of how much information they are putting online about themselves and what can be done with that data.

This is where Mismash comes in - it’s a site that aims to educate people about privacy on the web through funny examples.

Think “I’m on holiday come and rob me”: a mashup of the word ‘holiday’ on twitter/blogs/etc with location or address data from that same source.

Each fortnight a new mashup is either produced or linked to in a blog format, with the code that produced the mashup being freely available to download.

Needs and Benefits

Social networking sites Facebook, Twitter, Myspace and so on have kicked off in 2008 to the point where many people are putting data about themselves online without realising the full implications of their actions.

People are unaware that once information about them is public, it can be permanently available and can be connected with other bits of information about them that perhaps they might not like to see happening.

Mashups are fantastic tools for making interesting and useful tools, but the dark side of them is that they can potentially be used for illegal or defamatory activity.

People need to learn about the dangers of putting information about themselves online, but without solid examples it is too abstract for many to understand.

On top of that the word ‘mashup’ has not yet entered the popular lexicon so many are also unaware that data from one source can be mixed with data from another - a key issue that needs to be communicated with web users.

Approach

We would produce a simple blog in Wordpress, and pull together a small team of people who know how to use mashup utilities like Yahoo Pipes and lightweight programming languages like Ruby and Python to build and host quick and dirty mashups, hosted on cloud services like Google App Engine.

For the first few months this team would be responsible for brainstorming and producing the mismashes.

We would aim to build a community of mismashers who would compete to have their mismashes listed on the site, and eventually hand it over entirely to that community of users.

We would also populate the site with information and guides on how to make mashups and how to protect your privacy online under a “Don’t like this mismash? Here’s how to protect yourself” button.

Community guidelines about legality would need to be in place, as well as tools that developers could use to build on the work of others. We would aim to produce a ‘mashmaking’ toolkit for wouldbe mismashers.

The end result would be a self-sustaining site run by a community of users with no further funding requirements.

The business model for this idea is that if a good enough mashup emerges from the community it could be further developed by additional investment into a standalone enterprise, with running costs covered by google ad revenue and using free hosting providers.

Competition

Competition would come from ‘me too’ mashups gaining more traction via sites like Digg, or from other sites taking an idea and developing it further.

Our site would be better by offering a number of mashups collected in one place, and tools, services and explanations on how to make mashups and how to protect your privacy online.

Our site would also have more sustained traffic by becoming the place where mismashes are pulled together, thus sustaining an ongoing conversation.

In fact we would aim for our mismashes to be remixed and reproduced by others but credited as the source of the idea.